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scientific basis of race classification. Any attempt at race classification and therefore of race definition can at best be only an approximation, for no scientific system of race classification has as yet been devised by man. In the final analysis the legislature is attempting to define the indefinable" (Suzman 1960, 367). Landis (1961) similarly notes that the definition of the law was inherently ambiguous; she argues this was intentional, and that the ambiguity shifted the burden of proof to the individual. In a case where a person could not be proved to be either European or non-European, the burden of proof would fall on disproving the non-European side. |
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The lack of scientific definition had no bearing on the brutal consequences of the classification, despite the fissiparousbranching and dividingnature of the scientific problem. |
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Conflicting Categories in South Africa |
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Different aspects of apartheid law could classify a person differently. Where a woman lived, for example, often depended on her husband's classification, although movement from Bantu to white was not possible this way. So she might be of Indian national origin classified as Asian, married to a man classified as coloured, and live in a coloured zone but only be able to work or go to school in an Asian zone. This could be impossible or very arduous due to distance and the segregated transportation infrastructure: |
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Under the Population Registration Act, the children of mixed unions are, it appears, generally being classified according to the "lower "of the two layers involvedthat is, the group carrying fewer privileges. . . . But under the Group Areas Act, the children of Coloured and African parents, or Asian and African parents, would while they were minors presumably be classified according to the racial group of the father in order that they might live with him and his wife in his group area. The child of an Indian father and an African mother might, thus, be brought up in an Indian environment, but, on reaching the age of sixteen and receiving his identity card might be forced to leave his parents and change his mode of living and his associates to those of the African group. (Horrell 1958, 1213) |
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Again, the racialized gender structure is prominent here, where patrilinearity and patriarchal definitions of the couple's race are followed. Oddly, at times the multiple, contradictory methods of classifying could be used subversively to work in favor of the individual who lived between the categories. Horrell recounts, "A third case is |
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