Suchergebnisse

This paper addresses the politics of color-blindness in comparative perspective as its meaning has changed over the past half-century. Drawing on the cases of South Africa and the United States, I focus in particular on the socio-political and psychological functions that color-blind ideology performs for whites in defending white advantage in the present context. Although in the past color-blindness served as an effective rallying cry for the abolition of Jim Crow and the demise of apartheid, the very same principle serves in the post-segregation context to stall transformation of the racial order in the direction of greater equality. It is an irony that the principle of color-blindness that so effectively mobilized opposition to the institutionally racist order in both national contexts mutates at the very moment of apparent victory into one that radically limits the anti-racist imagination.

This article presents an analysis of 154 written submissions to the South African Human Rights Commission invited as part of the consultative process leading up to the South African National Conference on Racism 2000. The submissions demonstrate a fundamental lack of consensus regarding what racism is and how to combat it. Although the submissions reveal a variety of perspectives on racism within each self-identified racial group, a significant racial dimension - even bifurcation - is clearly manifest. Black and white South Africans approach the questions that were the topic of the National Conference on Racism in meaningfully different ways, suggesting the existence of "two nations of discourse". In mapping racial ideologies in post-apartheid South Africa, the article outlines the benefits of a structural approach in its engagement of a range of sociological debates from an international perspective: (1) the distinction between racial attitudes and ideologies; (2) the production and nature of new forms of racial identity, discourse, and racism; (3) the social construction of whiteness; and (4) the politics of non-racialism in the context of political projects such as nation-building and reconciliation. (Politikon-w ww.tandf.co.uk/journals/DÜI)

An examination of the degree to which conservative-led culture wars in the US have a "color" focuses on how assumptions about national identity affect the ways people differentiated by race/ethnicity are included or excluded from the national community. It is argued that the culture wars are part of a conservative effort to challenge liberal assumptions of the last 50 years by separating the "we" from the "they" in order to place categories of people "outside the broader universe of obligations." An exploration of the new breed of racism generated by the culture wars reveals conservative attempts to erode liberal racial policies like multiculturalism by drawing on constitutional principles of fairness. The premise is discussed in relation to affirmative action & welfare reform. It is concluded that there is a "color" to America's culture wars that is drawing a new boundary between deserving & undeserving citizens with potentially grave consequences for the politics of indirect racial exclusion. Suggestions are made for ways to mobilize an effective counter-response. J. Lindroth