The race-class paradigm treated apartheid’s legal machinery as backdrop rather than research object

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader ‘intellectual frameworks shape what research deems worthy of study’ theme — the way a paradigm’s assumptions blind it to its own blind spots, echoing similar dynamics in Milgrom on what institutions research chose to see. — connects to: Apartheid intensified inherited colonial categories rather than inventing them anew.; The Marxist-led race-class debate reframed apartheid analysis around class while sidestepping race itself — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 556; 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