Apartheid intensified inherited colonial categories rather than inventing them anew.

Evidence

In the parish of Aquin, where the Raimond family lived, there was a remarkable surge in the free-colored population not because of a baby boom or migration, but because administrators began applying racial terms where they had not done so before. Individuals and families were in effect transformed from white to mulatto or quadroon. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Such commissions, as we shall see in chapter 5, were also consummate producers of social kinds. The European Pauperism Commission of 1901 reassigned clusters of people for state scrutiny and in so doing wrote, revised, and overwrote what was to count in ascribing race. Ways of living were congealed into “problems,” subject persons were condensed into ontological categories, innocuous practices were made into subjects of analysis and rendered political things. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183 (#expands, via linked claim)

The focus on the relationship between apartheid and capitalism signaled the consensus that lay at the heart of the debate, that the key to understanding apartheid lay at the interface of political and economic processes. So the research generated by this debate tended to say little, if anything, about racist institutions and practices which seemed more remote from the capitalist nexus. Even if the “relative autonomy of race” was acknowledged (and at times, stressed), there was little interest or effort made to unpack it. Due note was taken of the formidable battery of apartheid laws and regulations concerned directly with the official construction and surveillance of racial differentiation and segregation: the Population Registration Act (1950), the Group Areas Act (1950), which created residentially segregated “group areas” along racial lines, the Immorality Act (1950), which prohibited sex across racial lines, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953), which segregated access to a range of public facilities. But these mechanisms of control were regarded as descriptive features of the political landscape, the backdrop against which analysis took place, rather than a focus of research interest in themselves (e. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 571 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: State racism operates pragmatically rather than from coherent durable ideology.; Capitalist labor demand contradicts South Africa’s categorical containment strategy. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 570; Colonial commissions actively produced racial social categories rather than describing them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183 (+2 more)

Related

• Colonial commissions actively produced racial social categories rather than describing them. (similarity 0.84)
• The race-class paradigm treated apartheid’s legal machinery as backdrop rather than research object (similarity 0.81)
• Apartheid naturalized race rhetorically while shifting racial categories to serve white self-interest. (similarity 0.80)
• Apartheid unified all whites as beneficiaries, not just Afrikaners, beyond mere demographic expediency (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Racial categories were administratively imposed rather than biologically fixed #corroborates (0.85) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 216
• Colonial commissions actively produced racial social categories rather than describing them. #expands (0.82) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 183
• The race-class paradigm treated apartheid’s legal machinery as backdrop rather than research object #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 571