Response to Zimitri Erasmus

Abstract

Zimitri Erasmus’ editorial essay follows from the position paper (Erasmus 2010a) she presented at the ‘Revisiting Apartheid Race Categories’ colloquium, at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2010. This essay largely complements her position paper and is ideally read alongside the latter. Given this, I respond to key elements in both pieces. Erasmus (this volume) interrogates continued administrative use of ‘race’ categories developed and institutionalised during apartheid. Her integrative overview of and framework for contributions to this special issue skilfully knits together these substantively diverse contributions without diluting the complexity of the topic and of the individual articles. En passant, this ensemble of articles provides a fructuous point of reference for on-going discussions about the functions and desirability of the continued employ of apartheid racial taxonomies in post-apartheid South Africa. Significantly, Erasmus (this volume) provides a timely engagement with the paradox of the current deployment of racial categories as a means of undoing the profound problems and inequalities engendered by the racism of apartheid racial categorisation. Some scholars (for example, Adam, in Lefko-Everett, this issue) argue for harnessing these categories to redress the strongly racialised configurations of privilege and exclusions institutionalised during apartheid. However, their continued use, as many authors in recent years have reminded us (for example, Alexander, in LefkoEverett, this issue, Stevens et al 2006), could easily re-inscribe and further sediment these apartheid categories and their underlying assumptions, and also reuse them in new articulations of social occlusion and exclusion. Several insights in the two pieces to which I respond here are useful for deepening current debates on the continued use of the old racial typologies virtually naturalised during the apartheid period. First, Erasmus correctly suggests that seeking to identify and offer easy solutions for the paradox