Unequal ‘cultures’? Racial integration at a South African university.

APARTHEID; SEGREGATION in education; RACISM; SCHOOL integration; RACE discrimination; CULTURE; SOUTH Africans; UNIVERSITY of Pretoria

LYNNWOOD (South Africa); SOUTH AfricaReport Available

This article examines the process of racial integration at the University of Pretoria since the demise of apartheid. The university has taken significant steps to achieve fairer representation of the different ‘races’, but has not succeeded in diminishing student perceptions of the overwhelming importance of racial identities. Some suggest that this is because white, Afrikaans-speaking students continue to display racial prejudice against fellow students who are black. We argue that while this may be so, a more important obstacle lies in the institution's adherence to a discourse involving an easy substitution of ‘culture’ for ‘race’ as a means to describe ‘difference’ in South Africa. This discourse, which has a long history at the university, serves to divert attention from the racialised inequalities that underpin the salience of racial identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]