In the face of new waves of deaths, including those that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement, the world is reawakening to the power of racism to kill people. These are problems have been there for centuries, but are now called pandemics — pandemics of murder, of disease and of social inequality.
The Effects of Race Project at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study started in 2013. The goal of a team of academics was to better understand the “everydayness of race” and how race thinking created durable and seemingly inescapable racialised realities in South Africa, the United States and elsewhere.
Race thinking – the idea that people belong to a race determined mostly by their skin colour – has so framed our realities that we can scarcely imagine a world without it.
But race thinking has deformed us and society because it’s based on constructs of otherness and difference. These, in turn, underpin expectations of character, intelligence, motivation and behaviour. They can pave the way for the unleashing of suspicion, derogation and dehumanisation.
Read the complete article at: The South African
