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  • Declassified: moving beyond the dead end of race in South Africa by Gerhard Maré
  • Caryn Abrahams (bio)
Gerhard Maré (2014) Declassified: moving beyond the dead end of race in South Africa. Auckland Park: Jacana,

Gerhard Maré's book Declassified, published 20 years after South Africa's democratic transition, takes an exploratory approach to the question of race in contemporary South Africa. In his own words, this approach 'is filled with "what if" questions, deliberately to explore, to see where they take us if we discard, even if just for the moment, the limits set by acceptance of race as a given, the limits to our thinking and to our sense of our own agency' (173).

Declassified provides strong cause for academics and other public intellectuals to question the otherwise unquestioned bedrock of 'race' in South Africa as a self-evident aspect of South African society. The book's intention is to compel a rethinking of South African society, disrupting the notion that this is 'just the way things are' (56). Maré argues in his book that the racialised context of South Africa does not reflect reality, but creates reality. The book seeks to critique race as the process of classification and identification that permeates every area of South African life, where even demographic information becomes laden with meaning, judgment and patterns of belief (51). This racialised template operates in South Africa in both everyday and institutional ways. It allows the continuity of group claims and social attitudes (54) and gains perpetual analytical meaningfulness because it is used and 'guarded' by the state (28). Maré argues that race-thinking guides everyday cognition, sense-making and behaviour, it facilitates race populism (mobilisation on the basis of race), and it serves power. [End Page 71]

The book begins with a personal reflection of the reach and insidiousness of race-thinking. He tells the poignant story of his mother's burial and the instance of cemetery staff that she be classified 'correctly' for appropriate ceremonial purposes. For Maré, race-thinking is so pervasive that it proves difficult to escape even when one dies. The rest of the book follows his considered conviction that racialisation is morally indefensible and an anathema to human dignity.

The book makes a number of important contributions. The first is the definition of non-racialism as a complete rejection of the existence of races and the discursive consequences of this self-evident racialisation. While the author does not deny that there have been real social consequences of racial classification, he makes the point that another consequence of racialisation has been an ongoing demand for these categories to be maintained. He also argues that the current meaning of non-racialism, as put forward by the African National Congress, has fallen short since it focused on undoing the consequences of race-based policy without rejecting race as a 'valid category of human distinction' (79). Instead, that version of non-racialism leaves those categories intact, despite the fact that they have been challenged, disrupted and refuted in a myriad of ways. He also astutely points out that when non-racialism is used as the rationale for redress and racial justice it only entrenches difference based on race since it relies on and maintains racialisation.

The second contribution of the book is in its analysis of 'statecraft' and how racialised templates form an integral part of bureaucratic practice. Racialisation, Maré argues, has continued long after the political transition in South Africa in 1994. He details how the democratic South African government retains and recreates systemic racialisation in the present day. He argues that the state template of race is, in addition, morally indefensible because it also exonerates capitalism as a system of injustice, making racialised redress an acceptable evil. Maré's explication of the institutionalised machinery of race in the South African state presents a vexing problem in the democratic era especially since it is employed to fix the very legacy of classification in the first place, and is implicated in the way capital and race privilege mutually reinforce each other.

The third contribution of this book is in its critique of equality as a notion of demographic redress where a greater...

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