Racism and Its Discontents: A Global Struggle for Racial Justice

By Veon Bock

A friend of mine in the US recently remarked on the return and rise of what he called “Make Apartheid Great Again”, a phrase that captures the regressive racial politics and cultural anxieties currently resurfacing in that society. This observation is symptomatic of a broader trend: the global retreat from the quest to address racial inequality. The fight against both institutional racism and racial prejudice is being undermined on multiple fronts, from shifts in public discourse to regressive policy changes and the systematic deconstruction of previously hard-won gains.

One of the great tragedies of this struggle has been the manner in which ideological commitments have often taken precedence over pragmatic, material solutions. On one side, we find those who seek to defend the entrenched material advantages they inherited from colonialism and apartheid, constructing all manner of “straw men” when confronted with the undeniable reality of racial inequality. These defenders of privilege typically profess to adhere to a neoliberal, [hyper-]individualist worldview that only those already in positions of socio-economic advantage can afford to entertain. What is left unspoken is that much of their wealth and status were accumulated not through meritocratic means, but through a historical process of violent dispossession and systemic exclusion, often enforced by state-sanctioned brutality.

Yet, paradoxically, those who advocate most vocally for the dismantling of racism and structural inequality often do so from within an ideological framework that itself warrants scrutiny. Many operate from a postmodernist, relativist stance in which the idea of truth is reduced to a mere instrument of power, an epistemic tool wielded for power rather than as an objective measure of justice. This is evident in the selective engagement with historical figures: for instance, the relative silence surrounding Karl Marx’s explicit racism. While Marxist theory provides an incisive analysis of class struggle, its proponents often neglect the ways in which Marx himself reproduced racist hierarchies, seeing non-European societies as existing in a pre-modern state, awaiting their historical transformation through European industrial capitalism. The issue of racial inequality, then, is too often framed as a secondary derivative of economic class struggle, rather than as a distinct axis of oppression with its own logic.

At the same time, those who claim to represent “rationalist” liberal traditions, ostensibly opposed to both racism and radical ideology, rarely reflect on the deeper philosophical roots of their own ideological inheritance. Cartesian rationalism, with its rigid dualism between mind and body, subject and object, has historically underpinned exploitative Enlightenment-era justifications for racial hierarchy. Figures like John Stuart Mill, heralded as champions of liberty, advanced theories of utilitarian ethics that were often blind to the ways in which their abstracted principles justified colonial domination under the guise of a “civilising mission.” The liberal commitment to individual rights, while a powerful political ideal, has been frequently weaponised to obscure the structural determinants of inequality, ironically reinforcing the very hierarchies it claims to transcend.

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Therefore, what we see on both sides is an absence of genuine truth-seeking. One side remains beholden to an exploitative rationalism that abstracts human suffering into liberal platitudes, while the other, emerging from the post-Hegelian intellectual trajectory of Marx, Nietzsche, Critical Theory, and deconstructionism, reduces truth to an exercise in power dynamics. The result is an ideological impasse: liberalism, in its naïve faith in progress, refuses to acknowledge its complicity in racial exploitation, while the postmodern left, in its radical skepticism of truth, undermines the very basis for a coherent, shared vision of justice.

If we are to move beyond this stalemate, the discussion on race must be grounded in a historical realism that neither excuses the sins of liberalism nor collapses into a nihilistic rejection of truth. We must hold both traditions accountable, acknowledging that neither rationalist liberalism nor postmodernist critique offers a sufficient framework for addressing racial injustice. A serious engagement with racial inequality requires an approach that resists both ideological rigidity and relativist cynicism, seeking instead a mode of discourse that prioritises ethical consistency, historical accountability, and material justice over abstract theorising and ideological posturing.

* Veon Bock, MPhil (UCT) is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy. He is an independent consultant and is currently in the process of authoring two books, one dealing with the financial exclusion problem in South Africa and the other a novella, which memorialises Prof Adam Small and Dr Neville Alexander.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.