Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Discriminations

Legal Commentary

: Discriminations

White South Africans Adjust To Affirmative Action...

A Google search on ?affirmative action? these days turns up as many (sometimes more) articles from around the world as from the United States. For some reason this interesting report from The Pretoria News on whites adapting to affirmative action turned up today, even though it is several years old.

?South Africa's white population's growth rate is declining,? the article reports, at least in part because

there appears to be a massive surge of people reclassifying themselves coloured in order to improve their upward mobility....

Coloureds experienced 1.17 percent per annum growth, Africans 0.96 percent and Asians 0.89 percent. But whites suffered a -0.05 percent decline.

Although some of the white decline was probably due to emigration (itself perhaps influenced by the country?s affirmative action policies), the report on which the article is based doubted that emigration was the primary explanation.

But there are other social forces at work as well: the continuation of official race classification in the guise of affirmative action in the post-apartheid era has seen the self-defined coloured population soar from 3,6 million people in 1996 to an unlikely 4 million people in 2005.

Of course the increase in the number of ?Coloureds? in the wake of affirmative action should not be surprising, since it has long been known that if you subsidize something you get more of it.

Full post as published by Discriminations on May 21, 2008 (boomark / email).