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the dream
realising
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Unlearning the logic of race
in the South African school
Crain
Soudien
the dream
realising
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iii
Unlearning the logic of race
in the South African school
Crain
Soudien
the dream
realising
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Published by HSRC Press
Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa
www.hsrcpress.ac.za
First published 2012
ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2380-6
ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2381-3

ISBN (e-pub) 978-0-7969-2382-0
© 2012 Human Sciences Research Council
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily
reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’)
or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication,
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Contents
Tables vi
Foreword vii
Preface xi
Acknowledgements xiv
Abbreviations and acronyms xv
Introduction ‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’ 1
1 Social difference and its history 31

2 The obdurate nature of race 54
3 Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity 81
4 The racial nature of South African schooling 96
5 Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools 126
6 The asymmetries of contact in the South African school 158
7 Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools 175
8 The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa 193
9 Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against
history 225
10 Thinking and living our way forward 240
References 247
Index 261
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vi
Tables
Table 5.1 Extent of changes in selected schools in five provinces
(percent) 139
Table 5.2 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in formerly race-based
schools (per cent) 139
Table 5.3 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in public and independent
schools (per cent) 140
Table 5.4 Learner demographic profiles 140
Table 5.5 African learners in selected KZN schools (per cent) 141
Table 9.1 High schools by performance in Senior Certificate
(Grade12) mathematics 228
Table 9.2 UCT graduation rates, for cohort commencing studies in
2006 and graduating in 2009 (per cent) 229
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vii
Foreword
No one could have foreseen the many and complex ways in which racial
integration in schools would unfold in the wake of the long period of
colonialism and apartheid from which South Africa emerged in the 1990s.
Those who studied schools quickly recognised the difference between
desegregation and integration. Researchers discovered ways in which social
class recast race and the racial experience inside schools. A few found that
the walls of schools were highly permeable, as powerful experiences gained in
cities, townships, homes, churches, peer groups, youth political organisations
and other forming influences carried seamlessly into the ways race took on
meaning inside institutions formally established for learning. Others found
dominant cultures subduing incoming cultures and, at times, not without
the ready participation of the newcomers seeking mobility in a country and a
world that privileged particular languages, customs and ways of thinking. For
those who studied schools, the many faces of school integration required new
and courageous theorising that went beyond the application or borrowing of
well-trodden concepts and methods from other settings.
Enter Realising the Dream and it will not surprise the reader that Crain
Soudien is regarded as South Africa’s foremost theorist of school education.
Trained in the sociology of education and with an impressive exposure to
leading thinkers in comparative and international education, Soudien brings
into conversation some of his, and others’, most important writings on race,
class and education since the early 1990s to track the ways in which race,
especially, takes its meanings in the experiences of post-apartheid schooling.
The versatility of the author in drawing on a vast range of conceptual frames
from post-colonialism through new race theories of school and society is
breathtaking. That said, Realising the Dream does not make for easy reading,
for it requires deep reflection and the revisiting of common sense in our
understanding of race, education and society.

This is tricky terrain. How, for example, does one talk about race without
assigning to it an essentialist and enduring meaning after apartheid? The book
takes on this dilemma squarely, and here the interaction between Soudien and
Paul Gilroy is especially illuminating in the recognition and deconstruction
of race. To take another example, how does the eloquence of theory and its
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languages capture the complexity it tries to describe? Here again the author is
brutally honest: ‘our theories will always fall short of the realities they seek to
encompass’. And how does one account for what appear to be progressive laws
and policies only to find them working against system-wide change to benefit
the poor and the disadvantaged? In response the author takes us through a
stunning array of cases of schools grappling with policy ‘on the ground’ and
gives an almost ethnographic sense of how things change, and stay the same.
In some ways the cases constitute the centre of the book, and anyone initiate
into schools research in this country who is looking for a ready collection and
bibliography of the major writings on race and education since the early 1990s
would find it neatly contained in this outstanding volume.
There is no voluntarism here, but a nuanced account of the choices we make
as politicians, policy-makers, parents and students. This sounds harsh, but
Soudien is right: ‘African parents, educators and learners were complicit’ in
what he calls the ‘structured exclusion’ of black children from the broader
social and academic achievements of the school. The question is, why? One
cannot dismiss the choices of black parents in favour of English, for example,
as simply a false consciousness; that would not only assume the researcher
has true consciousness, it is also just sloppy analysis. In a world that privileges
English as the language of access, opportunity and status, I find it patronising
for the black middle classes to insist that the poor honour mother-tongue
education while the well-off happily ensconce their own children inside the

cotton-woolled and polite English-medium schools.
But Soudien takes another brave step in this regard by not simply accounting
for black-into-white school integration but also throwing a critical eye
over that other difficult conversation: the ways in which African students
experience and appropriate education in former coloured and Indian schools,
and how all black students are included and excluded in former white
schools. The politics and economics are different depending on which cases
of integration you choose to focus on, and this is where even more research
needs to be undertaken.
This book is also a timely contribution since at the time of writing this
foreword High Court Judge Boissie Mbha decided that a former white school
in Johannesburg must admit a single black student on grounds that the school
cannot use its admission policy to exclude black students. The capacity of the
school, ruled the judge, rests with the government even though the admissions
policy might rest with the school governing body. However, on closer
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inspection the issue is much more complex. First, the school has an enrolment
of nearly 50 per cent black students already, so the exclusion argument is thin.
Second, the governing body has power over admissions – subject, of course,
to constitutional values – and this must be respected. Third, admissions serve
in part to determine how many – not only which – students to admit given a
set of educational goals (e.g., smaller, more manageable classes). The counter-
argument is raised in some detail in the Times of 15 December 2011.
My point is this: as schools become more integrated, at what point does
exclusion shift from numbers admitted to cultures recognised, from parent
control to government interference, from access to quality, from race to
cosmopolitanism? More importantly, how does human integration happen
inside schools in ways that embrace children, their histories, traditions, beliefs

and commitments, behind a powerful model of democratic education? This
surely must be the central question in deciding what the common project
should be around which we rebuild schools and society.
Soudien’s corresponding research programme demands lengthy descriptive-
analytical accounts of daily life in schools – of the Philip W. Jackson variety
on the hidden curriculum – but this book at least pushes us in that direction
with a guarded optimism revealed in the title, Realising the Dream, and, in a
memorable turn of phrase, a personal stinger: ‘Ways of being are not in our
blood’.
Here one of the challenges, recognised briefly by the author, is to trouble
whiteness a little more, and certainly beyond the dismissal of race-thinking
in schools as white supremacy, a charge so common in angry writing. What
about white woundedness, anxiety, fear and retreat? The white evil versus
black good narrative of history has run its course, and we need to ask new
questions about serious issues such as white guilt and what Chabani Manganyi
calls the ‘politics of the defeated’.
Take, for example, what has happened in many schools where integration
became resegregation, such as the case of an all-white school, nervously
embracing the project of open access, becoming an all-black school with low
education standards and brutal modes of discipline against pseudo-gangsters
on the playground. The most prominent media example of such a school is the
former J.G. Strydom High School, renamed Diversity High by the progressive
Afrikaner principal. The now black principal in a black school was caught
brutalising a black student, beating and kicking the child on the floor of his
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office. Is this the endgame for integration in working-class white schools like
Diversity High?
The related challenge offered by Soudien’s work is to explain how the ‘logic

of race’ manifests itself in white progressive politics compared to white
conservative politics and everything in between. And in this pursuit, the
comparison cannot be reduced to English versus Afrikaans school cultures.
Finally, in this regard what gives the logic of race such continued currency,
with all shades of the epidermis? The answers to these questions are not
all found in this book, but Realising the Dream is without doubt a reliable
launching pad for deeper inquiry along these lines.
The author will no doubt brace himself for a familiar criticism that in focusing
on integration the attention is limited to a small number of schools; sheer
race demographics imply that the vast majority of South African schools will
remain black. That is true, but some of us choose this focus because it is such
a powerful barometer of the state of race and race relations in our country, and
such a convenient place – replete with children – to try to foretell the future.
But here is an interesting challenge for the next generation of race research,
and a subject on which the author has advised in the anti-xenophobia film
on youth, Where Do I Stand? That is, how are children integrated – or not–
with respect to national origins, and with respect to various ethnicities
within the black community? We cannot ignore such studies because of
the obvious divide-and-rule ideology of apartheid that made many of us as
social and educational researchers not pay attention to what were then called
the inevitabilities of tribal conflict. Here too the conceptual table is laid by
Soudien for productive inquiry in these directions by focusing on how racial
identities are formed and deformed, and can in fact be reformed in school.
In the end, schools are about learning and the democratic project about
‘unlearning’, as Soudien puts it, the received logics of race. This is the task set
in this intriguing new book which every student teacher and teacher educator
alike must read.
Professor Jonathan Jansen
December 2011
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xi
Preface
This book comes out of an ongoing engagement with the issues of equality
and education. It was conceived as a text in the closing months of 2008, after
a conference in Adelaide, Australia, on the state of race and education. I used
the occasion of the meeting to develop an argument for why ‘race’ as an idea is
so ubiquitous, why it is so dangerous and why we have to discard it altogether.
While I had allies at the meeting, there was also resistance and puzzlement.
The resistance came from two sources. First was a response from a young
person who found the thought of having to give up her whiteness and the
standing that it represented completely nonsensical. Why did she have to give
up what clearly was so good for her? Why couldn’t others become like her? The
second response was different and was perhaps not even resistance. It came
from a group of people who were about to have their own global gathering of
indigenous peoples and who, understandably, thought they would find in us
and in our meeting a group of people who were sympathetic with and kindred
in their view of the world. They asserted a powerful sense of their own separate
identity. In an implicit rebuttal of what I was suggesting, the strategic point
they sought to make was that they could not sacrifice their own identities
at the very moment that a sense of their full historic dignity was possible.
They couldn’t and wouldn’t sacrifice their distinct identities – even for the
cause of dismantling white privilege. A version of this politics also produced
the puzzlement that circulated in the gathering. How was it possible to live
without race? The realities of ‘us’ and ‘them’ were too deep.
I learnt a great deal from this meeting in Adelaide. False as race is as an idea, it is
viscerally inscribed in our heads and in our bodies. I learnt how disorientating
the idea of ‘racelessness’ is, and that this disorientation disempowers people. I
came away from this experience sobered and want to thank all my colleagues
and friends who shared those few days with me. They may never know how

much I came to understand the importance of living in community and of
our dependence on one another. I want to insist, however, that a sense of
our community cannot be constructed simply on the basis of what we look
like. If it were, if we automatically and instinctively see ‘connection’ based on
similarities of our appearances, we would be crafting our world in the most
arbitrary of terms. It would be a world of whim, caprice and thoughtlessness.
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Our world has to be much more than that. We must make community more
deliberately. Values and conscious commitments must be the basis on which
we give our allegiances to one another. And, in many ways, it wasn’t race that
my colleagues in Adelaide were defending. They were defending a world of
meaning – another world. And it is this that we need to make clear as we think
of how we describe each other. I thank my colleagues for this stimulus.
More directly, many friends and members of my family have been extremely
helpful in getting this work ready for publication. It has been read in part or in
whole and commented on by Alan Wieder, Nita Hanmer, Mokubung Nkomo,
Zimitri Erasmus and Jonathan Jansen. I am grateful for all the help they have
provided. Alan was the first to see the text. As long ago as early 2009, I told
him that I had put the manuscript together and, as is his wont, he said, ‘Let
me see it’. And so I sent it off to him in Portland, Oregon, and month after
month he methodically sent me very helpful comments. Nita, my sister-in-law
in Sydney, Australia, read the next draft of the manuscript and was ruthless,
as a good editor should be. She cut through my verbiage, demanding clarity
and felicity of expression. She would sit at her desk surrounded by all the latest
dictionaries she could find and would say that ‘the Collins dictionary doesn’t
have this word. Please use another.’ I have tried hard to meet her exacting
standards. I know that my writing can be difficult and I appreciate how much
her editorial skill has improved the text.

To Mokubung, Zimitri and Jonathan, I extend my deepest thanks. You all have
been great comrades. I have appreciated having you just a phone call away. It
is a source of great comfort to know that we can just talk – about the difficult
things our country is going through but also about the endlessly wonderful
things that make this such an extraordinary place and time in which to live.
The intellectual affinity we have is very important to me. Indeed, I have come
to depend on it.
I also wish to thank the staff at the HSRC – Roshan Cader, Fiona Wakelin and
especially Inga Norenius. Roshan began the publication process with me and
then handed it over to Fiona and Inga. Out of this came an understanding of
what many who are experienced authors know but perhaps don’t talk about
sufficiently loudly: you cannot write a book by yourself. The HSRC appointed
a number of peer reviewers for the manuscript. These reviewers were
enormously helpful, providing an intellectual view of the text and sharp and
insightful comments that allowed me to refine and improve the presentation.
Inga then handed the manuscript over to an editor who subjected it to a line-
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xiii
by-line copy-edit, which further benefited the text. I would also like to thank
the designer for all her wonderful skill in producing the cover for the book.
Speaking of the cover, my daughter Carla worked with the initial thoughts I
had and came up with a great design concept. Thank you, Carla. The text used
on the cover comes from contacts all over the world and has come to generate
a series of minor linguistic debates. I asked friends and colleagues around the
globe to translate the title Realising the Dream into languages with which they
were familiar. My request stimulated a flurry of questions and responses, often
with people asking to see the manuscript so that they could render an accurate
translation of the title. My great thanks to you all for the effort and kindness
you put into this.

And, of course, it needs to be emphasised that notwithstanding all of this help,
any problems that remain with the text are mine alone.
Finally, a few people make my life many times more manageable than it would
be without them. Ingrid, Jenny, Amie, Carla and Lyn, I am grateful for your
love and support.
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xiv
Acknowledgements
Some of the chapters in this book are revisions of previously published
journal articles. The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the
following publishers for permission to include them here.
•
Southern African Comparative and History of Education for Chapter 3,
which is a revision of ‘Creolisation, education and identity’ in the Southern
African Review of Education 2 (2002), pp. 5–17.
•
Faculty of Education, University of the Free State for Chapters 4 and 8,
which draw on an article co-authored with Yusuf Sayed, ‘A new racial
state: Exclusion and inclusion in education policy and practice in South
Africa’ in Perspectives in Education 22 (4) (2004), pp. 101–115.
•
Taylor & Francis for Chapter 6, which is a revised version of ‘The
asymmetries of contact: An assessment of 30 years of school integration in
South Africa’ in Race, Ethnicity and Education 10 (4) (2007), pp. 439–456.
•
John Wiley & Sons for Chapter 7, which is a revision of ‘The
reconstitution of privilege: Integration in former white schools in South
Africa’ in Journal of Social Issues 66 (2) (2010), pp. 352–366.
Chapter 5 is a revision of ‘ “Constituting the class” An analysis ofthe

process of “integration” in South African schools’, which waspublished in
L. Chisholm (2004) Changing class: Education andsocial change in post-
apartheid South Africa, Cape Town: HSRCPress.
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xv
Abbreviations and acronyms
ANC African National Congress
DET Department of Education and Training
HIV/AIDS human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency
syndrome
HOA House of Assembly
HOD House of Delegates
HOR House of Representatives
NED Natal Education Department
SASA South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996)
SGB school governing body
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1
Introduction
‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’
For a long time South Africans believed that South Africa was the most
important country in the world. Colonial rule followed by apartheid embodied
incomprehensible evil. On the South African people lay a special burden – that
of exemplifying for the world what it meant to oppose the depredations of
the heart and the soul. Giving this self-perception weight was the extensive
exposure the country enjoyed in the international media: Nelson Mandela’s

stoic composure in the face of his relentless humiliation, its people’s willingness
to forgive. South Africans were a chosen people.
Looking back at this attitude, one cannot help but remark on its naïveté
and its narcissism. As naïveté it betokened a simple lack of awareness of the
complexity of world politics. As narcissism it came down to a conceit that the
South African question deserved political and moral eminence over all other
human rights indignities anywhere else in the world. With South Africa’s
readmission into the international community after 1994, it quickly became
clear that while apartheid and racism were reprehensible (they remain so),
they were by no means of greater (or lesser) scale than that of many other
conflicts and cases of inhumanity taking place in other parts of the world.
For somewhat different reasons, almost two decades after becoming a
democracy, the question of South Africa’s importance for the world is back
on the agenda. South Africa is once more a place of global interest. Questions
have been raised about the success of the post-apartheid project and about the
country’s capacity to deal with the basic human entitlements of dignity, safety,
shelter and the right to adequate health and education. In this new context it
can be argued that South Africa presents itself as an important focus of global
attention. Deserved as the questions are about the success of its so-called great
miracle – the avoidance of a racial bloodbath and the achievement of a form of
reconciliation between its erstwhile enemies – there are more serious reasons
for why the country merits international attention. Chief among these is that
South Africa is one of the world’s major social laboratories.
What makes it such an important laboratory?
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R EA L I S I NG T H E DR E A M
2
The central significance of South Africa is that it poses the question of being,
of ontology, the capacity to feel, to know and to be aware of oneself, with an

intensity not easily matched elsewhere in the world. What it means to be a
human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of one’s rights
and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the
right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right
to others – is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and
complexity rarely found in modern history. The question is simultaneously
philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter,
ontological and practical in its nature.
With respect to the ontological nature of the question, there are two great
puzzles that living in South Africa and being a South African throw up.
The first, in the maelstrom of everyday South African life, with all its racial,
gendered and classed sound and fury, is about how one holds on to and
cultivates a sense of one’s humanity. How does one cultivate the capacity,
as Foucault (2001: 10) explains, not simply to know oneself, but to actually
take care of oneself? Particularly for those who find themselves in a middle
class which believes that it can do without the ‘other’ and that the ‘other’ is
a category which is not material for its own survival, how does one come
to understand the full complexity of one’s personal and social history? The
second puzzle has to do with how this capacity to care for oneself might
come to include and be premised upon an unqualified appreciation of the
humanness of all those ‘other’ to oneself. How does this sense of ‘care’ come
to include the awareness that one’s well-being is completely dependent on the
well-being of others, others upon whom one will inevitably have to call when
one’s imagined self-sufficiency – materially and in terms of well-being of the
mind – is shown to be impossible? And critically, beyond the limited circles of
imagined ontological autonomy – however those who find themselves in this
situation understand their ability to live without others – how does one install
this sense into the South African psyche?
These issues are significant for a number of reasons. They are significant in
so far as South Africans, like people elsewhere in the world, have the obvious

challenge of comprehending the reality of their social interdependence. But
there is an intensity to these issues that sets South Africa apart. I argue in this
book that this intensity is simultaneously social and individual. We as South
Africans have the extraordinary privilege of our pasts, our contemporary
experiences and our futures all coming together in such a way that we cannot
evade the great question that has faced many great societies in the past: what
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I NT R O DU C T I O N
3
kind of human beings do we wish to be? In facing this question we face our
history, tradition and culture as they take expression in ‘raced’, gendered
or classed ways and are asked how we will build a future for ourselves as
individuals and together as a society that is fair and just. We have here the
wonderful challenge, not only of how we will live together as people, but also of
how we will develop our individual capacities and gifts beyond all the limiting
prohibitions that our varied histories and legacies throw in front of us. It is
how we manage our freedom as individuals and, at the same time, demonstrate
the capacity to live with each other that is important. This is the promise we
as a society represent. We have the opportunity here of demonstrating how
we might take real joy in the endless differences which make us human and
of showing that we realise that our differences are the resource upon which
the survival of the human race depends. It is in realising that we resolve our
differences, whatever they might be, and celebrate our achievements in very
similar ways that our oneness as a human race is asserted. For that we should
rejoice. We express sadness, relief, expectation and humility in very similar
ways. How then do we sublimate secondary calls on our identity, such as the
claims that culture makes on us, to the greater ideal of our common humanity?
These questions lead logically to the question of what an inclusive ontology
premised on the idea of a common humanity might look like. What is the

content of a modern self-aware ontology? To put the question in ordinary
terms, how does a human being live his or her life in a state of full awareness
of his or her individual rights and the rights of others around him or her?
Should a question such as this have limits? This book is not about ontology.
Perhaps it should be. That, unfortunately, has to be left for another time.
But the reason for emphasising ontology is that the world finds itself in a
constrained time. The general rule for how people should live – the ways
in which they should manage themselves and their relationships with one
another and to what they should look forward – is dominated by the example
provided by Europe and North America. Europe and North America, through
the historical role of Europe in the colonies and the domination of the United
States on the world stage, have come to supply the world with the guidelines
for how it should be conducting itself. At the individual level this comes
down to prescribing behaviour, relationships and the life-determining choices
people should be making. This is the ontological example that the dominance
of the ‘north’ represents. It has come to supply the central narrative of being,
of what it means to be human, especially in the way in which one engages the
relationship between subjectivity and truth. The full history of this discussion
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R EA L I S I NG T H E DR E A M
4
and particularly how it inflects identity is crucial. I undertake an exploratory
analysis of this in Chapter 3 of this book. The reason for raising this issue
here, however, is to emphasise that the European example of what it means to
be a human being is by no means the last word on the matter – the events of
just the last 100 years in Europe and particularly the horrors of the First and
Second World Wars are testimony of this – and that South Africa represents
an opportunity for rethinking the questions of ‘how-to-be’ and how human
beings can ‘be-together’ in ways that few other societies in the world are doing.

To highlight the significance that South Africa represents, this book is written
in a deliberately reflective way. It seeks to address whether the self-limiting
prejudices of everyday South African life can be broached and then bridged to
make it possible for South Africans to live beyond the destructive appeals of
their exclusionary pasts and whether they can imagine a future in which the
value of being human is primary. The question is at one level what has been
called the national question. But it is so only in a strategic and not an essentialist
sense. I am not interested in a project of nationalism, but I do seek to understand
how the histories which purport to explain the discourses of self and other can
be surfaced, faced and engaged with, for the purpose of realising the dream of
our common humanness and of our simple equality that this entails, despite my
awareness of the factors which stand in the way of this realisation.
I come to this question of realisation of our potential as a sociologist of
education and as a scholar interested in those things of the everyday that, on
the one hand, attract and seduce us and, on the other, repel and disgust us –
our comfort and/or discomfort in atavism, in rituals of form, including birth,
death, sexuality, the rites of passage to manhood and womanhood – and ask
what these do to our capacity to actually see and embrace the wonder of our
infinite differences. I am regularly and repeatedly inspired as I come across
people who have a real sense of awe and respect for what makes human beings
so different but yet utterly and fully human. I am inspired by the desire in them
to find the potential in others and the passion they have to enhance the ability
in us to expand our sense of responsibility for each other. I am also dismayed
by the proclivity within many of us to tear down and to denigrate and to see
others through lenses of conceit and superiority. These qualities of desire and
repulsion constitute the heart of the human condition. I want to suggest that
their South African variations, the configurations that they take here, in their
concentration and breadth and depth of social difference, make the country
worthy of attention and possibly even a ‘special case’.
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South Africa: another way of seeing it
Conventional accounts of South Africa present it as a long-range racial
project. Most histories of the country begin with the fateful meeting between
the seafaring Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires and the indigenous
peoples of South Africa. The general style in which this encounter is narrated
is that of ‘high’ civilisation encountering the ‘primitive’ periphery of the
world. I approach the question differently in this book and suggest that the
binary representation of this encounter – of a homogenised, civilised white
and European identity on the one side and a childlike, simple and immature
Africa on the other side – is inadequate. I shift the discussion to focus on the
common experiences of what being human is all about.
The approach I take is to argue that the question of what it means to be human
in South Africa is obviously shaped by our history but that this history is about
a great deal more than race. The substance of our humanity is an immense
psychosocial question and arises directly out of how we as South Africans have
conquered and subjugated each other; our migration into, out of and around
spaces we have declared to be ours and only ours; our rights and abilities to settle
and build livelihoods on the landscape and the violent removal from us of our
rights to these; our habitation of and displacement from spaces; our conceits of
superiority and inferiority in all their inflections – racial, class, gender, sexual,
culture, language, age, religion and tradition; our notions of what is valuable
about our pasts, our narratives of who we are, our yearnings for progress and a
new future; our desires to heal our divisions and, crucially, our intense desire to
be safe from the ravages of crime and violence; and finally, our confusion about
why we should be dying as young people when our whole futures are supposed
to lie ahead of us. South Africa is a country which is simultaneously about
integration and segregation, tradition and modernity, being safe and unsafe,

being well and unwell, and which brings these all together into an ensemble of
inexpressible tragedy and beauty, a country which is almost unique as a space
in which people are called upon to be human. The intensity of being fully alive
– awake – in the deepest human sense is an experience that South Africa makes
important. The United States, in a different combination of these issues, is one
society where a similar intensity is evident, but even it has not had to deal with
the ever-present existential sense of malaise and possibility which has come to
both afflict and bless South Africa.
While I begin this discussion with an appeal to complexity, I do want to
emphasise how crucial the race discussion is to the country’s future. Complex
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and multifaceted as South Africa is, it has had to deal with the extraordinary
social reality that one part of its story, race, has literally devoured all its
contiguous social narratives. Race has come to vacuum out the salience of
the social, cultural, economic and psychological density of many people’s
life stories, both as individuals and in the solidarities and affinities they
have created for themselves, and replaced it with the single logic of their
racial identities. Race has come to assume the special status in South Africa
of a master signifier. A signifier is the physical form that a word or term or
concept takes on. Race as a master signifier is held up and invoked explicitly
and implicitly – the often ineffable ‘elephant in the room’ – to explain the
mundane to the mysterious, from the carriage of a ‘white’ man in a social
space of diverse people to the distress of crime in the streets and suburbs of the
country. Most critical about race as a signifier, even in denying its salience–
apartheid is over, it is said – is what it actually activates in conversations
between people and in their relationships with one another. I suggest that it
is rehabilitated and often silently validated in the unproblematised gestures of

recognition within and among discrete groups of people. The almost unique
practice of South Africans, even those presenting themselves as politically
progressive, of introducing themselves as ‘I am a white South African’ or ‘I
am a black South African’ speaks to the insidiousness of the ideological hold
of race in the country and its psychologies of desire and comfort and shame
and unease. Meant as a statement of awareness of one’s privilege or, conversely,
one’s subordination, it has come to constitute a barrier to thinking beyond
the simple acknowledgement of one kind of positionality. The hegemony of
racial identity has made it extremely difficult for people to imagine and build
for themselves, as they do in racial terms, identities which take their points
of departure from senses of self which begin in the endless list of differences
which actually constitute who they are. Recently Helen Zille, the Premier of
the Western Cape, the country’s southernmost province, made the comment
at a conference that race had become what she called a ‘default identity’. She
asked how this could be when we held so many different identities: ‘why
should we default to race?’
1
The point she made is an anti-essentialist one. Our
identities are not essentially this or that. As much basic sociology now routinely
explains, as human beings we have multiple identities, but we simplistically,
almost everywhere in the world, reduce all of the complexity embodied in our
multiplicity to the singular factor of race. This is what essentialism is.
Another reason for working with race is to emphasise to and for ourselves how
much it is a learnt value. As a master signifier, race is approached by many of
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us with a sense of the sacred, even when we seek to reject it. It is unspeakably
important – especially for those of us who live in South Africa and the United

States but, actually, virtually everywhere in the world. In looking around us, it
is the basis on which we make sense of space and the physical environment.
We read our worlds through the lens of race. Its power is almost without
parallel in our relations with one another. Only the caste system in India
approaches anything like the hold it has on our imaginations.
And yet, as I seek to show in this book, race is something we have learnt. That
one has to say this after all these years of sensitivity training and the endless
workshops we have all attended around discrimination and how it works is
an incredible testament to its seductive appeal to our senses. As a sociologist
of culture, of learning, of how ideas come to settle in our imagination, I
cannot accept as real that which is patently not real in an empirical sense. It
is astonishing that the intellectual world which I inhabit can make such a fuss
about proof, warrant and the evidentiary base in how we make arguments
and yet not see how the phenomenon of race is an ideological smokescreen.
I stand squarely with Gilroy in saying that ‘the old, modern idea of “race”
can have no ethically defensible place’ (2000: 6). I take another step in this
text in expanding the bounds of our ethical imaginations. I suggest that it
is through education that we come to an awareness of the full possibility
of what it means to be human, and that this education is only fully realised
when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race and gender and indeed
all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt.
I acknowledge the awkwardness of the expression ‘unlearning the logic of
race’ that I use in the subtitle of this book, but suggest that it is central to
our becoming fully human. I argue that such an unlearning will release us
from the false captivity of imposed belief and flawed logic in which we find
ourselves and will allow us to come to be that which we consciously choose to
be, to make the communities we seek to build much more conscious ones – to
be fully awake. One is, therefore, only in a qualified or provisional way that
which society says one is, be it a member of this or that ‘tribe’, kin grouping or
community. One is not any of those things attributed to us in the primordial

sense. Ways of being are not in our blood.
It is from a desire for attaining this state of awakeness that the title of this book,
Realising the Dream, comes. The promise of education is fundamentally that of
bringing to sight that which ideology obscures. Awakeness as the other side of
dreaming is about bringing into reality that which is in our imaginations. We
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dream of a better world. Education has the capacity to make real, in our will
and desire, this possibility. Education is the deliberative act of working with
and in our consciousness in a way that is fully open. In its fullness it has to be
alert to everything. It is here that the promise of education lies. The promise
is that within us, as reasoning subjects, resides the capacity to engage with
obfuscation, with ideology and with mystery in all their wiles. I am enough
of a materialist, however, to recognise how much this process of engagement
is also a practical process of political and economic struggle. Education is
important in carrying out that struggle.
Race
The obfuscation, the ideology and the mystery of race are what I focus on in
this text. Race is a thing we have made up. Moore, Kosek and Pandian argue
that both race and nature are what they call historical artefacts, ‘assemblages
of material, discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essence…Nature
appears to precede history, even as it wipes away the historical traces of its
own fashioning’ (2003: 2–3). The genetics discussion is important because
it has brought us to a point where the singularity of the human race and its
indivisibility is now beyond question. This is real. We have the empirical
evidence for it. The significance of the human genome is that it has shown how
genes have travelled and how population groups everywhere in the world can
be linked. We are all related.

Two challenges remain to the proposition of our connectedness. The first is in
the ways in which many geneticists continue to give modern sociological and
political descriptions to groups and individuals who lived during times when
these contemporary labels had no significance whatsoever (see Abu El Haj
2007). In the South African context, the description of particular groupings as
African, or more precisely as Khoisan, Indian, and so on, presents biological
histories in racialised terms. There are difficulties, of course. There is a
discussion among geneticists around labelling and social description, but there
is not sufficient awareness of the issues of sociology. Attributing modern labels to
ancient communities is incorrect. In southern Africa, for example, a significant
debate has begun about the Lemba, a group of people who live in Zambia and
Malawi whose cultural practices are very similar to those of the Jewish faith.
The question, are these people a long-lost Jewish tribe? has gone out. And in
deciding it, several rounds of genetic testing have been undertaken. The results
have been ambiguous. It is not, however, the ambiguity that is significant; it is
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the idea that biology-as-race is what ultimately counts. The biological nexus
will finally state whether they are ‘of the fold’ or not. In this view race and
biology are insistently conflated, and in the process the complexity of biology
itself is missed. Instead, it is reduced to the visible markers of pigmentation
and physiognomy, which geneticists repeatedly emphasise constitute less than
a single percentage point of one’s genetic make-up. The rest of a human being’s
biological complexity carries no social significance.
The reality, however, is that the ‘insignificant’ fraction of a per cent of our
genetic variation that we have come to acknowledge – the markers of colour,
nose and lip shape, hair – has come to be of great consequence. Such markers
have come to be real with real effects for many of us, and we should not for

a moment evade that truth about the value the world in which we live places
on our outward attributes. When we confront the reality that African people
remain at the bottom rung of the ladder of world opportunity, the provision
of services and the recognition of ability, talent, virtue, beauty and every other
human attribute we might think of, the very particular nature of this racism
must be faced squarely. The simple truth is that there is nothing inherent in
who or what the person deemed to be African is that predisposes him or her
to any kind of status at all. If we recognise this, and the enormity of it as a
cognitive event in our heads is great, we come to the realisation that it is the
‘thing’ behind the oppression or the exploitation which we need to be getting
at. That ‘thing’ is racism. What activates it, what material or psychological
interest it feeds off and promotes, is what we desperately need to come to terms
with. If we fail to do this, we then actually declare race itself a real thing.
How to counter racism strategically is, of course, contentious. This book argues
that education of the deep kind, one that refuses to work with symptomatic
expressions of reality – of what ‘things’ appear to be – is the most effective way
of achieving that goal. The book unapologetically holds on to the promise of
what our Enlightenment inheritance has sought to teach us: that as human
beings we are all capable of analytic thought and that we have among us a
variety of cognitive routes to apprehending and making sense of reality in both
superficial and deep ways. None of us, either as individuals or as members of
social groups, is automatically – because of who we supposedly are – superior
in the ways in which we live or think. The potential for the most sublime, or
indeed the most ridiculous, exists among us in equal measure. We can, in
these terms, become a post-racial world. Such a world already exists in small
circles and cells in and around us. Many of us are in it. We live it. The prize it
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