Review of “Can We Unlearn Racism?: What South Africa Teaches Us about Whiteness”

Abstract

Can We Unlearn Racism? is among a few books currently turning to South Africa as an exemplar of possible new political horizons amid surging right-wing populisms and democratic backsliding across the world. As an unusual settler state, it bucked global trends in the mid-twentieth century with its notorious prolongation of colonial relations called apartheid, instituted in 1948, the year of the adoption of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. As colonial powers withdrew from the African continent in the following decades, “colonialism of a special type” persisted in South Africa, as per the local diagnosis of the condition in which colonizers and colonized inhabited the same country. In 1994, this time in step with other world events partly precipitated by the end of the Cold War, South Africa mounted a “miracle” transition to democracy, as various book titles at the time would have it. This conceptualization has been problematized for its oversimplification and ahistoricity. But recently Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, in a comparative study that included the United States (2020, Neither Native nor Settler. The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Harvard University Press), found South Africa to have broken with the racial terms of apartheid to create a political community beyond the “settler/native” division. The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness (S. Hunter and C. van der Westhuizen, 2022. Routledge) also draws on South Africa to challenge assumptions in the field of Critical Studies in Whiteness, particularly the notion of Whiteness operating invisibly.