Conversations about race in places like Cape Town sound eerily similar to those happening in the United States.

Apartheid is dead in South Africa, but a new version of white supremacy lives on.
 
“During apartheid, the racism of white people was up front, and we knew what we were dealing with,” Nkwame Cedile, a Black South African, told me. “Now white people smile at us, but for most Black people the unemployment and grinding poverty and dehumanizing conditions of everyday life haven’t changed. So, what kind of commitment to justice is under that smile?”

As he offered me his views on the complex politics of his country, Cedile, a field worker in Cape Town for the People’s Health Movement, expressed a frustration I heard often in my two weeks in the country: Yes, the brutality of apartheid ended in 1994 with free elections, but the white-supremacist ideas didn’t magically evaporate.
 
That shouldn’t be surprising. How could centuries of white supremacy simply disappear in 15 years? What did surprise me (as a white U.S. citizen) is how much discussions about race in South Africa sounded just like conversations in the United States.
 
While the United States struggles with its race problem with a white majority and South Africa has a Black majority, I found this made little difference in terms of the psychological pathology of so many white people.
 
From a two-week trip, I wouldn’t claim deep insights or knowledge about South Africa. My contact in the country, outside of informal chats with people on the street, was limited primarily to university professors and students and progressive activists in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. I didn’t have a chance to get behind the gates in the wealthy neighborhoods or talk to elite business people, and my travels in the Black townships were limited in time and scope.

But even with those limits, some clear patterns emerged about the white people with whom I engaged.
 
The first trend is an argument that goes like this: Apartheid is over, we have a Black government and now it’s time to move ahead by understanding that the problem of race is no longer political but one of inadequate cultural understanding and engagement.

This celebration of diversity is familiar to us in the United States, where institutions (especially corporations and schools) tend to address difficult questions about disparities in political power and the distribution of wealth through multiculturalism.

While there’s nothing wrong, of course, with acknowledging cultural diversity and helping people learn more about other cultures, multiculturalism does not take the place of real politics, no matter how much many white people wish it could. Understanding others doesn’t automatically mean that those with unearned privileged will work to undermine the system that gives them that privilege.
 
During my first days in the country, my host for the trip, Junaid Ahmad, reported an incident that drove home how superficial such commitments to multiculturalism can be.

Ahmad, a Ph.D. student and activist at the University of Cape Town, had been asked to speak on race issues opposite the student government president during a campus radio program. When the other student (a white man) pointed to a recent musical performance in which Black African and mixed-race choirs sang together, Ahmad, who is a Pakistani-American, challenged the multiculturalism-as-a-solution assumption behind the comment.

The student president got agitated with Ahmad’s critique until finally, as the interview was ending, the young white man turned to him and said, “You should be careful.”
 
The vague warning wasn’t a direct threat, but Ahmad said that given the context of a white man angered by a challenge from an Indian (the category into which Ahmad would likely fit in South Africa), it was hard not to interpret the comment as white supremacist.

Though this young white man chose a crude expression for his emotional reaction, he was not idiosyncratic. In my experience, many whites—in South Africa and the United States—expect their endorsement of multiculturalism to be accepted as evidence of a serious commitment to ending racism.
 
After a talk at the University of Johannesburg in which I argued for always keeping discussions of race grounded in the white supremacy of the culture, a faculty member there took issue with the tone of my remarks.