Post-apartheid growth produced extreme racial wealth stratification despite formal color blindness

Evidence

Wealth has spiraled in South Africa in the last decade, supported by a sustained economic expansion, all the challenges notwithstanding. Relatively more people are wealthier, and more have entered the middle class. But as wealth has expanded, the gap between wealthy and poor has exploded. South Africa is now second only to Brazil in negative income distribution. And that gap is racially revealing for a state supposedly paying almost no formal heed to race. While the income gap initially narrowed between black and white, perhaps unsurprisingly given the ending of color bars on employment possibilities and the contested stress on affirmative action, it has grown again in recent years and it has exacerbated dramatically among black people. As a small percentage of black entrepreneurs have acquired enormous wealth, the overwhelming percentage of blacks have been driven more precipitously into deeper poverty. The official unemployment rate runs just short of 25 percent, but it is closer to double that in some township and rural areas inhabited exclusively by black residents and where the HIV infection rate more or less matches the unemployment rate in the area. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1600

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader research on racial neoliberalism and the argument that formal color-blindness masks racialized outcomes. — connects to: Black economic inequality relative to whites remained structurally fixed across multiple decades — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 3351
• SEED: Angle: ‘when more means less’ — post-apartheid South Africa as a textbook case where economic growth dissolved rather than narrowed racial inequality, relevant to any discussion of meritocratic myths.