Two nations of discourse: mapping racial ideologies in post‐apartheid South Africa

This article presents an analysis of 154 written submissions to the South African Human Rights Commission invited as part of the consultative process leading up to the South African National Conference on Racism 2000. The submissions demonstrate a fundamental lack of consensus regarding what racism is and how to combat it. Although the submissions reveal a variety of perspectives on racism within each self‐identified racial group, a significant racial dimension—even bifurcation—is clearly manifest. Black and white South Africans approach the questions that were the topic of the National Conference on Racism in meaningfully different ways, suggesting the existence of ‘two nations of discourse’. In mapping racial ideologies in post‐apartheid South Africa, the article outlines the benefits of a structural approach in its engagement of a range of sociological debates from an international perspective: (1) the distinction between racial attitudes and ideologies; (2) the production and nature of new forms of racial identity, discourse, and racism; (3) the social construction of whiteness; and (4) the politics of non‐racialism in the context of political projects such as nation‐building and reconciliation.