Can you know whether someone is black, white or ‘mixed race’ by looking at them? This way of knowing persists despite anti-colonial and anti-racist arguments that Black is a political identification which cannot be read off one's skin, and despite more recent scientific knowledge that race is not visible. That one can know with one's eyes who or what someone is and where they come from has its foundations in pre-modern, sixteenth-century Eurocentric epistemologies. South Africa's history of apartheid and its continued use of apartheid race categories for purposes of redress perpetuate ‘the look’ as a way of knowing race.

What is ‘the look’? What work does it do for the idea of ‘race’? What does it rely on for its power? Are there ways of knowing and doing that counter ‘the look’?

Racial markers, racial naming and their meanings change with time, context and political struggles. Changes in meanings of race emerge from a specific constellation of socio-political circumstances that make up a particular historical moment in a specific place – known in the social sciences as a historical conjuncture. In her Lacanian analysis of race, Kalpana Seshadri- Crooks (2000) contends that although meanings of race and its markers change, ‘the look’ as a technology of racial differentiation and identification remains constant. The means by which we identify someone visibly as either black, white or ‘mixed race’ (and in South Africa as Coloured, Indian or Chinese) remains the same. In the case of people of ‘mixed race’, ‘the look’ is used not only to identify but also to specify their supposed racial mixture.