ABSTRACT
Racial identities in South Africa reflect a highly complex history of how people have
related to each other. They also illustrate how power has been used to validate different
identities, along a racial hierarchy that attached the most value to whiteness and the least
to black Africanness. These structural validations have played themselves out in everyday
interactions between people both in terms of how they are seen and how they see
themselves. In particular, this study draws on psychoanalytic literature to help to explain
the workings of race and the recalcitrance of racism. In South Africa, conceptualizations
of blackness and whiteness have dominated discourses on race and on racism. Set in
Cape Town, this study by contrast, focuses on coloured identities and how these are
experienced and understood particularly in relation to black Africanness. It uses
participants’ life histories to explore the workings of race and racism in coloured
households and communities, examining relations between family members in this regard
in particular. It illustrates the tensions that characterize coloured subjectivities especially
in the post-apartheid era, showing how coloured identities articulate themselves in
opposition, as well as in relation, to black Africanness. Importantly, this study reveals
how associations with black Africanness have threatened the security of many people
who identify as coloured. The thesis also explores indices of sexuality and gender as they
relate to the broader topic of race and racism. The key argument of the study as a whole
is that by exploring the meanings of race racism in the realm of the intimate, or the
intrapersonal, we will come closer to understanding these notions and practices and in the
case of racism, some of the reasons why it persist after social and political
transformation, even as its meanings change
