Anti-apartheid leftists avoided race talk because the state owned that language

Evidence

The tendency to steer clear of the subject of race was also intertwined with the politics of nonracialism on the left. With the language of race being the language of the apartheid state, the dominant tendency amongst apartheid’s critics was to position themselves as advocates of nonracialism. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 578

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader pattern of how dominated groups abandon categories co-opted by oppressive regimes — parallels debates about ‘colorblindness’ post-civil-rights in the US.
• SEED: Article angle: when the oppressor owns the vocabulary, do the oppressed strengthen themselves by abandoning it or by reclaiming it?