South African academia neglected the study of race despite its omnipresence

Evidence

It is highly paradoxical then, that for many scholars surveying the academic literature on apartheid, one of its biggest gaps is an engagement with the nature of race itself: “there must be very few places in the academic community which has actively neglected the study of race to the same extent as in South Africa” (Greenstein, 1996:5). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 547

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the well-known irony that race scholarship often neglects whiteness and the theoretical nature of race; mirrors critiques of ‘colourblind’ academia elsewhere. — connects to: The most race-saturated society hosted an academy that neglected studying race itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 547; 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; Race-focused research on apartheid is recent and still early-stage — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 595
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 547