The issue of race in public policy needs to be examined as a logical progression from the theorisation of the ‘national question’ in the struggle against colonialism. Running like a golden thread in this conceptualisation within the broad liberation movement were two fundamental starting points.

Firstly, failure to appreciate the material self-interest that drives social action on issues of race can spawn an eclecticism that appeals to sense and sensibility without understanding the factors that inform them. Thus is hatched a ‘rainbowism’ that is born of aspiration but is nevertheless decreed through discourse – leading to cycles of euphoria and despair that repeat themselves intermittently in the manner of mass schizophrenia.

Racism and non-racialism are more than just attitudinal, spiritual or ideological phenomena. They have their roots essentially in people's material conditions. As Karl Marx argues in The German Ideology, ‘men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking’.

Secondly, and as a guard against narrow materialist analysis, to reduce the challenge of race or the identities that attach to it merely to society's varied material conditions ignores the fact that ideas and attitudes can develop and congeal independently of economic conditions. A failure to appreciate this dimension creates the unrealistic expectation that access to opportunity and improvement in material conditions can automatically alter ideas, attitudes and behaviour. Ideology and attitudes can have an autonomous dynamic of their own. Friedrich Engels argues in his ‘Letter to Bloch’ that

The central thesis of this chapter is that the material and attitudinal elements are each a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the articulation and praxis of racism and its antithesis. For the purposes of linking historical enunciations with the post-1994 manifestation of public policy, emphasis in this chapter is placed on the evolving positions of the African National Congress (ANC) on race. The chapter also points to the limits of those conceptions, and the need to reframe the liberation ideal beyond the quest for equality.