Apartheid as Systemic Racism

The key argument put forward in this chapter is that apartheid must be interpreted as constituting a form of systemic racism. What is drawn out here is that Hendrik Verwoerd’s apartheid blueprint was such that it presented an overall structure of race-based categorical exclusion that was closely tied to the dominant white racial frame of South African society, and which comprised social closure mechanisms that ensured differential access to land, housing, education, and work, such that considerable material and existential advantages accrued to white people whilst African people were consigned to lives that mattered less. Sociologically speaking, it is maintained that in practice these mechanisms were so interlinked that they locked in place a cumulative structure of advantage for white people against a structure of concentrated disadvantage for African people. It is also shown how the apartheid blueprint was built on the foundations of the earlier segregationist-era, how it came to be enacted through legal statutes, and how it took on such an overwhelming force that its systemic dynamics remain operative to this day.