Locked in Systemic Racism

The argument of this chapter is that the key exclusionary mechanisms of the apartheid era which worked to put and keep systemic racism in place, and that operated in favour of the white moral community, have not been fundamentally challenged by the new public policies that have been formulated and pursued by the African National Congress-led government. Rather, the key mechanisms that make for a racist society have been re-articulated and remain locked in place to ensure that the cumulative advantages generated for white people are not only almost seamlessly self-perpetuated but also deepened through the ostensibly non-racial abstractions of liberal-legalist thought attached to the state, the economy, and the law. The conventional form of a liberal democratic constitutional state that upholds formal equality under the rule of law and a market economy is not in and of itself an adequate antidote to systemic racism—if anything, it has come to provide a legitimate shell for the continuing perpetuation of racial inequality and racial injustice.