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6
The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid |
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Sir de Villiers Graaff asked where the sudden danger to the white group was
that had caused the minister to decide to close off the human stud-book he
had tried to create. He was endeavoring to classify the unclassifiable.
(Horrell 1968, 27) |
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The stubborn survival of racial categories attests to the enduring power of the
old race paradigm, as well as the fact that new insights and methodologies
take time to be fully incorporated and internalized.
(Dubow 1995, 106) |
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As information scientists, the theoretical and practical issues of racial and
ethnic group categorization, naming, and meaning can be viewed as empirical
data about problems associated with the organization of knowledge, repre-
sentation, classification, and standards setting.
(Robbin 1998, 3) |
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Introduction: The Texture of Classification |
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The last chapter examined the detailed interactions among people, institutions, and categories about tuberculosis. Each has a trajectory, and the trajectories may pull or torque each other over time if they move in different directions or at different rates. The threads that tie category to disease, to science, to bureaucracy, and thus to person, often become twisted and tangled in the long process of the disease. The texture of classification here is composed of thick filiations, encompassing much of a person's life, imposed from outside, and filled with uncertainty and contradiction. |
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This chapter examines another similarly torqued group of filiations between people and classifications, that which tied racial categories to persons under apartheid in South Africa. Here, race classification and reclassification provided the bureaucratic underpinnings for a vicious |
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