Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical

race jurisprudence: ‘Divining our

racial themes’
Joel M Modiri*

1 Introduction
In this article, I repeat arguments made elsewhere on the importance of critical
race scholarship in South African legal thinking.1 Critical ‘outsider’ jurisprudence
is a developing genre of legal enquiry and needs to be considered in analyses of
legal reform, human rights, constitutionalism, transformation, transitional justice
and reconciliation. While divergent feminist legal theories, certain strands of
‘queer’ legal theory, US and Euro-Brit Critical Legal Studies (CLS) have received
wide coverage within South African legal scholarship, vibrant jurisprudential
movements such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), postcolonial jurisprudence and
Black Feminism have remained largely absent from post-apartheid critical legal
discourse. Not only does the markedly ‘white’ character of South African critical
and postmodern legal theory explain the paucity of critical race theory – the
general critique levelled at CLS scholars in the US by CRT scholars for their
failure to come to terms with the particularity of race and racism in their analysis
of how law is a site for the production of ideological practices, politics and social
power applies also to South African Crits and postmodern legal theorists in their
engagement with the post-apartheid legal culture.2
However, given South Africa’s unique history of totalitarian white supremacist
rule and institutionalised anti-black racism, the shocking silence of critical race
discourses cannot merely be dismissed as an oversight. It explains the extent to

*
Researcher, Department of Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria.
1
See Modiri ‘The grey line in between the rainbow’ (2011) SAPL 177-202; ‘The colour of law, power
and knowledge’ (2012) SAJHR (forthcoming).
2
See Harris ‘Foreword: The jurisprudence of reconstruction’ (1994) California LR 743; Bracamonte
‘Foreword: Minority critique of the Critical Legal Studies movement’ (1987) Harvard Civil Rights-Civil
Liberties LR 297; Delgado ‘The ethereal scholar: Does critical legal studies have what minorities
want? (1987) Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties LR 301.
232 (2012) 27 SAPL

which black people have been pushed into the subaltern and how deeply
entrenched our subordinate status has become. The harms we experience, our
needs and suffering are incapable of intelligibility within traditional forms of legal
discourse and social meaning. To my mind, the absence of CRT in South African
legal thought corresponds with the broader exclusion of black people, black
experiences, black values and black needs in society and the overwhelming
dominance of whites in all spheres of life. To account for this deep feeling of
racial alienation under the law, I suggest that we turn to the conceptual tools and
methodologies developed by critical race theorists to illustrate the ways in which
the social construction of race is present in legal systems and how power and
knowledge production, specifically, but not only in law, are also racially
structured.3 I also suggest that CRT is needed in the South African legal context
because of the ideological inadequacy and technocratic assumptions of current
traditional (formal/liberal/conservative) approaches to equality in South Africa.
CRT allows us to examine racial issues more critically and directly in the context
of their social, economic and political implications for law and legal rules.
It provides a different and much-needed approach to thinking about the
contemporary challenges of race and racial domination. CRT, in contrast to liberal
approaches which view racism as the outcome of individual prejudice and hostility
and which posit law as a neutral and apolitical mediator of racial conflict,
understands racism as a structural manifestation of white social, economic and
cultural power and views law as a site for the reproduction and concealment of
that power.4 In other words, law is a constitutive element of race itself and
reproduces the structures and practices of racism and racial domination (white
supremacy) through the legal tradition and myriad legal rules which may often
seem unconnected to race itself.5
In offering a race-conscious yet non-essentialist account of the complex
interaction between race, law and power, CRT carries out the progressive
groundwork for a radical politics of anti-subordination and social justice. This is
particularly significant in a country like South Africa where, despite ostensible legal
reforms and a comprehensive Bill of Rights, anti-black racial subordination and
discrimination persists and the privileges unjustly accrued to whites are virtually self-
perpetuating.6 My argument is for CRT to intervene in the paradox of the
coexistence of the constitutional promise of formal legal equality and non-racialism
with the realities of material inequality and the ongoing racial oppression of Blacks,

3
See Delgado and Stefancic Critical Race Theory: An introduction (2001).
4
See Fitzpatrick ‘Racism and the innocence of law’ in Fitzpatrick and Hunt (eds) Critical legal
studies (1987) 119.
5
Crenshaw et al (eds) Critical race theory: The key writings that formed the movement (1995) xxv.
6
See Mamdani ‘When does reconciliation turn into a denial of justice?’ in Nolutshungu (ed)
Memorial lectures (1998) 1; Gibson ‘What happened to the promised land: A Fanonian perspective
of post-apartheid South Africa’ (2011) Antipode 1-27.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 233

and to challenge colour-blind and race-neutral responses to racial politics and the
discourse of equality. By placing race as a central theme (or ‘category of analysis’)
in the construction of law and legal theory, and by viewing racial issues (including
those sometimes deemed as not being racial issues) from the perspective of the
racially oppressed, our approaches to legal analysis could be radically altered and
moved closer to the quest for racial justice, equality and freedom.7 In CRT, the
experiences of Blacks – which are by no means monolithic or universal – are used
as a frame of reference for understanding the brutal effects of institutionalised
racism and racial ideology because the experiential viewpoints of Blacks offer a
different insight into race from those within the dominant culture (whiteness).8 It is
also important to note the absolute centrality of historical and social analysis in
CRT’s engagement with race and law. Therefore, if South African CRT research
employs the tools, approaches and methodologies of US CRT, these must still be
grounded in the specific social, economic, political and legal dynamics of South
Africa and its unique historical and present context.9
In this article, I argue for law and legal theory to move towards a critical race
jurisprudence in a way that will address some of the issues set out above. I do
not, however, offer a full examination of CRT’s applicability to the South African
situation, and suffice it to say that I believe that it is highly applicable and relevant.
I also do not argue that CRT should replace or supplant existing critical theories
of law, but rather that legal analysis, including ‘critical’ legal analysis would benefit
from being attentive to the voices of racially marginalised and excluded
communities. To illustrate these arguments further, I proceed (in section 2) to
focus on a few critical writings on race in South Africa, and internationally, which
further motivate the need for adopting CRT. I suggest that CRT offers an
intellectual and theoretical vocabulary of critique that can expose law’s role in
rationalizing unjust social hierarchies based on race, class and gender (among
many other categories). In the South African context, CRT is a timely challenge
to the overwhelming reliance on the rhetoric of formal racial equality and
constitutional optimism by exposing the ongoing symbiosis between the suffering,
poverty and inequality experienced by Blacks and the privileges, dominance and
longevity experienced by whites. Thereafter, (in section 3) I discuss a few ‘racial
themes’ which could be incorporated in an analysis of law and legal doctrine.
Each theme amplifies the call of CRT for the problematisation and reconfiguration
of the manner in which law constructs knowledge about race and participates in
the ‘race-ing’ of South African society. In conclusion, I argue for a critical

7
Tuitt Race, law, resistance (2004) xiv.
8
See Matsuda ‘Looking to the bottom: Critical legal studies and reparations’ (1987) Harvard Civil
Rights-Civil Liberties LR 323.
9
See Macdonald Why race matters in South Africa (2006); Magubane The making of a racist state:
British imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875-1910 (1996); Rycroft Race and the law in
South Africa (1987); Seeking and Nattrass Class, race and inequality in South Africa (2005).
234 (2012) 27 SAPL

jurisprudence that recalls and remembers the spectrality of race and racism in the
lives and laws of (post-)apartheid South Africa.

2 Why CRT? Recalling ‘race’

Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep seated, that it is
invisible because it is so norm al.10
US CRT scholar, Derrick Bell, in the opening chapter of the book in which he
argues that blacks remain the ‘faces at the bottom of society’s well’ and contends
that racism is an ‘integral, permanent, and indestructible component’ of society,
reflects on growing up in the years before the Second World War.11 It is the striking
similarity of his account to the South African experience that I try to draw out.
Bell writes that during that time, the slave heritage of African-Americans was
more a ‘symbol of shame than a source of pride’.12 This was because, as Bell himself
puts it, ‘[it] burdened black people with an indelible mark of difference as we struggled
to be like whites’.13 Struggle and survival meant moving on and rejecting slavery as
he and others would sometimes claim – erroneously, as he later found out – that they
were descendant of the free Negroes. Self-delusion, by denying one’s history of
slavery and racist exploitation, brought ease and comfort to Bell and other African-
American youths at the time. Slavery was barely mentioned in schools or public
discourses by the descendants of the victims and survivors of slavery. The culture at
the time ‘encouraged and enhanced individual denial of our collective, slave past’.14
However after the Second World War, and particularly in the 1960s, this
changed when a few academics and activists began writing and republishing
books and out-of-print volumes that regenerated interest in the subject of slavery.
Bell recalls that although all the narratives and literature depicted slavery as
egregious and awful, they also depicted a division between two camps of whites:
the good and benevolent whites who eased the slaves’ anguish and a few bad
and evil whites who shouldered all the blame for slavery.15 This narrative of good
white/bad white has allowed whites to simultaneously feel outrage and revulsion
for slavery without necessarily recognising slavery as a burden upon America’s
history and certainly not as a burden that required reparations (that is, because
they all identified as ‘good whites’ as a strategy to avoid confronting the fact that
white supremacy as a system works to the benefit of all whites irrespective of the
degree of their personal commitment to white supremacist beliefs and values).16

10
Chisholm, quoted in Johnson Heart full of grace (1995) 223.
11
Bell Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism (1993).
12
Id 1.
13
Ibid.
14
Id 2.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 235

He writes further that even though most whites take comfort in existing racial
stereotypes and are fearful that Blacks will get ahead of them, many of them
respond to race-based measures either with a sympathetic headshake or victim-
blaming rationalisations. Both responses, Bell notes, lead many to conclude that
complaints about racial discrimination by Blacks are excuses used by people who
are unwilling to compete on an equal basis in society. Most discourses on redress
and Affirmative Action in post-slavery America represent blacks as slothful,
lacking in ambition and as needing special treatment in life, with no reference to
historical context. The effect of these discourses is to relieve white communities
of their responsibility and to avoid confronting their complicity. Accordingly, Bell
suggests that there is a need to reassess our assumptions about race and the
persistence of racism in society.
Such a reassessment of the racial situation will of course be difficult in the
contemporary context because racial discrimination is less visible as a result of
formal civil rights reform. The absence of overt racism and visible signs of
discrimination has created an atmosphere of post-racialism and racial neutrality
that has encouraged many whites and privileged blacks to believe that racism is
a thing of the past. However, Bell insists that despite the formal end of slavery as
well as judicial precedent and civil rights statutes to prohibit racial discrimination,
‘the fact of slavery refuses to fade’.17 Racial discrimination against Blacks
continues, their careers and lives are often under threat due to race, while
poverty, low income and unemployment still characterise the black condition. Bell
warns that what is designated as ‘racial progress’ is often not a solution to the
problem and in fact can become a ‘regeneration of the problem in a particularly
perverse form’.18 While there are statistics that confirm the erosion and
ineffectiveness of civil rights advances for Blacks, even those statistics cannot
begin to express the havoc caused by joblessness, misery, poverty, anarchy,
crime, poor public education, drugs and disrupted family life, which are all social
conditions informed by the history of slavery. Furthermore, in the present context,
where racism is not openly practiced but masked by neutral standards, Blacks are
constantly confronted with the interpretive dilemma of whether the setbacks that
they suffer are due to race or some other individual quality or characteristic. The
idea that racism is an aberration, rather than a banal entrenched practice as Bell
sees it, has disarmed its victims of the resources to perceive a racist act when it
is being perpetrated against them. This ensures that whites can deny both their
collective racial dominance and their individual culpability for racist practices. It
also means that Blacks who complain about racial discrimination are often
maligned and accused of racism themselves or of ‘playing the race card’.

17
Id 3.
18
Ibid.
236 (2012) 27 SAPL

Bell explains that the failure of civil rights reforms is rooted in the failure to
transform the ‘racial policy’ which is made up of thousands of individual practices,
symbols, and norms whereby Blacks are subordinated to whites. Bell also argues
that the most formidable barrier to racial equality is the ‘stabilising role’ played by
Blacks in society and the economy. By this, he means that Blacks are either the
scapegoats or guinea pigs of failed economic and political policies. Another
significant issue Bell raises, given the worsening economic and social conditions,
is the relationship between liberal democratic values and racism – which for him
reveals not an ‘apparent anomaly’ but an ‘actual symbiosis’. Liberal democracy
and racism in countries marked by racialised inequality such as the United States
and South Africa historically, and even inherently, reinforce one another.19 This
leads Bell to question whether current legal reforms have made an indelible
improvement or marked a decisive break from the past:
The fact is that, despite what we designate as progress wrought through struggle
over m any generations, we rem ain what we were in the beginning: a dark and
foreign presence always the designated ‘other’. Tolerated in good tim es, despised
when things go wrong, as a people we are scapegoated and sacrificed as
distraction or catalyst for com prom ise to facilitate resolution of political differences
or relieve econom ic adversity.20
For Bell, racial oppression and the permanence of the subordinated status of
Blacks is the key racial theme that needs to be explored by critical race theorists. He
wants us to question why even in countries which extol the values of equality, dignity,
freedom and are part of the global cult(ure) of human rights, Blacks remain racially
oppressed and subordinated, and as Bell puts it, at the bottom of society’s well.
We should recognise that the notion of formal racial equality, while
comforting to privileged whites and the black elite, remains illusory to the majority
of Black people. Substantive reform (in principle) often tends to translate (in
practice) into weakly worded and poorly enforced laws, vague, ineffectual and
indeterminate judicial decisions, token positions in the public and private sector,
corrupt enrichment of a small black elite, and public spectacles.21
Despite comparative differences in chronology, demography and legal
culture, Bell’s arguments (made in the context of the United States) are for the
most part apposite and accurately describe the race situation in ‘post’-apartheid
South Africa.22 Similar trends in response to the post-slavery era can also be
discerned in race discourses in post-apartheid South Africa.

19
Id 10.
20
Ibid 10.
21
Id 14.
22
For comparative literature on race in South Africa and the United States, see Fredrickson White
supremacy: A comparative study of American and South African history (1982); Marx Making race
and nation: A comparison of South Africa, the United States and Brazil (1998); Hamilton (ed)
Beyond racism: Race and inequality in Brazil, South Africa and the United States (2001).
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 237

From the outset, I should mention that I share Bell’s distrust of formal legal
reforms and their capacity to effect real and substantive change. I also question
why Blacks remain a racial underclass in a country with what is often hailed as ‘the
most progressive constitution in the world’.23 In South Africa we also experience a
climate in which the true horrors of apartheid are slowly becoming forgotten, in
which racial injustices and inequalities which were created by apartheid are
becoming normalised. In the same way as narratives and literature about slavery
obscured the past, so too did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission silence
many voices and relieve whites of their responsibility and complicity in the systemic
violence, exploitation and oppression which took place under apartheid.24 The TRC
focused on activists and political elites rather than on beneficiaries and victims and
thereby followed a narrow and strategic process of ‘reconciliation’ which embraces
hegemonic ideals like nation-building and unity which claim to speak for all.25 The
consequence of this was that the continuance of past oppressions and privileges
remained unquestioned and the possibilities of social reconciliation, social justice
and an enlarged (ethical) vision of equality were negated.
Eighteen years after the abolition of legalised racial segregation and
institutionalised racism, the implementation of numerous legal reforms and the
elaboration of a ‘substantive equality’-based Court jurisprudence, the fact of
apartheid refuses to fade. Thus Bell’s scepticism towards what we deem as racial
progress (part of the package of South Africa’s constitutional optimism) must be
heeded, including the danger that such racial progress and redress measures
might regenerate the race problem in many more perverse ways (such as colour-
blind racism, racial essentialism, reduction or assimilation of complex differences
or conservative interpretations and readings of the Constitution and other equality
legislation which close off the search for future alternative refigurings of equality,
freedom and justice). The ANC government’s embrace of global capitalism and
liberal democratic values also colludes with existing structures of racial
disadvantage and inequality to further subordinate Blacks.26
Achille Mbembe echoes these concerns in his discussion of the ‘post’-
apartheid South African experiment at creating ‘the first credible non-racial society
on the planet’.27 He notes that even after the formal end of apartheid, which was

23
Sachs The strange alchemy of life and law (2009) 27.
24
See Van Marle and Le Roux (eds) Law, memory and the legacy of apartheid: Ten years after
AZAPO (2007); Mamdani ‘Amnesty or impunity? A preliminary critique of the report of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)’ (2002) Diacritics 33-59.
25
See Mamdani (n 6).
26
See Madlingozi ‘Post-apartheid social movements and the quest for the elusive “new” South
Africa’ in Motha (ed) Democracy’s empire: Sovereignty, law, and violence (2007) 77. See also
Marais South Africa limits to change: The political economy of transition (2001) 153; Terreblanche
A history of inequality in South Africa 1652 – 2002 (2002); Bond Elite transition: from apartheid to
neoliberalism in South Africa (2005).
27
Mbembe ‘Passages to freedom: The politics of racial reconciliation in South Africa’ (2008) Public
Culture 5.
238 (2012) 27 SAPL

based on firmly entrenched race hierarchies, the struggle for racial equality has
not ended. In general, whites still control the commanding heights of the national
economy and top management positions and the distribution of wealth, income
and opportunities is still racialised.28 He argues that ‘[the] moment when South
Africa will be able to recognise itself and be recognised as a truly non-racial
community is still far away’.29 He bases his argument mainly on the continuation
of racist prejudices in the private sphere which keep breaking wide open, often
in the guise of matters that at first glance have nothing to do with race (such as
poverty, crime, corruption, language rights, sports, cultural pluralism, disease,
renaming of roads and public places to name a few). He writes that white racism
and the operation of white privilege have had to change in modus operandi, and
have become more subtle, covert and unconsciously practiced. He notes, in a
similar vein to Bell, that although most whites generally purport to support racial
equality in principle, they would later reject policies designed to implement
equality and continue to hold on to the privileges of a white skin, constantly
attempting to restore their normalcy.30
The standard meaning of reconciliation by ‘former beneficiaries of past racial
atrocities’ writes Mbembe is that racism is dead and ‘blacks should forget about
the past and move on’.31 Most whites have retreated to a comfortable position of
personal non-culpability for past misdeeds by ignoring the enormous nature of
their social and economic advantage as a group. In other words, whites have cast
themselves as ‘non-responsible rather than irresponsible’.32 As Clarkson writes,
‘to be irresponsible is to affirm a responsibility has been breached. To be non-
responsible is to deny that one falls within the ambit of a responsible field. In fact
it amounts to a denial that such a field exists at all’.33 Mbembe connects this
mentality of non-responsibility to the uncritical acceptance of the liberal
conservative notion of the autonomous self-made and self-reliant subject. He
argues that it is pretence to believe that white racism is not or is no longer the
main cause of black poverty and the troubling gaps in life’s opportunities
experienced by Blacks in comparison to their white counterparts.34 Another
source of race denialism which he identifies is the overreliance on the
constitutional promise of formal legal equality which creates the impression that
no further action is needed once the law has granted such equality.

28
Mbembe (n 27) at 6. See also Durrheim et al Race trouble: Race, identity and inequality in post-
apartheid South Africa (2011) 16-24.
29
Mbembe (n 27) 6.
30
Id 10.
31
Id 9.
32
Clarkson ‘The time of address’ in Veitch (ed) Law and the politics of reconciliation (2006) 234.
33
Clarkson (n 32) 234.
34
Mbembe (n 27) 9.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 239

Mbembe adds that this also leads to the erroneous assumption that racial
disparities are either the result of corruption, maladministration and poor economic
planning but also as simply a manifestation of the moral failure of Blacks (who are
accused of not working hard enough, of feeling over-entitled, not living an ethical
life and being prone to crime, corruption, baseness and illness). Measures aimed
at achieving transformation are also charged by advocates of liberal capitalism with
interfering with market rationality, discouraging foreign investment and acting as a
form of reverse discrimination.35 Mbembe connects this to the urgent questions of
social justice, democracy and political stability by arguing that these will not be
achieved as long as whites still cling to ‘the rule of property’ and maintain monopoly
over land ownership, capital, access to schools and universities, corporate
boardrooms and earnings that, on average, are six times more than blacks doing
the same work.36 He warns that ‘a radical revision of South Africa’s white
supremacist ideology is therefore taking place’.37 It has shifted from asserting the
natural inferiority of blacks and denying their humanity to questioning the moral
legitimacy and political appropriateness of racially-based redress measures. He
also warns that the apologetics for racial inequalities and the maintenance of unjust
systems of power and social hierarchies may come in the language of rights,
fairness and equal opportunity, but goes on to say that actually they will be an ‘effort
to institutionalise a racial privilege that is trying to mask its racial nature’.38 In
essence, then, the denial of the fact that past racial injustices can (to some extent)
and should be rectified through legal remedies has the effect of protecting and
preserving existing distributive injustices, power differentials and inequalities and
so postpones the imperative of justice and reparations indefinitely.39
Mbembe and Bell offer useful starting points for understanding both the
ethical and pragmatic questions facing CRT. The ethical questions entail an
exploration of alternative agencies and subjectivities that defy reified racial
categories, resisting the need to suppress or essentialise differences, reflecting
on memory, mourning and heritage, and a concern with the becoming of a radical
post-apartheid/post-colonial/post-modern politics, plurality and community. The
pragmatic questions entail what further measures for addressing racialised
disadvantage and distributional inequalities are required, what economic policies
and developmental agendas should frame those measures and what theoretical
concepts and intellectual traditions should be drawn upon in analysis of legal
doctrine and equality jurisprudence. Although I situate my concern more within
the ethical aspect, the pragmatic and material questions remain important. I am
interested in theories that disrupt and displace and that question the standards

35
Id 10.
36
Id 17.
37
Id 10.
38
Ibid.
39
Id 11.
240 (2012) 27 SAPL

and assumptions about race which we have come to accept as culturally-neutral

and self-evident rather than as situated and normative.
Talking and thinking about race today requires us to understand the
suppressed and silenced dimensions of racial power. To this end, Peggy
McIntosh’s seminal essay on unpacking the ‘invisible knapsack’ of white privilege
is instructive.40 McIntosh’s essay began with an observation of ‘men’s unwillingness
to grant that they are over privileged, even though they may grant that women are
disadvantaged’.41 She notes the irony in how most men may be willing to advance
the status and position of women in society, but are unable to support the idea of
lessening men’s status and position. Not surprisingly, she realises that the denial
of male privilege (and later also white privilege) protects that privilege from ‘being
fully acknowledged, lessened or ended’. She also notices how, because social
hierarchies are interlocking, although her gender disadvantages her, her race puts
her at an advantage. For McIntosh, racism is more than individual acts of meanness
and hostility; it is also a system that confers dominance and power on white
people.42 What is critical here is how she exposes the interplay between privilege
and disadvantage – that they are two sides of the same coin (white privilege = black
disadvantage). She argues that whites have been carefully taught and socialised
not to recognise how being white privileges them, in the same way men are
conditioned and taught not to recognise male power and privilege:
I began to understand why we are justly seen as oppressive, even when we don’t
see ourselves that way. I began to count the ways in which I enjoy unearned skin
privilege and have been conditioned into oblivion about its existence. My schooling
gave m e no training in seeing m yself as an oppressor, as an unfairly advantaged
person or as a participant in a dam aged culture.43
McIntosh describes the deeply false consciousness of whites as follows:
W hites are taught to think of their lives as m orally neutral, norm ative, and
average, and also ideal, so’ to be m ore like ‘us’.44
This was also the crux of Steve Biko’s critique of white liberal activists and
academics during the apartheid era:
It is not as if whites are allowed to enjoy privilege only when they declare their
solidarity with the ruling party. They are born into privilege and are nourished by
and nurtured in the system of ruthless exploitation of black energy.45

40
McIntosh ‘White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see
correspondences through work in women’s studies’ in Center for Research on Women Wellesley
College working paper no 189 (1988).
41
Id at 1.
42
Ansley ‘White supremacy (and what we should do about it)’ in Delgado and Stefancic Critical
white studies: Looking behind the mirror (1997) 592-595.
43
McIntosh (n 40) 4.
44
Ibid.
45
Biko I write what I like (1978) 66.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 241

McIntosh then goes on to list a range of over 50 privileges which inhere to

white people and often operate in an oppressive and hostile manner against black
people. She does this to point out how racism is a lifestyle of whites in the sense
that it naturalises unearned white privilege at the expense of blacks in the same
way as Himani Banerji shows how racism is the very principle of self-definition of
European/Western societies.46 I list some of the most evocative privileges
identified by McIntosh for these purposes:47
• If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing
housing in an area which I can afford and in which I want to live.
• When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilisation’, I am
shown that people of my colour made it what it was.
• I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for
their own daily physical protection.
• I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will
tolerate them if they fit the school and workplace norms; my chief worries
about them do not concern others’ attitude towards their race.
• I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters,
without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, poverty
or illiteracy of my race.
• I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
• I can remain oblivious to the language and customs of persons of colour.
• I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work
against me.
• I can worry about racism without being seen as self-interested and self-
seeking.
• If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or there isn’t a racial issue at
hand, my race will lend me more credibility for either position than a
person of colour will have.
• I feel welcomed and ‘normal’ in the usual walks of public life.
Again she shows how whiteness has become an asset – a property available
to whites for their prosperity, protection and comfort.48 This leads her to conclude
that ‘white privilege has turned out to be an elusive and fugitive subject’ and that
meritocracy is a ‘myth’.49 Indeed to re-imagine and re-design social systems, we
must acknowledge (not just know about) their colossal unseen dimensions. If
white privilege is not directly displaced, any attempts at equality, equity,
transformation and reconciliation will remain empty and incomplete. The
discourse on white privilege, whiteness and white subjectivity became prominent

46
Banerji Thinking through: Essays on feminism, Marxism and anti-racism (1995) at 46.
47
McIntosh (n 40) 5-9.
48
McIntosh (n 40) 11. See Harris ‘Whiteness as property’ (1993) Harvard LR 1709.
49
Id 9.
242 (2012) 27 SAPL

in South Africa in 2011 after the publication of an article by Samantha Vice, in

which she considered the question of how whites should ‘live in this strange
place’.50 Vice’s primary thesis was set out as follows:
South Africa is still a visibly divided and suspicious land. All South Africans are
required to feel pride in their country, and expats are urged to return to build the
nation and participate in the m iracle that the early post-apartheid days m ade not
im possible to believe in. At the sam e tim e, our equally fam ous history of
stupefying injustice and inhum anity feels still with us: its effects press around us
every day, in the visible poverty, the crim e that has affected everyone, the child
beggars on the pavem ents, the de facto racial segregation of living spaces, in who
is serving whom in restaurants and shops and in hom es.51
Vice seeks to explore the possibilities of living an ethical life in South Africa
in the aftermath of apartheid, a South Africa which she describes as a ‘strange
and morally tangled place to live’.52 Although her focus falls on the ethics of
whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa, the questions she is raising inevitably
address and relate to race relations and to the constitutional vision of non-
racialism, equality and freedom. We cannot begin to think of these questions
without considering Vice’s secondary thesis, namely, that in South Africa ‘the self
is so thoroughly saturated in histories of oppression or privilege’.53 Vice points out
that even though whites have lost ‘de jure’ or formal political power, whiteness still
remains a ‘social location of structured privilege’ in which whiteness and the
perspectives of whites are emphasised and the economic, social and political
advantages accrued to whites are seen as normal and unremarkable. But despite
appearing as normal, universal and ‘just the way things are’, Vice points out that
whiteness and white privilege is ‘unearned, unshared and nonuniversal’.54 Thus,
a problematisation of whiteness in South Africa might lead to a deconstruction of
conventional understandings of race and racial power.55 Vice argues that given
the fact that an honest and sincere public dialogue about race has not taken
place in South Africa, philosophers (and I would add lawyers, legal academics,
judges and law students) need to engage with the (past and present) politics of
race and oppression.56

50
Vice ‘How do I live in this strange place?’ (2010) J of Social Philosophy 323. See also ‘The
whiteness debate’ Mail and Guardian Online at http://mg.co.za/tag/whiteness-debate (accessed
2012-01-22).
51
Vice (n 50) 323.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Id 325. See Yancy (ed) What white looks like (2004) 227; Lopez (ed) Postcolonial whiteness: A
critical reader on race and empire (2005) 121; Rasmussen et al (eds) The making and unmaking
of whiteness (2001).
55
See Sullivan Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege (2006) 4.
56
Vice (n 50) 324.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 243

I do not wish to enter the ‘whiteness debate’ initiated by Vice; rather my aim is
to think through the messages that her ultimate contention (that white South
Africans should feel shame, guilt and humility) communicates about race and
racism, and also about redress and transformation. Firstly, there is always a danger
in burgeoning disciplines such as critical whiteness studies (and also masculinity
studies) that focus too much on the moral burdens of whiteness, of ‘being white’ in
particular contexts, on the life of the oppressor, might in effect result in a further
entrenchment of the centralisation of whiteness in society. Also, one can argue that
the emphasis on whites simply acknowledging their unjustly privileged position
rather than working to actively disavow it and rework their identification with Blacks
on a plane of radical horizontality amounts to what Sara Ahmed refers to as ‘non-
performative anti-racism’.57 It reduces reparations and redress – which have
material and non-material dimensions – to benevolent and morally aware whites
changing their behaviour. This in turn also reveals another reduction: Under Vice’s
view on whiteness, racism is reduced to misunderstanding, intolerance and a lack
of a social conscience by over-privileged whites. This view removes, or downplays,
structural power, systemic dominance and institutionalised ideologies as the
fundamental framers that define race and racial identity.
I do agree with Vice that ‘whiteness’ needs to be exposed as culturally situated
rather than as an invisible norm. The operation of whiteness as a silent normative
benchmark is also present in the foundations, suppositions, methods, principles,
doctrines and practices of South African law, its legal culture (which is formalistic
and conservative) and in legal education and untransformed law faculties – and this
does need to be exposed and questioned. However, her concern with the personal
and individual elements of race, as well as her suggestion that whites should be
silent and humble rather than to embrace ‘a change of tongue’58 shows little
sensitivity to the need to construct an active pluralistic public sphere and to the
becoming of a post-apartheid community, sociality, politics and ethics. I am
concerned that in attempts to heal racial divisions and address inequalities and
injustices, our strategies and methods seek to close, fix and settle rather than
unsettle, open and displace our existing beliefs about the connections between race
and racism and the new constitutional order.
If there is a main point that can be gleaned from the different theoretical
reflections by Bell, Mbembe, McIntosh and Vice it is that race must remain a central
and socially significant category of perception, representation and analysis.59 Our
existing concepts about race and racism are in a constant state of flux as the
dynamics of race and racism themselves also undergo invariable change. The
absence of a critical race discourse in law causes these existing concepts to
57
Ahmed ‘The non-performativity of anti-racism’ (2006) Merideans: Journal of Women, Race and
Culture 104-126.
58
See Krog A change of tongue (2003).
59
Crenshaw et al (n 5) xv.
244 (2012) 27 SAPL

stagnate and become reified but more pertinently, this absence has also lead to
lawyers, judges and legal academics (and law students) ignoring marginal identities,
difference and relationships and opting to follow traditional modes of analysis
(wrongly conceived as objective, neutral and rigorous) in their examination of, and
conversations on, human rights, anti-discrimination, constitutionalism, and also
private law and commercial law doctrines. A return to race through CRT might force
lawyers and academics wedded to traditional legal canons to confront the
intractable structural racism that remains hidden yet embedded within the salient
functioning of legal categories. Uncovering the racial view of law through theories
grounded in the realities of the racially oppressed might illuminate particular
experiences and voices left out of modern legal consciousness. In the section that
follows, I further contemplate a few racial themes that respond to this need to
refigure and transform our understandings of the relationship between law and
race, specifically in the post-apartheid context.

3 Contemplating racial themes in post-apartheid

times
W e are so quick to reject and deny racism and sexism in ourselves that we
overlook how they are em bedded in all aspects of society, including the law and
legal institutions.60
In CRT writings, a number of conceptual themes can often be identified.61 As
CRT is still a developing, albeit diverse, body of jurisprudence, these themes
should be understood as starting points, angles of approach and focus areas
rather than comprehensive frameworks and prescriptive methodologies. CRT, its
concepts and aims, is still open, exploratory and transforming.62 My aim in this
section is to briefly introduce a few other racial themes to deepen the race
intervention in South African critical legal thought. What unites the themes I
discuss below is an orientation around ‘race’ that seeks to observe and critique
the relationship between law, racism and power and an overt concern with ethical
politics, social justice, radical difference and anti-subordination.63

3.1 Race-consciousness
Race-consciousness as a mode of legal criticism is, as the word suggests, an
approach to legal analysis that is conscious of race and racism and open to

60
Van Marle ‘Reflections on teaching Critical Race Theory in law schools/faculties’ (2001)
Stellenbosch LR 86.
61
See Delgado and Stefancic ‘Critical Race Theory: An annotated biography’ (1993) Virginia LR 461.
62
Calmore ‘Critical race theory, Archie Shepp and fire music: Securing an authentic intellectual life
in a multicultural world’ 1992 Southern California LR 2126.
63
Bell ‘Who’s afraid of critical race theory?’ 1995 University of Illinois LR 898.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 245

considering the effects of racial identities and histories of racial domination. It is

an approach that undermines formalist/liberal/colour-blind approaches that
associate the eradication of racism with the transcendence of a racially conscious
standpoint, and with the forgetting of race and racial classifications.64 Ironically
these colour-blind ideologies are said to be more pervasive in racially-stratified
societies (such as South Africa and the United States).65 Colour-blind approaches
(understood as conservative/liberal/formalist) have been shown to undercut their
own ‘non-racist’ goals by ignoring the racial dynamics that shape society thereby
also maintaining established privileges and denying the complex differences
between people. They also fail to properly understand the structural effects of
racialisation and thus often rely on non-racial explanations to explain even
apparent racial disparities. CRT has responded by proffering a style of legal
analysis that pays explicit attention to race, racism and racialisation. However in
order to live in the tension between race-consciousness and anti-essentialism,
CRT approaches race from what Joshua Glasgow refers to as a
‘reconstructionist’ angle.
The notion racial reconstructionism (or ‘race as a social construct’) as
proposed by Glasgow does not treat race as a biological or scientific fact. Race
does not refer to any self-evident biological or genetic traits or common
characteristics but instead to a complex phenomenon which is at once historically
constituted and socially, economically, politically and legally constitutive. Glasgow
suggests that the meaning, concept and utility of race should be reconstructed
as a social phenomenon through which people can address the legacies and
ramifications of racialised history – the ways in which certain groups have been
subordinated and some privileged through the medium of racial discourse and
practice.66 Simply put: in order to transcend race, one must openly confront
racism. Such a race-conscious approach recognises the unstable, tentative and
relational nature of identity categories and acknowledges that race is entwined
with class, gender, disability, religion and a myriad other factors.67
CRT however also distances itself from what Crenshaw et al refer to as the
‘vulgar anti-essentialism’ of some conservative and even postmodern approaches.
‘Vulgar’ anti-essentialism is the claim that since racial categories are not ‘real’,
or ‘natural’ and instead socially constructed, it is theoretically and politically
undesirable, impossible or absurd to posit race as a category of analysis or as a
basis for legal redress, political activism and mobilisation.68 To be progressive and
non-essentialist need not mean that the voice of race should be lost as, in Drucilla

64
Peller ‘Race consciousness’ (1990) Duke LJ 758.
65
See Bobo ‘Inequalities that endure? Racial ideology, American politics and the peculiar role of the
social sciences’ in Krysan and Lewis (eds) The changing terrain of race and ethnicity (2004) 13-42.
66
Glasgow A theory of race (2009) 152.
67
Harris ‘Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory’ (1990) Stanford LR 581.
68
Crenshaw et al (n 5) xxvi. See also Lee ‘Navigating the topology of race’ (1994) Stanford LR 747.
246 (2012) 27 SAPL

Cornell’s words, ‘there is a materiality to how we are placed in a society, which we

cannot simply escape from by attempting to disidentify with who we have been
shaped to be’.69 Indeed while race, like gender, is a social and cultural construct, and
thus not ‘real’ in any scientific or ontological sense, the Blacks whose lives are
inscribed within and trapped by those constructions are very real. Their subordination
to whites is real; their exploitation by whites is real; the racialised poverty, violence,
exclusion, and stereotyping that they experience and whites do not are real.
This is what distinguishes CRT’s progressive, anti-racist and critical race-
consciousness from race discourses which still rely on naturalist conceptions of
race or which seek to repudiate race and eliminate race discourses altogether. In
South Africa, race-consciousness in law enters into a public, legal and social space
which reflects a society that is seemingly tired of speaking about race and the
hauntings and horrors of racism in post-apartheid times. Yet on a regular basis we
see police using lethal force against ‘suspects’ and protestors. We hear about
shack fires, evictions and open-air toilets; about people dying due to unsafe
electrical cables, drowning in floods and in taxi and bus accidents. Issues such as
crime, poverty, poor public healthcare and educational facilities and unemployment
dominate most discussions on South African politics and economics. Most middle-
class South Africans employ (read: exploit) Blacks as domestic workers, gardeners
and car guards. What unites these seemingly disparate issues and incidents is that
they are racialised social conditions that are directly traceable to apartheid and are
continuing because of the lack of reparations and a dearth in commitment to
genuine social change. Race-consciousness shows both how law participates in
these systems of racial violence and how this participation has specifically
devastating consequences for Blacks. It is thus a corollary premise of race-
consciousness that if race disappears from the horizon of law, or from the view of
the world, so will the lives and experiences of Blacks.

3.2 Conceptual fidelity: Racism and white supremacy

CRT’s intellectual origins owe a great deal to the broad field of feminist theory – and
specifically the sophisticated, complex and rich treatment of sexism, misogyny and
patriarchy as distinct but interconnected political systems and also as practices of
oppression, subordination and power. Similar conceptual analysis can also be
identified in CRT’s treatment of racism and white supremacy. In general, CRT
scholars as well as radical black thinkers are concerned with the ideological and
structural effects of racism and white supremacy, and specifically its material and
psychic effects on its main victims: Black people.70 As such, the conception of race

69
Cornell ‘Revisiting Beyond accommodation after twenty years’ (2011) Feminists @ Law 5.
70
See Wilderson III Incognegro: A memoir of exile and apartheid (2008); Kilomba Plantation
memories: Episodes of everyday racism (2008); Farley ‘The black body as fetish object’ (1997)
Oregon LR 457.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 247

followed in CRT does not locate race and racism exclusively in social relations such
as prejudice and stereotyping based on skin colour but rather understands racial
oppression as primarily an institutional and systemic problem.71 The definitions and
meanings attached to the concepts of racism and white supremacy is an obviously
important question as it determines how legal and political institutions treat and
apply them in approaching constitutionally-based notions such as equality, redress,
transformation, multiculturalism and non-racism.
In CRT, racism is an integral, routine, and regular component of society and an
ingrained feature of all facets of life, law, politics, relationships and discourse. It is
banal, not abberational, and its ubiquity, not its absence characterises the normal
state of social structures.72 In a country like South Africa with a long and lingering
history of institutionalised and legally sanctioned systems of white supremacist terror
(slavery, colonialism and apartheid), race is central to everything including ‘patterns
of perception, logic, symbol formation, thought and speech, action and emotional
response as conducted, simultaneously in all areas of human activity (economics,
education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sexuality and war)’.73 White
supremacy accordingly does not refer to right-wing extremist racist hate groups that
consciously promote white domination and superiority but rather denotes a system
(political, legal, social, economic and cultural) in which whites maintain overwhelming
control and power not just in a material sense but in a symbolic sense as well.74 The
‘critical’ in CRT signifies its critique of (legal) liberal understandings of racism.
Liberalism conceives of racism as an irrational, abberational act based on a
valorisation of race categories committed by an individual wrongdoer deviating from
otherwise ‘normal’ and ‘impartial’ ways of acting, thinking and treating human beings.
It then also views law as ‘innocent’ and ‘pure’, as detached from social and political
concerns, and thus incapable of complicity in racial discrimination.75 CRT, like much
of CLS scholarship, rejects this liberal view of racism and takes a critical stance
towards liberalism’s preference for incremental, ‘step-by-step’ and programmatic legal
reforms (such as anti-discrimination legislation) based on rights as the main, if not the
only, solution to ending racism. An apt example is the aims of anti-discrimination
legislation (such as the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination
Act76 ) which is to identify isolated perpetrators (through certain ‘bad acts’ like racist
speech or sexual harassment) and victims (through discharging often onerous
burdens of proof).77 Similar trends can be identified in labour court cases where black

71
See Feagin Systemic racism: A theory of oppression (2006).
72
See Delgado and Stefancic (n 3) 7.
73
Welsing The Isis papers: The key to the colours (1990).
74
Ansley (n 42) 592-595.
75
See Fitzpatrick (n 4) 121.
76
Act 4 of 2000.
77
Valdes et al ‘Battles waged, won and lost: Critical Race Theory at the turn of the millennium’ in
Valdes et al (eds) Crossroads, directions and a new critical race theory (2002) 2.
248 (2012) 27 SAPL

employees struggle to prove racial discrimination because of the courts’ reliance on

reasonableness tests and formal notions of causation and intention which do not take
into account the already existing unequal power relationships between white
employers/supervisors and black employees and the deep-seated racism already
embedded in labour practices (hiring and promotion) and standards (such as merit).78

3.3 The alchemical fire of a remembering constitution:

Constitution as monument and race critique as memorial
A primary motivator for the need to reassess our racial themes in South African
constitutionalism and human rights is the argument that most covert racist
practices and the legacy of colonial apartheid have been normalised and
concealed under the veil of the Constitution. I share the sentiment that a critique
of the relationship between law, racial ideology and power relations cannot be
separated from an attendant critique of the liberal constitutional order (based as
it is on constitutional supremacy, human rights and rule of law) under which that
relationship is sanctioned and enabled.79 Two such critiques can be cited:
Mogobe Ramose has argued that the foundation of the Constitution does not
mirror the needs and aspirations of the majority and will accordingly always
prevent genuine reform, reconciliation and transformation.80 Mabogo More,
focusing on the land issue, claims that the constitutional settlement ‘offered black
people the right and not the means to own land while it simultaneously
entrenched white ownership of the unjustly appropriated land’.81 He then
concludes, with reference to Frantz Fanon, that South Africa is a neo-colonial (or
‘neo-apartheid’) state because the constitutional changes that occurred in the
1990s amount to mere formal decolonisation and ‘pseudo-independence’ and not
true liberation and sovereign independence.82 The Constitution thus does not
exist outside of, or above, the racial politics that CRT seeks to explicate, but is an
active part of that politics – implicated by and embroiled within it.
One way to understand the Constitution and to approach its relationship with
race, redress and equality is the distinction between monument and memorial as
espoused by Lourens du Plessis.83 Du Plessis defines memorial constitutionalism

78
See, eg, Mafomane v Rustenburg Platinum Mines (2003) 10 BLLR 999 (LC); Ntai v SA Breweries
Ltd (2001) 22 ILJ 214 (LC); Mangena v FILA South Africa (Pty) Ltd (2010) 31 ILJ 662 (LC).
79
See Sibanda ‘Not purpose made! Transformative constitutionalism, post-independence
constitutionalism and the struggle to eradicate poverty’ (2012) Stellenbosch LR 482.
80
‘In memoriam: Sovereignty and the “new’ South Africa”’ (2007) Griffith LR 310.
81
‘Fanon and the land question in (post-)apartheid South Africa’ in Gibson (ed) Living Fanon: Global
perspectives (2011) 173-187.
82
See Fanon The wretched of the earth (1968); Towards the African revolution (1967).
83
Du Plessis ‘The South African Constitution as memory and promise’ (2000) Stellenbosch LR 385;
Snyman ‘Interpretation and the politics of memory’ in Bradfield and Van der Merwe (eds) Meaning’
in legal interpretation (1998) 312.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 249

as ‘a constitutionalism of memory, in a South Africa (still) coming to terms with its

notorious past’, and as ‘a constitutionalism of promise moving along the way of
(still) getting to grips with a fulfilled and transformed future’.84 Memorial, in
contrast to monumental, constitutionalism does not remember the past by
celebrating historic and grand spectacles of political reconciliation or by building
monuments and statues of heroic leaders. Instead it focuses on the ordinary day-
to-day experiences of ordinary South Africans; it commemorates past (and
present) victims of gross human rights violations, socio-economic inequalities and
injustices in their daily (public and private) lives. Whereas monumental
constitutionalism – through abstract theories that focus on universality and
generality – fixes, closes and settles, memorial constitutionalism, through a
respect for difference, Otherness and an awareness of the complexity of life
resists the closure and is open to tensions and nuances.
In the context of race, I identify the Constitution and the constitutional order
itself with the monument, and I view a constitutional optimism fixated on the vision
of non-racialism, as a belief that the formal de jure end of apartheid has
occasioned the end of black suffering and white supremacy as well as colour-
blind, race-neutral and liberal conservative approaches that try to contain race
issues within the confines of law and rights as examples of monumental
constitutionalism. I argue that such approaches, although originating from
different sources, share a failure to recognise the legal historical significance of
race, and accordingly will only maintain or repeat the racial status quo and
prevent new approaches to racial justice from coming into view.
Correspondingly, I identify the progressive and postmodern race-
consciousness and critical outsider perspective of CRT as representing the
memorial and memorial constitutionalism. These approaches are concerned with
the remembering and recalling of the past, its atrocities and its victims, with living
in the tensions of post-apartheid being and becoming, and with recognising the
limits of law and constitutionalism.85 Whereas a monumental approach is
instrumental and functionalist and concerned with implementing policies,
programmes and legal rules designed to eradicate racialised inequality,
discrimination and injustice, the memorial represents a return to radical politics,
struggle and resistance and critical questioning. Whereas a monumental
approach views transformation and redress as a linear (procedural) process and
focuses exclusively on material needs, a memorial approach is open to multiple
directions and movements, and recognises both the material and non-material
needs of people. Here I would briefly want to contrast the dignity-based approach
to equality, the notion of substantive equality and the Harksen test (which
together represent the monumental approach to equality) to the rights utopianism

84
‘Memorial constitutionalism in action?’ 2008 African Human Rights LJ 401.
85
Van Marle ‘The spectacle of post-apartheid constitutionalism’ (2007) Griffith LR 419.
250 (2012) 27 SAPL

of critical race theorist Patricia Williams (which represents traces of a memorial

approach).
The notion of ‘substantive equality’ which purports to take into account
material group-based disadvantage and concrete circumstances into account
suffers firstly from itself being formalised in the Harksen case86 into a three-step
formulaic test which reduces the struggle for racial equality to a set of
considerations regarding differentiation, specified or analogous grounds,
legitimate government purpose and justifiability of rights limitations. Secondly, it
is couched firmly within a liberal, individualist emphasis on dignity that is blind to
unequal power relations and structural discrimination. The notion of substantive
equality, placing dignity at the heart of the right to equality and the creation of a
purportedly comprehensive test represents a constitutional pact based on
unattainable promises and grand claims which have made, and can make, no
substantive change in the lives of Blacks. Like the monument, the Constitution
merely stands there -- stagnant and motionless – leaving the small gains made
and reforms achieved to slide into irrelevance and ineffectiveness as patterns of
racial domination and privilege reproduce and adapt.
Williams’ response to the CLS rights critique (that they are vague, disutile
and indeterminate, that ‘exactly what people don’t need is rights’87) and
specifically its own reaction to liberal civil rights scholarship represents a much
greater responsiveness to history, context, relationality, ethics, narrative, lived
experience and thus, a memorial approach. While Williams supports the CLS
thesis on rights, she argues that instead of being discarded, rights should be
expanded and unlocked – freed up rather than enclosed. Rights rhetoric, or the
language of rights, should not be abandoned; instead we should ‘become
multilingual in the semantics of evaluating rights’.88 Robin West argues that
Williams undermines the CLS rights critique by showing how the history of racist
brutality is actually ‘one of a failure of rights commitment, rather than an excess
of rights assertion’.89 In essence, Williams argues that a much deeper problem
lies not with rights themselves but with the legal culture or ‘legal universe’ in which
they exist. Williams also seeks to emphasise how rights, meanings of rights and
their socio-political significance are experienced differently – something which
(the mainly white male leftist) CLS scholars did not pay sufficient attention to:
[W ]here one’s experience is rooted not just in a sense of illegitim acy but in being
illegitim ate, in being raped, and in the fear of being m urdered, then the black
adherence to a schem e of both positive and negative rights – to the self, to the
sanctity of one’s own personal boundaries – m akes sense.90

86
Harksen v Lane NO 1998 1 SA 300 (CC).
87
Gabel and Kennedy ‘Roll over Beethoven’ (1984) Stanford LR 33.
88
Williams The alchemy of race and rights (1991) 51.
89
West ‘Spirit murdering the spirit: Racism, rights, and commerce’ (1992) Michigan LR 1795.
90
Id 154.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 251

Williams’ articulation of the utopianism and social change inherent in rights

also fits in with Angela Harris’ suggestion that CRT should inhabit, and live within
the tension between modernist optimism (emancipation through law which is
normatively reconstructionist) and postmodern pessimism (radical critique of law
which is normatively deconstructionist).91 Rather than projecting the tension into
an image of balance and bringing it to finality, Williams and Harris suggest that
CRT should use that tension in ways that are creative rather than paralysing.
Such an approach is tentative and continuously open to transformation and
reimagining. It also prevents the slippage from memorial to monument
represented by the CLS critique of rights (‘trashing’)92 which can itself become
fixed and static and reified if it does not take into account difference and lived
experience in the way suggested by Williams:
To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true. Yet it is also true that
blacks believed in them so m uch and so hard that we gave them life where there
was none before; we held onto them , put the hope of them into our wom bs,
m othered them and not the notion of them . And this was not the dry process of
reification, from which life is drained and reality fades as the cem ent of conceptual
determ inism hardens round – but its opposite. This was the resurrection of life
from ashes four hundred years old. The m aking of som ething out of nothing took
im m ense alchemical fire – the fusion of a whole nation and the kindling of several
generations.
Williams urges a generous approach to human rights that is grounded
neither in a ‘misguided complacency with present liberal rights discourse, nor in
a resigned or bitter discontent’.93 It is a notion of rights imbued with a hope for,
and love of, community, transformation, affirmation of life, integrity of self, care
and concern and a refusal to exploit, violate, devalue, objectify and reduce.

3.4 Black invisibility

A central theoretical concern in CRT, and also in Africana philosophy and Black
existentialism and phenomenology is the notion of ‘black invisibility’.94 Its starting
point is that anti-black white supremacist racism espouses a notion of the world
that is predicated upon, and improved by, the absence/disappearance/fungibility
of Blacks.95 An enquiry , even if unstated, into how the structure of legal thought,
its tools, standards and traditions, reinforce the invisibility of Black people, their

91
Harris (n 2) at 743.
92
See Kelman ‘Trashing’ (1984) Stanford LR 293. See also: Gabel ‘The phenomenology of rights-
consciousness and the pact of the withdrawn selves’ (1984) Texas LR 1563-1599; Gabel and
Kennedy (n 87) 1-55; Tushnet ‘An essay on rights’ (1984) Texas LR 1363.
93
West (n 89) at 1796.
94
Gordon ‘Existential dynamics of theorising black invisibility’ in Gordon (ed) Existence in black: An
anthology of black existential philosophy (1997) 72.
95
Gordon ‘Introduction: Black existential philosophy’ in Gordon (ed) (n 94) 6.
252 (2012) 27 SAPL

experiences and needs stands central to any CRT critique of law. Monumental,
colour-blind and liberal approaches (taking either the form of judicial decisions,
legislative schemes or academic research), which I pointed out above could
reinforce this invisibility. Indeed Blacks have been rendered not just ‘invisible’ but
also voiceless by a society where white standards and beliefs are not only
accepted as the norm, but also falsely disguised, and uncritically perceived, as
neutral, objective and logical. This invisibility becomes more forceful and
pervasive when dressed up in the formal legitimacy of the law and its claims to
objectivity, race-neutrality and apolitical innocence. Richard Schmitt, reflecting on
the legacy of Fanon, argues that we should be less concerned with the questions
of whether the idea of ‘race’ is defensible or whether racism is an emotional,
neurological or intellectual defect. We should rather ask the question ‘what does
racism do to people’?96 In Fanon, according to Schmitt, the answer is simple:
racism objectifies – and exploits, confines, hardens and imprisons.97 Racism
denies freedom, forecloses the possibility of having genuine human relationships
and ‘makes man into a thing’.98 He outlines what he refers to as the many faces
of racism, namely: infantilisation; denigration; distrust; ridicule; exclusion;
scapegoating; violence; and rendering invisible. He writes that:
The excluded becom e invisible. Their concerns are unknown, their lives are of no
interest to anyone but them selves. A whole world becom es invisible behind the
dark skin. The culture of white Europeans is still universal. It is sim ply ‘western
culture’ or ‘culture’ without qualification.99
In law and legal theory, the invisibility described by Schmitt can take (and has
taken) numerous forms. Blacks are excluded, ignored and neglected in white-
dominated and white-made theories. We are alienated through strategies that
purport to take our perspective and view into account but which end up
marginalising or distorting the Black experience(s). Our social, economic and
cultural realities of difference, inequality and un-freedom are decontextualised by
whiteness masquerading as the universal and abstract norm. Blackness is placed
within dualisms that devalue black people or it is misrepresented by means of
naturalist accounts and meanings of race that are taken for granted. Narratives,
images and symbols about who we ‘are’ and can be are appropriated and
reversed, used by whites in ways that trivialise black activities and practices, and
turn us into inferior uncivilised stereotypical exotic natives. In this vein, the
constitutional transition and constitutional ideals themselves, as the outcome of
a formal technocratic negotiated settlement, need to be critically considered.

96
Schmitt ‘Racism and objectification: Reflections on themes from Fanon’ in Gordon et al (eds)
Fanon: A critical reader (1996) 35 (original emphasis).
97
See Fanon Black skin, white masks (1967).
98
Schmitt (n 96) 36.
99
Id 37.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 253

Martin Chanock exposes the inherent racism in the formation of South

African law and legal culture by describing the common law as an integral part of
white cultural nationalism and, ultimately, white supremacy.100 Chanock also
shows a connection between this racist legal culture with the formalism of most
lawyers, the judicial deference approach of judges who saw themselves as ‘above
politics’, the choice of liberalism as the central political ideology of the new order,
the continuation of global capitalist empire as well as a general insistence on ‘law
and order’ (the rule of law ideal).101 Most forcefully he argues that a new form of
colonisation took place in the 1990s, however, not by the Westminster system but
by the ‘Constitutional State’.102 The question of whether genuine transformation
(a radical change in the system and its subjects) as opposed to mere evolution
or formal change took place in 1994 continues to be posed.103 The answer to this
question will be found in the extent to which the new post-apartheid order undoes,
breaks away from, redefines and radically questions the assumptions and
premises upon which the apartheid system was based. This means that what we
view as ‘normal’ must be re-evaluated, and what some call (incorrectly to my
mind) the ‘substantive’ or ‘legal’ revolution of South Africa needs to be constantly
revisited through critical accounts like Chanock’s in order to prevent the invisibility
and disappearance of Blacks from the public space, and from the nation’s political
memory.

4.5 White backlash politics

W hen white people say ‘justice’, they m ean ‘just us’.104

The notion of ‘white backlash politics’ has been central to post-apartheid
legal and public race discourses, and it has even played itself out in Constitutional
Court decisions on affirmative action and restitutionary equality most prominently
in Walker105 and Van Heerden106 in which privileged white men brought claims of
unfair discrimination. Mbembe, under the heading ‘amnesia’ describes this white
backlash politics as follows:
It is one of the m any ironies of the 1994 ‘negotiated settlem ent’ that a large
num ber of white South Africans can sim ultaneously stigm atize the project of
‘transform ation’ and continue to feel entitled to their privileged position in society.
They are willing to fight for their constitutional rights, but they are not ready to

100
Chanock The making of the South African legal culture 1902 -1936: Fear, favour and prejudice
(2001) 527.
101
Id 512.
102
Id 518.
103
Cornell Transformations: Recollective imagination and sexual difference (1993) 1.
104
Black American aphorism quoted in the frontispiece of Mills The racial contract (1997).
105
City Council of Pretoria v Walker 1998 2 SA 363 (CC).
106
Minister of Finance v Van Heerden 2004 6 SA 121 (CC).
254 (2012) 27 SAPL

contem plate, and deal with, the accum ulated atrocities on which these privileges
rest.107
White backlash politics in essence describes the legal strategies, rhetorical
discourses and discursive habits, political mobilisation efforts, conscious and
unconscious practices, attitudes and mindsets by which whites seek to preserve
their interests and privileged status and justify the disproportionate disadvantage
suffered by Blacks. In South Africa, the ‘white backlash’ against non-racial
democracy comes in the form of language and cultural rights politics, claims of
unfair discrimination or reverse-racism against whites, the appropriation of
minority rights issues, purportedly principled calls for equal opportunity, colour-
blindness and merit, dismissive and accusatory discourses which disarm the
charge of racism (such as ‘playing the race card’; ‘my best friends are black’;
‘you’re being too sensitive’) as well as seemingly race-neutral concerns about
crime, corruption, failures in service delivery, and wasteful expenditure by
government. It characterises the political principles and policies of both
conservative, right wing pro-white organisations (such as the Freedom Front Plus,
AWB, and Afriforum) and also liberal-capitalist democratic formations dominated
by whites (such as the Democratic Alliance, and FW De Klerk Foundation). Also,
the main arguments put forward by this white backlash politics relies heavily on
the Constitution, the principle of non-racialism (often invoking the hypnotic names
of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) and rests primarily on the belief in formal
legal equality.
I do not wish to recount the extent of white privilege and the economic,
social, cultural dominance that is associated with whites and whiteness, suffice
to say that this is well-documented.108 I want to raise questions about how the
formalistic and neutral pretensions of law, and the complete disappearance of
reparations and its replacement by perfunctory redress measures, liberal
individualism and ‘socio-economic rights-talk’ machinates with the global system
of white supremacy that is central to white backlash politics to once again,
enslave, subordinate, impoverish, marginalise and render Blacks invisible. More
pertinently I am interested in why, in the aftermath of apartheid, many whites still
not only lack a critical self-awareness of their subject and group position, but they
also view that position as an unquestionable birthright. What does this say about
the challenges of post-apartheid being and becoming, about the possibilities of
new agencies and new subjectivities and a different way of living together in a
‘multicultural’ democratic ‘community’? Given the inherently conservative
enterprise that law is, and the racist heritage of the South African legal system,
the aspects of white backlash politics described above should come as no
surprise.

107
Mbembe (n 30) 12.
108
See, eg, Dei et al (eds) Playing the race card: Exposing white power and privilege (2004).
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 255

The self-centred, self-interested and privatist nature of this white backlash

politics is problematic because it encourages what Bell refers to as ‘racial bonding
by whites’ which ‘means that black rights and interests are always vulnerable to
diminishment if not outright destruction’.109 It reflects a white community struggling
to disavow the racist ethos of apartheid which deprived, and still deprives, all of
us of ethical human fellowship with one another. That liberal, legal and even
‘democratic’ explanations and justifications are available for use by white
backlash politics augments my cynicism about rights and distrust of law. It also
returns us to the dangers immanent in liberal human rights discourses and formal
constitutional guarantees which despite creating the illusion of substantive
change are seemingly incapable of effecting that change.

4 Concluding thoughts: Spectres of race

Charles Mills laments that in mainstream political philosophy, ‘race barely
exists’.110 The silence of race is as ‘as if nonwhites were on a separate planet
rather than very much a part of one world interconnected with and foundationally
shaped by the very region studied by First World theory’.111 He traces the problem
to what he refers to as an ‘exclusionary theoretical dynamic’ in which the
presuppositions and methodologies of existing canons and systems of knowledge
‘offer no ready point of ingress, no conceptual entrèe, for the issues of race,
culture and identity’.112 Race has become an afterthought in mainstream
philosophy, and also in legal theory. Mills notes that typically what one gets is ‘an
attempt to piggyback the problem of race onto the body of respectable theory’.113
Either liberals view racism as a violation of liberal individualist ideology or Marxists
explain race and racism within a Marxist paradigm. He writes that ‘one starts from
a pre-existing conceptual framework ... and then tries to articulate race’ within this
framework.114 Following the example of feminist theory’s use of gender, Mills
suggests that ‘we place race at center stage rather than in the wings of theory’.115
So rather than starting with some theory and then smuggling in race, we should
begin with the fact of racial subordination. That way race is treated as a political
system and mode of domination with its own ‘specific norms for allocating benefits
and burdens, rights and duties; its own ideology; and an internal, at least semi-
autonomous logic that influences law, culture and consciousness.’116

109
Mbembe (n 27) 9.
110
Mills Blackness visible: Essays on philosophy and race (1998) 97.
111
Mills (n 110) 97.
112
Ibid.
113
Id 98.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid.
116
Ibid.
256 (2012) 27 SAPL

In the introduction, I echoed Mills’ concern about the silence of race in the context
of South African jurisprudence. I noted a similar ‘exclusionary theoretical dynamic’
at work in South African law and legal scholarship – including within ‘critical’ and
‘progressive’ circles.117 I advocated the move towards post-apartheid critical race
jurisprudence on the basis of two underlying premises. The first being that CRT
distances itself from traditional (liberal, conservative, formalist) beliefs about both
law and race which necessarily places it in opposition to the entire South African
legal culture and post-apartheid legal order. The second is that, contrary to
colour-blind, race-neutral and post-racial ideologies, race is still a defining feature
of the South Africa’s (post-)apartheid polity and reality. While South Africa,
through its Constitution and the establishment of a liberal democratic multicultural
political order, has seemingly rejected white supremacy as a ‘normative vision’,
this rejection has not been tethered to a transformative social commitment to
eradicate the substantive conditions of Black suffering and racial subordination.118
Because South Africa was, for over 350 years, organised expressly around white
supremacist principles, it cannot simply cease to be white supremacist through
a formal declaration of racial equality and non-racialism. Thus South Africa
remains white supremacist due to the institutional momentum and systemic
replication of white supremacist values and practices in the spheres of culture,
language, epistemology, political economy, social standards and especially law.
As Mills writes:
[a] case can be easily m ade that white suprem acy continues to exist in a different
form , no longer backed by law but m aintained through inherited patterns of
discrim ination, exclusionary racial bonding, cultural stereotyping, and differential
white power deriving from consolidated econom ic privilege.119
Correspondingly the more we remain oblivious to its continuance, the deeper
it will sink into the roots of the ‘post’-apartheid constitutional order, which will in
turn normalise and preserve it.
To stress the theoretical centrality of race, I began by ‘recalling’ race with
reference to Bell’s observations on American race discourse in the post-slavery era,
and, through Mbembe, compared these to the racial politics of ‘post’-apartheid
South Africa. Both contended that while the private and public face of racism had
changed, it remained nevertheless prevalent – and thereby demonstrated the

117
I do not claim that no critical or progressive legal scholar in South Africa has ever mentioned race
in their writings, but rather that race does not feature prominently or independently in South African
legal scholarship. The few works that do mention race explicitly either do not identify it as or draw
upon CRT, or they are the antithesis (or a distortion) of the approach to race proffered by CRT.
Legal writing in South Africa, including critical legal writing, is marked by a severe absence of race
as a serious area of study and engagement.
118
Crenshaw ‘Race, reform and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination
law’ (1988) 101 Harvard LR 1336.
119
Mills (n 110) 102.
Towards a ‘(post-)apartheid’ critical race jurisprudence 257

failures and shortcomings of constitutional legal reforms, especially ones deter-

mined and structured by liberalism, capitalism and conservative legalism. I then
spent some time considering the argument that the ending of racism and the
achievement of racial justice and equality necessitated a challenge to and problem-
atisation of whiteness and white privilege.120 Following McIntosh, I concluded that
the end of racism is innately connected to the end of white privilege. Following Vice,
I concluded that the oppression and moral damage that characterised apartheid
have rendered the constitutional ideals of non-racialism, racial equality and justice
incomplete, and perhaps even unattainable. I thereafter reflected on a few themes
which could animate more thinking on race and law. I defended a race-conscious
standpoint in legal critique and analysis and a radical political interpretation of the
concepts ‘racism’ and ‘white supremacy’ that focuses on structural power and
systemic oppression. I supported a memorial, in contrast to a monumental,
approach to race and constitutionalism. I proposed ‘black invisibility’ as one starting
point for contemplations on race. Finally, I described ‘white backlash politics’ as one
of the major barriers to the transformation and reconstruction of the South African
public space, and as a negative obstacle to the project of post-apartheid being and
becoming.
If it was not clear in the tone and flow of this article, I should mention that I
situate the project of a post-apartheid critical race jurisprudence within the general
concern with the notion of a ‘post-apartheid jurisprudence’, and with critical legal
perspectives on post-apartheid law.121 In the context of the present configuration of
a South African CRT, apartheid is not cast as over and complete, but rather as a
‘returning past’ or ‘continuous present’. The ‘post’ in post-apartheid does not signal
the end of apartheid, but the delayed beginning of that end, the struggle to become
post-apartheid, a moment continually deferred. Post-apartheid jurisprudence, like
critical race theory, is a jurisprudence of rupture, rather than continuity, of
disruption, rather than normality, of the margins, rather than the mainstream, of the
ordinary, rather than the spectacle, and of un-decidability rather than predictability.
It involves an opening, not a closing or settling of, the many tensions, histories and
complexities of ‘race’ in our daily lives.
Race is indeed a global obsession. With a dark history steeped in racist
ideologies and laws, issues of race have divided South African society since its
creation and yet they remain both inescapable and obligatory to all our
conversations and discourses. The legal, political and cultural systems of this
country can never be immune from the past, present and future effects of anti-
black racism and oppression. In fact they have only served to amplify and

120
See Delgado ‘The current landscape of race: Old targets, new opportunities’ (2006) Michigan LR
1271 where it is said: ‘White privilege ... demands the serious attention of every race scholar’.
121
See Van Marle ‘Reflections on post-apartheid being and becoming in the aftermath of amnesty:
Du Toit v Minister of Safety and Security’ (2010) Constitutional Court Review 347.
258 (2012) 27 SAPL

perpetuate the destructive and violent nature of racism.122 As the introduction

alludes, the purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of critical race
theory in the South African post-apartheid context. However, behind this
academic and theoretical discussion are the real and concrete lives (and deaths),
experiences and histories of black people, which cannot be contained or
catalogued by any theory, ideology or doctrine. It is they who are the betrayed,
forgotten and unseen. It is they who cry out ‘what happened to the promised
land?’123 and ask aloud ‘where have all the rainbows gone?’.124 It is they who
haunt ‘post’-apartheid South Africa. As with Jacques Derrida’s spectre/ghost, to
write black people’s lives into the metaphor of the ghost, which remains ‘beyond
being’ and yet ‘which never dies’, is to do so ‘in the name of justice’.125 The
apartheid past and its continuing reach into the lives of South Africans also
symbolises the Derridean ghost: ‘it remains always to come and to come back’.126
It is this dark ghostly presence that shall leave us with haunting inequalities and
with a haunting-in-equality, haunting injustices and a haunting-in-justice. But it is
also a spectre, a debt and a demand, that shall one day re-turn, and keep
returning. For as Derrida writes, ‘[t]he ghost begins by coming back’.127
Like the m onum ent with its cracks exposed, we are left with what I see as a
haunting (in)equality – every act of equality will be haunted by its own exclusions.
This is also a haunting from within. The haunting, the com ing back of the
forgotten, the cracks on the wall represent the call of the political and of a radical
politics that continues to trouble the liberal im agination, constitutional optim ism ,
hum an rights activism ... and other attem pts to evade politics, responsibility,
judgem ent and ultim ately the call for justice.128

122
McMorris ‘Critical Race Theory, cognitive psychology, and the social meaning of race: Why
individualism will not solve racism’ (1998-1999) 67 University of Missouri-Kansas City LR 695.
123
Gibson (n 69).
124
Gqola ‘Where have all the rainbows gone?’ (2004) Rhodes Journalism Review 6-7.
125
Derrida Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international
(1994) xix.
126
Id 99.
127
Id 10.
128
Van Marle ‘Haunting (in)equalities’ in Hunter (ed) Rethinking equality projects in law: Feminist
challenges (2008) 146.