Race is always a touchy issue, and a recent event here in SA emphasized this. One SA government minister excoriated another in an open letter recently here in SA over a race and employment bill. This article gives good background, but basically it would modify the race composition targets to reflect the national, not local, composition.
Back up: "black" here sometimes means "anyone who wasn't white under apartheid" and sometimes means "historically African." In the latter context, races here are typically broken into white, Indian, coloured, and black. All non-whites were discriminated against under apartheid, though to slightly varying degrees, and all benefit from legislation like BEE (SA's affirmative action policy).
The key effect of the proposed Employment Equity Act amendments is that in areas that don't reflect the general SA demographic -- namely Western Cape -- you could see coloureds (who make up a disproportionate % of the WC population) get pushed out of jobs in favor of blacks, even though all are "historically disadvantaged."
Here is a link to an interesting open letter by Trevor Manuel, former high-profile Finance Minister for SA. There is a reference in another article about race categories; the comments are perhaps even more interesting than the article.
Back up: "black" here sometimes means "anyone who wasn't white under apartheid" and sometimes means "historically African." In the latter context, races here are typically broken into white, Indian, coloured, and black. All non-whites were discriminated against under apartheid, though to slightly varying degrees, and all benefit from legislation like BEE (SA's affirmative action policy).
The key effect of the proposed Employment Equity Act amendments is that in areas that don't reflect the general SA demographic -- namely Western Cape -- you could see coloureds (who make up a disproportionate % of the WC population) get pushed out of jobs in favor of blacks, even though all are "historically disadvantaged."
Here is a link to an interesting open letter by Trevor Manuel, former high-profile Finance Minister for SA. There is a reference in another article about race categories; the comments are perhaps even more interesting than the article.
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