Reclaiming nonracialism: reading The Threat of Race from South Africa

ABSTRACT

Gillespie challenges David Theo Goldberg's critique of the project of nonracialism (antiracialism) in The Threat of Race. Goldberg's critique understands nonracialism to forbid the racial terms that would allow for racism to be named and dismantled, and thus sees nonracialism as a variation on white privilege. She tests the book's most general claim by looking carefully at how this claim is substantiated in the chapter on South Africa. She argues that Goldberg's critique of nonracialism relies on a historiography of South Africa that excludes radical traditions of anti-apartheid nonracialism that would complicate the ease with which nonracialism might be seen as an ally to racism. The history of the Unity Movement is drawn on to illustrate a radical organization in the anti-apartheid tradition that explicitly advocated the principle of nonracialism. Gillespie looks at the Unity Movement as an example of radical experimentation with nonracialism as a way of dismantling race–class oppression under white supremacy. She advocates nonracialism as a practice that attempts to contend with oppression in the present while at the same time employing future-oriented principles that prevent the terms of anti-oppression from becoming mired in a dangerous redeployment of the categories of race.

Keywords:

• antiracialism
• apartheid
• David Theo Goldberg
• nonracialism
• racism
• South Africa
• The Threat of Race
• Unity Movement

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Neville Alexander for granting an interview, Barbara Rosenbaum for her patience and care in bringing this publication to fruition, as well as its anonymous reviewer. Thanks are also due to new writing group colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand—Shireen Ally, Bridget Kenny and Prishani Naidoo—who complicated and critiqued this claim to nonracialism in ways that will only be able to be worked out in future arguments. But, mostly, warm thanks to David Theo Goldberg and Patterns of Prejudice for the welcome invitation to think through his provocative book.

Notes

¹No Sizwe [i.e. Neville Alexander], One Azania, One Nation: The National Question in South Africa (London: Zed Press 1979), 133.

²David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 311 (subsequent page references will appear parenthetically in the text).

³I use ‘antiracialism’ and ‘nonracialism’ interchangeably in this piece, the latter being the historical term used in South Africa.

⁵Steve Biko, ‘Black Consciousness and the quest for a true humanity’, in Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: A Selection of His Writings, ed. Aelred Stubbs (London: Heinemann Educational 1979), 90.

⁴For a recent elaboration of this point, see Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel C. Gibson, ‘Biko lives’, in Andile Mngxitama, Amanda Alexander and Nigel C. Gibson (eds), Biko Lives! Contesting the Legacies of Steve Biko (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2008).

⁶Formal manifesto issued by the Congress Youth League in 1948: [Alexander], One Azania, One Nation, 58. Interestingly—and this is a history that remains to be written—it appears to have been the ANC-aligned student movement of the 1980s that invigorated the debate on nonracialism within the Congress movement.

⁸Quoted in [Alexander], One Azania, One Nation, 83–4.

⁷For a discussion of how ‘culture’ was deployed as a tool for racist governance, see Robert Gordon, ‘Apartheid's anthropologists: the genealogy of Afrikaner anthropology’, American Ethnologist, vol. 15, no. 3, 1988, 535–53.

⁹David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell 2002).

¹⁰African National Congress, ‘The Freedom Charter’, 26 June 1955 (emphasis added), available on the ANC website at www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/charter.html (viewed 9 November 2009).

¹²Interview with Neville Alexander, Project for the Study of Alternative Education in South Africa (PRAESA) offices, University of Cape Town, 24 July 2009.

¹¹Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1955] (New York: Monthly Review Press 2000). For a recent discussion of race–class tension in South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement, see Nurina Ally and Shireen Ally, ‘Critical intellectualism: the role of Black Consciousness in reconfiguring the race–class problematic in South Africa’, in Mngxitama, Alexander and Gibson (eds), Biko Lives!.

¹³[Alexander], One Azania, One Nation, 47.

¹⁴It should be noted that, as with all of the anti-apartheid resistance organizations, there was of course a range of interpretation to be found inside the AAC/Anti-CAD alliance.

¹⁵‘All Africa Convention’, available on the South Africa History Online website at www.sahistory.org.za/pages/chronology/special-chrono/governance/all-africa-convention.htm (viewed 9 November 2009).

¹⁶I. B. Tabata, The Awakening of a People (Cape Town: All African Convention 1950), ch. 9, available on the South Africa History Online website at www.sahistory.org.za/pages/library-resources/online%20books/all-africa-convention/AAC-index.htm (viewed 9 November 2009).

¹⁷See ‘Tabata “I. B.” Isaac Bangani’, available on the South Africa History Online website at www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/tabata-ib.htm (viewed 9 November 2009).

¹⁸[Alexander], One Azania, One Nation, 55. The ten-point programme was broadly democratic, and not reflective of the more radical tendencies in the movement, a ‘minimalism’ intended to garner maximum support, as well as to avoid at least some of the repressive state controls. It included franchise, free education, inviolability of person, freedom of speech and movement, nonracialism, land redistribution, revision of criminal code, taxation and labour legislation. The programme is available on the South African History Online website at www.sahistory.org.za/pages/library-resources/online%20books/allison-drew/1943-document8.htm (viewed 10 November 2009).

¹⁹Jaffe, quoted in Neville Alexander, ‘Aspects of non-collaboration in the Western Cape 1943–1963’, Social Dynamics, vol. 12, no. 1, 1986, 1–14 (4).

²⁰Tabata, The Awakening of a People, ch 1.

²¹Interview with Neville Alexander (emphasis added).

²²Interview with Neville Alexander (emphasis added).

²³Interview with Neville Alexander (emphasis added).

²⁶Interview with Neville Alexander.

²⁴[Alexander], One Azania, One Nation, 22; Neville Alexander, ‘Black Consciousness: a reactionary tendency?’, in Barney Pityana, Mamphela Ramphele, Malusi Mpumlwana and Lindy Wilson (eds), Bounds of Possibility: The Legacy of Steve Biko and Black Consciousness (Cape Town: David Philip Publishers/ London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books 1991).

²⁵Interview with Neville Alexander.

²⁷Interview with Neville Alexander.

²⁸For further elaboration on the Unity Movement's failure to create a truly mass-based movement, see Baruch Hirson, ‘A short history of the Non-European Unity Movement: an insider's view’, [1995–9], available online at www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/supplem/hirson/neum.html (viewed 23 November 2009), and [Alexander], One Azania, One Nation.

²⁹I see this mode of nonracialism as having similarity with the racial queer movement, which has always proposed to dismantle sexual privilege by undermining the hegemony of sexual categories, welcoming the instability of identities, and placing the work of sexual anti-oppression in critical intersection with other battles against privilege.

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Kelly Gillespie

Kelly Gillespie is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is a co-founder of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism