Racial Encounter by Durrheim Kevin;Dixon John;

Author:Durrheim, Kevin;Dixon, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The new segregation

Segregation is commonly understood to be a conservative and racist doctrine that has its roots in the premodern context of slavery and frontier life. Against this prevailing view, John Cell (1982) argues that segregation is a product of modernization. It developed in cities and towns, in the early stages of industrialization of the newly formed nation states of the USA and South Africa. Moreover, he suggests that, at the outset, segregation was not a conservative doctrine, but that its ‘ideology was created on the whole by well-educated and comparatively moderate men as an apparently attractive alternative to the more extreme forms of white supremacy.’ (p. x). In contrast to frontier societies, ‘segregation is a settled system, in which all sections of society participate, albeit unequally, in a single economic whole.’ (p. 13). Modernization had brought people together in cities and factories, in a single economy and nation state; and segregation was advanced by progressive thinkers of the time, as a means of regulating intergroup relations while striving for equality. In Cell's view, then, segregation is far more than either a racist ideology or mere physical separation. In the later language of Omi and Winant (1995), Cell defines segregation as a ‘racial formation’:

Segregation is at the same time an interlocking system of economic institutions, social practices and customs, political power, law and ideology, all of which function both as means and ends in one group's efforts to keep another (or others) in their place within a society that is actually becoming unified.

(Cell, 1982, p. 14)

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