The psychology of social change – 30 years post-apartheid: what went wrong and how to fix it?

This article presents some snapshots from 30 years of my collaborative work in the social psychology of social change in South Africa. Projects with students and colleagues used ethnographic, discursive, and survey methods to document racial encounters in the newly desegregated spaces of post-apartheid South Africa. I will review some of the successes and failures of desegregation efforts both in the country and in social psychology, where intergroup contact theory has come under considerable scrutiny. Critically, an assimilate-to-privilege form of desegregation has not resulted in systemic change but replaced the apartheid ‘colour line’ with an ‘epistemic line’ of White privilege and race stereotyping. Towards the end of the article, I’ll consider why anticolonial discourse rejects intergroup contact as a solution, and turn, finally, to Mbembe’s concept of Afropolitanism to make modest proposals for a way forward – the ‘how to fix it’ part of the article.