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racism. Here too the attempt to create a normalized, systemic bookkeeping system was embedded in a larger program of human destruction. There are enduring lessons to be drawn about moral accountability in the face of modern bureaucracy. The ethical concerns are clearly basic questions of social justice and equity; at the same time, their very extremity can teach us about the quieter, less visible aspects of the politics of classification. We walk here a line similar to that of Hannah Arendt in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The quiet bureaucrat ''just following orders" is in a way more chilling than the expected monster dripping grue. Eichmann explained what he was doing in routine, almost clerical terms; this was fully embedded in the systematic genocide of the Holocaust. |
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One of this book's central arguments is that classification systems are often sites of political and social struggles, but that these sites are difficult to approach. Politically and socially charged agendas are often first presented as purely technical and they are difficult even to see. As layers of classification system become enfolded into a working infrastructure, the original political intervention becomes more and more firmly entrenched. In many cases, this leads to a naturalization of the political category, through a process of convergence. It becomes taken for granted. (We are using the word naturalization advisedly here, since it is only through our infrastructures that we can describe and manipulate nature.) We emphasize here the stubborn refusal of "race" to fit the desired classification system suborned by its proapartheid designers. Thus, we further develop the concept of torque to describe the interaction of classification systems and biography. |
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From the early days of Dutch settlement of South Africa, the de jure separation and inequality of people coexisted with interracial relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century charter of the Union, it was simply stated that "equality between White and coloured persons would not be tolerated" (Suzman 1960). Various laws were enacted that reinforced this stance. When the Nationalists came to power in 1948, however, a much more detailed and restrictive policy, apartheid, was put into place. In 1950 two key pieces of legislation, the Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act were passed. These required that people be strictly classified by racial group, and that those classifications determine where they could live and work. Other areas |
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