In this chapter I take up the contemporary debate on the pasts and futures of non-racialism. I am interested in non-racialism as both a form of political thinking and a mode of political practice towards a desired political end.

My aim in offering a critical appreciation of political thinking on non-racialism is to settle the question not of whether it is a good idea or a bad idea but of whether it is a useful or helpful concept at this point in the fashioning of a post-apartheid future. So the chapter is neither a history of the concept, nor an account of its origins, nor a narration of who has ideological or organisational proprietorship over it. Not that these might not be significant lines of inquiry.

I discuss non-racialism loosely in conversation with two concepts and a proposition gifted to us by the British Jamaican critical theorist Stuart Hall. The two concepts are ‘conjuncture’ and ‘strategy’, and the proposition is the possibilities of conducting a politics without guarantees.

What I am interested in here is what Stuart Hall called thinking the conjuncture we're in now. It is about interrogating conceptual, theoretical and ideological formulations as matters of strategy and tactics, rather than out of ideological or philosophical fidelity, or purity, outside of historicity.

To restate, this exploration is asking: does non-racialism, as the constellation of both a political idea and political practice, serve the purpose to which it strategically was put to work when it was deployed to resist apartheid's categorisations? Similarly, does the critique of non-racialism by Black Consciousness thinkers do the political work that it did when it was formulated to assert a political project that offered a way to think blackness not as a racial category but as a political solidarity derived from a shared experience?