Racial States and Re-making Race: Exploring Coloured Racial Re- and De-formation in State Laws and Forms in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The nation-state is one powerful entity that makes race. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century South African apartheid racial state cultivated a triracial hierarchy through officially naming three groups into law: White, Black (native African), and Coloured, with Coloured being defined and situated in the “racial middle” as neither White nor Black African. Yet because race is a social construction that is adaptive and dynamic, the state’s role in making race is also malleable and changing. This study offers a case study of how modern racial states re-make racial categories by focusing on the potential for re- or de-formation of the Coloured racial category since the end of apartheid in 1994 and 25 years into democracy. In conducting a critical race discourse analysis of official state forms and laws, the author finds that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges Coloureds’ racial categorization and position in the racial middle. It does this by simultaneously supporting nonracialist (i.e., color-blind racist) strategies and rewriting Coloured as Black as a means for racial redress. Moreover, the author argues that contemporary South Africa practices coloured blindness through both de-formation and then re-making of the Coloured racial category, thus contributing to the potential shift to a dichotomous racial hierarchy. This project demonstrates how the racial middle can be re-made to uphold state racial projects transformed by changes in the sociopolitical context.