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Social construction of race and citizenship in south africa
Magubane, Ben
Magubane, Ben
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dmaguban.pdf
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"The use of race and racism has a long and ugly history. Hegel provides a logical point of departure. He reminds us that attempts to naturalize inequalities in order to justify slavery and oppression of Africans was made in the crudest terms eminent European philosophers could think of. In the construction of Africa as a Dark Continent and the African as human being in the rough , a lot was at stake. In 1517 Las Casas, the Spanish theologian feeling guilty about the certain destruction of indigenous Americans, (who were being forced to work in the mines and plantations), recommended Africans to be enslaved because they were plentiful and stronger. Since then, European Christianity, philosophy, biology and other social sciences, to justify the barbarism of slavery, orchestrated contempt and sub-humanity of the African, so much so that today their degradation have become accepted as well deserved. Whilst the focus of this paper is on South Africa, it is my belief that to understand the essence and nature of racism, is useless, at least to me to focus exclusively on developments in any particular European country. Racism is inseparable from the advent of what Cornel West (1993:18), calls the Age of Europe. White supremacy and racism are but expressions of measures European adventurers and colonizers deemed necessary to colonize, expropriate and exploit and rule colonized peoples. In the colonies the structural injustices of foreign domination produced a cultural system of beliefs and images that inflicts ontological wounds on colonized humanity, wherever they are in the white world. It attacks their intelligence, ability, beauty, and character in subtle and not so subtle ways (cf .West: Ibid.)."(pg 3)
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2001-09-03
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With permission of the license/copyright holder