This is a question that has long been overdue for attention.
The past week has seen South Africa’s Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture, Gayton McKenzie, under intense public scrutiny over decade-old tweets in which he referred to Black people as “Kaffirs” – an apartheid-era slur steeped in centuries of racist oppression.
McKenzie, who only joined government last year as part of the Government of National Unity, insists the remarks were regrettable but not malicious.
He points to his own heritage – a Black mother, Coloured identity, and life experience – as evidence that he could not possibly have been racist against Black people.
This argument has been met with fierce resistance, yet it forces us to confront an uncomfortable but necessary question: who gets to decide who is Black, and what does racism mean in today’s world?
Part of the difficulty lies in the fluidity – some might say the contradiction – in how societies define and classify race.
In South Africa and Zimbabwe, those of mixed race are generally labelled “Coloured,” a distinct category historically shaped by colonial classification systems.
As historian Mohamed Adhikari has noted, this identity emerged not simply as a matter of skin colour but as a socio-political construct, shaped by the in-between position the apartheid state forced on Coloured communities – placing them above Black Africans yet below White people.
Many within the Coloured community have come to embrace this as a unique identity, resisting being folded into a broader “Black” category defined by African nationalist politics.
But if McKenzie had made the same remarks in the United States, it is unlikely the public conversation would have been framed the same way.
In the American context, the “one-drop rule” – a principle dating back to slavery and entrenched during segregation – dictated that anyone with any African ancestry was considered Black.
Sociologist F. James Davis famously described it as “one nation’s definition” of Blackness, one that has endured in public consciousness even after its legal demise.
This is why Barack Obama, with a Kenyan father and White American mother, was universally celebrated as the first Black US president, and why Kamala Harris, born to an Indian mother and Jamaican father, is hailed as the first African-American vice president.
In the American racial imagination, mixed race people with African heritage are embraced as part of the Black community without hesitation.
The contrast could not be starker.
In South Africa, McKenzie’s heritage places him in a separate category, subject to political and cultural expectations that differ from those placed on Black Africans.
The outrage over his old tweets hinges partly on this distinction: critics view him as speaking about Black people, not as a Black person.
The underlying sentiment is that McKenzie, as a Coloured man, was punching down on a group historically more marginalised in the South African racial order.
Yet, paradoxically, in the US, this might have been read as an intra-community insult – offensive, yes, but seen within a shared racial context.
African Americans, for example, often use the word “nigga” among themselves, a form of linguistic reclamation that linguist Jacquelyn Rahman has shown can signal solidarity – though it provokes outrage if uttered by outsiders.
The McKenzie controversy forces us to interrogate not just the definition of racism but the mechanics of race itself.
Decades of scholarship, from Michael Omi and Howard Winant to Stuart Hall, have shown that race is not a biological reality but a social construct – a system of classification shaped by history, politics, and power.
What it means to be “Black” in one society may not map neatly onto another.
In South Africa, apartheid’s Population Registration Act legally enforced categories of “White,” “Black,” “Coloured,” and “Indian,” embedding them deeply into the social and political fabric.
As the cultural theorist Zimitri Erasmus points out, even after apartheid’s end, these categories retain immense symbolic and psychological weight.
In the US, by contrast, the binary logic of slavery and segregation created a much broader definition of Blackness – one that collapses mixed heritage into a single racial identity.
This is not mere academic hair-splitting.
How we define race shapes how we define racism.
If racism is about prejudice plus power, then it is entirely possible for someone from a marginalised racial group to hold and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about others within that group – or about other marginalised groups.
Sociologists such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have documented how racism operates even “without racists,” embedded in structures, language, and everyday practices.
Intra-racial prejudice is real: lighter-skinned Black people sometimes discriminating against darker-skinned peers, African immigrants holding biases against African Americans, and yes, Coloured people in South Africa sometimes looking down on Black Africans, or vice versa.
The question then becomes not whether someone can be racist “against their own,” but whether they are reinforcing hierarchies and prejudices that cause real harm.
McKenzie’s defence – that as someone of Black ancestry, he could not be racist toward Black people – leans on the idea of a fixed racial solidarity.
But lived experience often complicates this.
A person’s racial identity is shaped not just by ancestry but by how they are perceived and treated in their society.
In South Africa, Coloured identity has historically been positioned differently from Black African identity, with its own privileges and disadvantages.
That context inevitably colours (no pun intended) how McKenzie’s words are interpreted.
And yet, the outrage also invites self-reflection.
Are South Africans and Zimbabweans, in clinging so tightly to apartheid-era racial categories, perpetuating the very divisions we claim to reject?
Are we guilty of a form of racial gatekeeping that excludes mixed-race people from full membership in the Black community, even when they share ancestry, culture, and struggles?
In much of the world – from Brazil to the UK to parts of the Caribbean – mixed-race people are often embraced as part of the Black diaspora, while in southern Africa they remain boxed into a separate category.
Sociologist Edward Telles’ research on Latin America’s “pigmentocracies” shows how these categories can both empower communities and entrench inequality, depending on how they are used.
To be clear, the Coloured community in South Africa has every right to assert its distinct identity.
This is not about erasing that uniqueness or forcing assimilation.
It is about acknowledging that race is not a universal constant – that our definitions are products of specific histories, and that they can both unite and divide.
McKenzie’s argument, stripped of its political defensiveness, is essentially a plea for a broader understanding of racial solidarity – one that recognises shared struggles without denying difference.
The McKenzie episode, then, is less about one man’s old tweets than about how we police racial boundaries.
It asks whether our categories serve justice or simply re-inscribe old hierarchies under new names.
It reminds us that racism is not just something that flows from White to Black, but something that can exist within and between communities of colour – and that addressing it requires nuance, not just outrage.
In the end, the question of “who is Black” has no single answer.
It is a negotiation between self-identification, community acceptance, and societal perception, all filtered through the prism of history.
What is clear is that race, as we use it, is less a matter of biology than of politics – and that how we draw these lines will continue to shape the debates we have about power, prejudice, and belonging.
The Gayton McKenzie controversy simply reminds us that in a world where race is defined differently across borders, the meaning of racism is equally contested.
If we are serious about dismantling it, we must also be willing to rethink the boxes we’ve inherited – and the walls we keep building between ourselves.
© Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. Please feel free to WhatsApp or Call: +263715667700 | +263782283975, or email: mbofana.tendairuben73@gmail.com, or visit website: https://mbofanatendairuben.news.blog/
