The article traces the debates around questions of race', ethnic identities, colour-castes and class inequalities, and their interconnectedness under a system of capitalist production in South Africa through the lens of Neville Alexander's own writings. The central question that I pose is in what ways Alexander's writings on such social differentiations reached beyond conventional understandings of race and other differentiations by both academic and political writers (conservative, liberal or progressive), and whether they challenged new thinking on further research and political practice in the here and now. This article takes as its starting point Alexander's rejection of the notion of race or any kind of social marker as constant and unchanging biological, social or cultural imperatives. In rejecting such views as essentialist, reductive and racist, Alexander, somewhat unfashionably in the late 1970s, sought to inject a scientific approach to the historical and social construction of race and the multiple identities South Africans carry with them every day. While some of the conceptual tools he used are not necessarily new, such as colour-castes, his analytical experimentations provided fresh insights that, first, can be traced both along and against the grain of his own background in the Non-European Unity Movement, and second, they provided an open invitation to debate race and class during the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, and to rethink the meaning and practice of non-racialism and antiracism. I suggest there is a consistency in his academic and political work that relates the sociopolitical and educational reconfigurations, practices, meanings and imaginings of race and ethnic identities, including the now fashionable concepts of whiteness' and xenophobia' to the issues of persistent inequalities, poverty, shades of injustice, protection of privilege and the capillary sources of profit.
