Race, racialisation and colour-caste
Since race categories do not pick out biologically significant divisions of humanity, their use can be misleading and offensive. Yet racialisation – society’s viewing and treating South Africans as though they comprised different races – has generated real societal groups which are significant from...
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| Language: | English |
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University of Johannesburg
2021-02-01
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| Series: | The Thinker |
| Online Access: | https://journals.uj.ac.za/index.php/The_Thinker/article/view/446 |
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| author | George Hull |
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| author_sort | George Hull |
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Since race categories do not pick out biologically significant divisions of humanity, their use can be misleading and offensive. Yet racialisation – society’s viewing and treating South Africans as though they comprised different races – has generated real societal groups which are significant from the perspectives of justice and identity. In the philosophy of race, these facts make for a conceptual conundrum. Is common-sense race thinking right that races, if they exist, are human groups differing in significant, inherent and heritable ways, in which case there are no races? Or has common-sense race thinking failed to grasp races’ socially constructed nature, and should we say races are the really existing groups generated by racialisation? The same facts confronted the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) – a mid-20th-century South African liberation movement – with an organisational and theoretical challenge. Given its uncompromising non-racialism, how could it justify a federal structure which effectively divided its membership into African, Coloured, and Indian sections? If this was not race-based division, what was it? A former NEUM member, Neville Alexander, provided the Unity Movement with the conceptual resources to answer this challenge. I argue that his major work, One Azania, One Nation, is also a contribution to the philosophy of race. Alexander first contends that social constructionists cannot, without equivocation, claim that common-sense thinking about race in one sense has created races in a quite different sense. He then shows that introducing a second concept, ‘colour-caste’, can preserve the insights of the constructionist approach. While races are unreal, colour-castes are real social identities which need to be overcome.
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| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-04d7f9f31816414c91c47bbee5ce02e8 |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 2075-2458 2616-907X |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2021-02-01 |
| publisher | University of Johannesburg |
| record_format | Article |
| series | The Thinker |
| spelling | doaj-art-04d7f9f31816414c91c47bbee5ce02e82025-01-28T09:02:33ZengUniversity of JohannesburgThe Thinker2075-24582616-907X2021-02-0186110.36615/thethinker.v86i1.446Race, racialisation and colour-casteGeorge Hull Since race categories do not pick out biologically significant divisions of humanity, their use can be misleading and offensive. Yet racialisation – society’s viewing and treating South Africans as though they comprised different races – has generated real societal groups which are significant from the perspectives of justice and identity. In the philosophy of race, these facts make for a conceptual conundrum. Is common-sense race thinking right that races, if they exist, are human groups differing in significant, inherent and heritable ways, in which case there are no races? Or has common-sense race thinking failed to grasp races’ socially constructed nature, and should we say races are the really existing groups generated by racialisation? The same facts confronted the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) – a mid-20th-century South African liberation movement – with an organisational and theoretical challenge. Given its uncompromising non-racialism, how could it justify a federal structure which effectively divided its membership into African, Coloured, and Indian sections? If this was not race-based division, what was it? A former NEUM member, Neville Alexander, provided the Unity Movement with the conceptual resources to answer this challenge. I argue that his major work, One Azania, One Nation, is also a contribution to the philosophy of race. Alexander first contends that social constructionists cannot, without equivocation, claim that common-sense thinking about race in one sense has created races in a quite different sense. He then shows that introducing a second concept, ‘colour-caste’, can preserve the insights of the constructionist approach. While races are unreal, colour-castes are real social identities which need to be overcome. https://journals.uj.ac.za/index.php/The_Thinker/article/view/446 |
| spellingShingle | George Hull Race, racialisation and colour-caste The Thinker |
| title | Race, racialisation and colour-caste |
| title_full | Race, racialisation and colour-caste |
| title_fullStr | Race, racialisation and colour-caste |
| title_full_unstemmed | Race, racialisation and colour-caste |
| title_short | Race, racialisation and colour-caste |
| title_sort | race racialisation and colour caste |
| url | https://journals.uj.ac.za/index.php/The_Thinker/article/view/446 |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT georgehull raceracialisationandcolourcaste |