The strongest victims in the world

Sisonke Msimang, The Daily Maverick

The violent and public beating of non-violent black protesters at the University of Free State demonstrated white Afrikaner impunity on full display. It was a reminder of the continued ways in which white people’s violence in South Africa is a tool that takes direct aim at black people’s bodies.

The violent racist does not bother with acts of vandalism or bother with the destruction of property: That would be a waste of time and energy. Over centuries the violence has evolved into an efficient and highly effective machine. Kick the head and wound the body. Send a clear message – no warning shots. There is nothing symbolic about the violence whites have carried out in South Africa in the past and on Tuesday we saw that it continues to be as literal as it ever was.

Re-Inscribing Race Through Mixed-Race Myths

Danielle Bowler, Eyewitness News

We often turn on questions of ‘colouredness’ and consider their weight, form and effect at different moments in our contemporary democracy. In all of their phrasings, the questions that arise when attempting to make sense of mixed-raced identity include multiple key features that are variegated throughout South African history.

On Not Reducing Racism to Apartheid

Richard Pithouse, SACSIS

We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and neo-colonialism, and to take both phenomena seriously as powerful forces on the global stage that, from Ferguson to Paris and Johannesburg, continue to shape the present.

Lewis Gordon: PBS Conference October 26, 2013

A Dream Deferred? MLK, Trayvon, and the fight against racism today

LGBT Activists Disrupt Jo'burg Gay Pride 2012

Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality

by Loïc Wacquant, 2007

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience

of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during

the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality.

This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical

or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as

they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the

functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and

global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing

city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto

and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights

three distinctive spatial properties of ‘advanced marginality’ – territorial fixation

and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of ‘place’, and the loss

of a hinterland – and draws out their implications for the formation of the

‘precariat’ in postindustrial societies.

The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW, and the ICU, 1904–1934

by Lucien van der Walt, 2007

In this article, I argue that the history of labour and the working class in southern Africa in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be adequately understood within an analytical framework that takes the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis....This article.... examines three moments of transnational labour activism in southern Africa in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Firstly, there was the tradition of ‘White Labourism’: rather than being a peculiarly South African phenomenon, it originated in Australia, spread to South Africa in the early 1900s, and subsequently developed into a significant factor in labour politics in the Rhodesias by the 1920s. Secondly, there was the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism, which stressed interracial working-classsolidarity. As developed by the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or ‘Wobblies’) in the United States in 1905, this tradition came to South Africa via Scotland, where it spread from radical white labour circles to workers of colour in the 1910s, and then spilt over into the Australian IWW. Thirdly, there was the tradition of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), whose politics were an amalgam of two transcontinental currents: Garveyism and IWW syndicalism. The ICU operated regionally, spreading from South Africa in 1919 to South West Africa and the Rhodesias in the 1920s and 1930s. Set against the backdrop of regional waves of labour activism, the history of these transnational labour currents provides important insights into the social character of southern African labour movements in the period of the ‘first’ modern globalisation, lasting from the 1880s into the 1920s. The analysis presented here is influenced by, and makes a contribution to, the new transnational labour history that ‘relativizes’ and ‘historicizes’ the nation-state as a unit of analysis, stressing the ‘need to go beyond national boundaries’ and avoid ‘methodological nationalism’ in understanding working-class formation. A transnational labour history yields important insights into labour and working class history, provides a new synthesis that goes beyond old labour history, with its stress on formal organisation, and new labour history, with its stress on lived experience, and stresses the interconnections between labour worldwide.

Being-Black-in-the-World

Being-Black-in-the-World
by Noel Chabani Manganyi

by Noel Chabani Manganyi, 1973

In the 1970s and early 1980s Manganyi published a series of monographs, the first of which was Being-Black-in-the-World (1973), the last Looking Through the Keyhole (1981). In these works Manganyi examined incisively the effects of institutionalised racism on the internal worlds and external realities of South Africans. To this end, he explored a range of group and individual responses to the forms of institutionalised racism that characterised South Africa at the time, including alienation, distorted relations with the body, and the quest for freedom.

Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex

by Angela Davis, History is a Weapon

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

'Polluting the Body Politic': Race & Urban Location

This chapter from David Theo Goldberg's 1993 book Racist Culture is online here.