'Race' talk: discourses on 'race' and racial difference

The present article examines the responses to racism and 'racial' signifiers in the discourses of 33 black South Africans prior to, and after 1994, the year that marked the end of formal Apartheid and legislated racism in South Africa. More specifically, the article analyzes two corpuses of discourses, the first produced by a group of 26 black adults between 1992 and 1993, and the second by a group of seven high school students interviewed in 1999. One of the basic assumptions that informed the analyses of these discourses was that, since 1994, 'racial' signifiers, due to a range of factors, would have become increasingly valorized in the discourses of black South Africans. And indeed, it was found that in the discourses produced by the group of high school students in 1999, notions of 'race' and 'racial' difference were accepted and utilized in a much less critical manner than in the discourses produced by the group of black adults prior to 1994. The possible reasons for this trend are explored in the latter half of the article. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.