Racism is an absurd attitude to the colour of someone else's skin. Kwame Anthony Appiah (1992)

The History of apartheid undermines attempts at rehabilitating a counter-history of human dignity, and an openness to the ‘racial question’: The deformation of the racial question under apartheid has tended to ‘close off attempts at recovery. However, the fact that ‘race’ so regularly claims centre-stage in social and political life, seems to suggest that there are some vexed (substantive) issues we have to grapple with, and that the racial question was not just a social construction of apartheid. That apartheid ideology and social relations constructed the issues surrounding racial identity in