Apartheid historiography avoided defining race, treating it as residual or given

Evidence

Perhaps the most remarkable theoretical feature of this debate was the failure to engage the question of what “race” actually is, either in general theoretical terms or as an historical reality under apartheid. On the Marxist side, the concept of race was never explicitly defined; but tacitly, it became the signifier of all that was “not class,” in a debate which in fact confined itself - both empirically and theoretically - to a cluster of concerns about “class.” On the liberal side, scholars of apartheid tended overwhelmingly to take the realities of race and racism as given, the burden of analysis falling on showing how these features of the apartheid system supported Afrikaner nationalist political causes and ambitions. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 574

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on social constructionism vs biological essentialism, and to debates elsewhere about how scholarship sidesteps defining its central analytic categories. — connects to: Class-centered apartheid scholarship treated race’s relative autonomy as conceded but never analyzed. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 571; Apartheid scholarship defined race negatively as whatever is not class, never positively. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 574