The Reconstitution of Privilege: Integration in Former White Schools in South Africa

Abstract

This article draws upon ongoing school-based work to examine the nature of the integration process in South African schools, and its significance for redrawing the lines of privilege and subordination in South Africa. Focusing on former White schools, the article argues that an asymmetry continues to exist in the contact that takes place between White and Black. The essential impetus of this asymmetry is to produce practices of cultural assimilation in which Black people are required to give up their own aesthetics and cultural practices in favor of those of the dominant middle-class and White community into which they step. However, significantly more complex identity formations are emerging out of these developments.