Читать книгу Race Otherwise - Zimitri Erasmus - Страница 16

My second recent experience also happens to have occurred in the USA. A few months after the above encounter, I defended the spelling of the administrative category Coloured, not its legitimacy. The editors of a respected journal insisted on the use of the American spelling, ‘colored’, as opposed to the South African one, ‘Coloured’, in a special issue focused on the use of race in South Africa. I argued that like the terms White and African, in South Africa Coloured was and remains an official, though contested, administrative category. The spelling in South Africa should not be changed to that used in the USA because the meanings of these terms are context-specific. Unlike the situation in the USA, in South Africa Coloured does not always mean black in dominant discourses, historically and contemporaneously. Nor does it always mean black in popular discourses. There is a history, from the 1920s through to the present, of US projections of its black/white binary – in which ‘colored’ always means black because of the imagined percentage of ‘black blood’ in one’s veins – onto the far more complex South African context (see Hill and Kilson 1971). Given the erroneous approach of this history, the retention of the South African spelling was, for me, significant.