Rainbow nation or new racism? Theorizing race and identity formation in South African higher education

This paper explores both the personal narratives of a group of black and white undergraduate students and the institutional discourse at one historically white and Afrikaans medium university now undergoing its own transformation in post‐apartheid South Africa. It considers how students talk about their actual experiences and the micro‐realties of their personal biographies, what this reveals about how they construct and reconstruct race and identity, and how discourses of race and racialized identities are being reproduced or transformed under new historical and institutional conditions of possibility. The focus is twofold: on the one hand on the contradictions of institutional discourse which both formally admits black students but may subtly work to exclude them as well; and on the other on the friendships that students develop as just one exemplar of how race works itself out biographically and personally. The particular issue is to understand institutional and individual ‘default identities’ which work to erase or obscure the power relations of race and hence to enable race to persist, but also to explore moments of transformation when new identities are made possible. The paper further seeks to contribute to narrative inquiry, following Wright Mills's Mills CW (1959) The sociological imagination New York Oxford University Press [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] notion of the need to consider the intersections of history, biography and society.