On the earliest version of racelaw.co.za that is backed up by the Internet Archive, in November 2022, the IRR writes that “South Africa’s legal system … discriminates against legal subjects … on the basis of their perceived race or skin colour”. On the current version, they’ve walked back this framing. Now, apparently, South Africa’s legal system merely “treats legal subjects differently”. They know that “discriminates against” is a hard case to make if you look at the available evidence. We’ll do just that.
But first, let’s try to understand what they’re hoping to achieve. What’s their framing?
Looking further down their home page, they state that the post-apartheid government “almost immediately … began (re)enacting race law and pursuing racial policy”. These laws apparently “attempt to regulate aspects of society along racial lines and racialise commerce”. Framing the “racial” laws of the post-apartheid government as a continuation or re-enactment of apartheid laws is absurd. If one were to stop and think for even a single moment, you run the risk of realising that there has to be a difference between the apartheid-era and post-apartheid laws. Surely the bright sparks at the IRR must realise that there is a fundamental difference between a law that wants to harm people and one that wants to help?
Ah, but you see, these laws are still “racialist”, and we want to be “non-racialist” — this sounds like a good thing, right? We’ll get into that somewhere else. But lumping pre- and post-democratic laws together clearly reveals that the IRR is ideologically committed to a disingenuous framing.
If we accept that racial laws before and during apartheid were not just bad simply because they mention the word race, and that post-apartheid laws are also racial, then this implies that there is a racial group being oppressed. And this racial group can’t be the one democratically and demographically represented by those making the laws, i.e., people of colour. So, what the IRR is clearly implying is that white people are suffering under these “racial laws”.
I wonder why they wouldn’t just come out and say that. Perhaps it’s because that would undermine any claims to objectivity and commitment to liberalism and non-racialism and whatnot. Perhaps it would expose the truth a bit too clearly, which would make some people a bit squeamish to be in any way associated with this organisation, and make the media think twice about citing them favourably. And this truth is that the IRR is a white nationalist propaganda project, whether they realise it or not.
(And, by the way, claiming to be colour-blind, or “non-racialist”, and then being pre-occupied with the rights of a specific race group is like trying to have your cake after eating it. Stop pretending and pick a side.)
Now, let’s get to these “race laws”. They have a big counter at the top of the website saying 317 “Racial Acts of Parliament” have been made, of which 142 are “operative”. Even without getting to any more advanced analysis (e.g., actually looking at the evidence), we can already tell that the word “operative” is doing an enormous amount of work here. Indeed, they have a small (in terms of font size) disclaimer asterisked after the claim of 142 operative racial laws:
Nine (9) of the 142 operative laws have been deracialised since they were originally adopted as race laws. Some originally racial laws (to be distinguished from subsequently “racialised” laws) from before 1994, that remain operative today, are not enforceable, given the intervention of the 1993 and 1996 constitutions. Unless formally repealed, these laws will continue to be categorised as operative.
This stretches the definition of “operative” a bit too far, don’t you think? If “nine (9)” of the operative laws have been “deracialised”, surely then they stop being “race laws”? Right, so we’ll go ahead change that counter to 133 thank you very much. And, maybe you’ll think this is a crazy radical idea, but a law that is unenforceable is pretty worthless, right? So, we’ll have to go in and scrutinise all the “operative” pre-democratic racial laws to see which of them are actually operative, using a sensible definition of the word.
We’ll do that soon. We’ll also take a look at the reasons for the inclusion of these laws, one of which AfriForum terms “representivity” (sic) and is the justification behind the inclusion of a large number of laws. Stay tuned.
Last updated: 2025-03-12