BOOK EXTRACT
This is an extract from Coloured: How Classification Became Culture by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel.
Colouredness as an identity marker in South Africa must always be understood in the context of both the country’s race-based political structure and its unintended cultural consequences.
We have seen how the invention of coloured as a racial category under apartheid was a clumsy and random process based on a conception of race as a mash-up of biology, culture and geography – and that, when people presented themselves for racial classification, as was the mandate, it was not DNA or even self-identification
