Precedence and warning: global apartheid and South Africa’s long conversation on race with the United States

Abstract

This paper brings together histories of race, both in the United States and in South Africa, in order to think about how slavery, segregation, and apartheid, as well as responses to these, have shaped ideas about national identity and belonging. In it I explore the ways these two histories of racial oppression – both slavery and segregation in the US, as well as segregation and apartheid in South Africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of larger transatlantic dialogs on race, racial governance, and the boundaries of national belonging. The paper attempts to chart a history of exchange, between South Africa and the US, of ideas on racial policy and race thinking. This different genealogy for crossing the Atlantic will offer ways to think together events such as the shootings in Ferguson in the US and the shooting of miners at Marikana in South Africa, as related instances of how race – as defining feature of neoliberalism – continues to function in both places.