BYLINE: Neville Alexander
According to Section 1(b) of our post-apartheid constitution, the new South Africa is committed to becoming a non-racist society, among other noble goals.
This constitutional mandate, the result of centuries of struggle against racism and racial discrimination, essentially means that, in the new South Africa, racial identities are a category of sub-national social identities that will be discouraged, deprived of sustenance, phased out.
Nobody expects this will happen overnight. The struggle for a non-racist, non-sexist and democratic South Africa will take generations rather than decades. The political and cultural leadership of our country, those people who are the role models for the youth, have a heavy responsibility to help to create the conditions for realising these goals.
I want to state some of the most important insights about racism and race thinking we have gained over the past century or so as closely to the current state of our knowledge as possible. In doing so, I shall avoid going over ground that has been covered in previous contributions to this series.
A reputable study undertaken on behalf of the United Nations Conference Against Racism by the International Council on Human Rights Policy (ICHRP) in 2001, based on a wide variety of case studies of racism, asserted: It is helpful to recognise the systemic nature of discrimination and stigma ... In all the societies studied, racial discrimination reinforced economic marginalisation and vice versa.
"Members of victimised groups came to be exploited and marginalised economically and, at the same or at separate times, they came to be considered inferior. From the perspective of …
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