We will teach creationism in public schools and hang only beautiful images of an angelic Christ on our museum walls. The logic of segregation taught that the lines were never to be crossed. To be identified as white or black was to be excluded forcibly, to the extent that the law chose to use force from the lifeworld of the other. In New York, in the late 1980s, a close friend of mine was very nearly assaulted on the street for having had the audacity to wear a pair of jeans with holes worn through them. That was a white thing, and he was supposedly black .
Black people didn t dress like that.
No more than three years later, jeans with holes worn through them were all the rage for self-identifying black youth. A famous rap star had appeared in a music video wearing them. It is degrading and insulting to be stereotyped by others. It is doubly so, and far more insidious, when we stereotype ourselves. From the early 1950s to the late 1980s, the South African state compiled reams of study documents and legislation on the forms of government, commerce, and culture appropriate to the country s four supposedly different racial groups.