Mixed Race Families in South Africa: Naming and Claiming a Location

ABSTRACT

The very act of living across racial boundaries or borders is a challenge to existing ideologies and social structures. Through in depth interviews with ten South Africans, I explore the border patrolling or policing of people who cross race lines in intimate relationships. Interracial partners are concerned with safety and comfort in public places and in the role of parent, they are concerned about their children’s sense of belonging. As interracial parents and partners resist border patrolling, they are also resisting racial categories, even as they claim and name locations that may work to reproduce racialisation. The experiences and perspectives of interracial parents and partners presented in this article suggest that racism and other forms of inequality remain entrenched and pervasive. And, despite the dream of unity and non-racialism, inequality between racial groups and classes has grown under neoliberalism in South Africa [Bond, P., 2004. From Racial to Class Apartheid: South Africa’s Frustrating Decade of Freedom. Monthly Review, 55 (10), 45. Available from: https://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/south-africas-frustrating-decade-offreedom-from-racial-to-class-apartheid/] Far from the hope for a rainbow nation the experiences of interracial partners and parents show that race remains significant, hierarchical and defining of ideologies, identities and institution. The interviews highlight that borders of racial categories are contested and charged spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Border patrolling
• interracial
• Coloured
• mixed race
• whiteness
• racialisation
• apartheid
• South Africa

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Heather Dalmage is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice, at Roosevelt University. She has written about multiracial families in the US and South Africa and is a former Fulbright Scholar at the University of KwaZulu Natal.

Notes

1 This research fits with a growing literature that explores parenting mixed race children (for example Twine 2010; Song and Gutierrez 2016).

2 The participant that identified as Coloured lives as white (accepting the assumptions others make about him). He is in a relationship with a person that identifies as Khoisan.

3 This was not planned, but an outcome of the snowball sampling.

4 The acts were amended and reworked over time. I list the original acts.

5 Research by Amoateng and Heaton (2015) show that African men are more likely to outmarry than African women.

6 Kaffir is a racial slur used against Black Africans.

7 In his research on the ways middle-class Blacks negotiate racism in public places, Feagin (1991) found that Black couples must negotiate their response to the situation and then with one another.