Publisher's Synopsis
Winner, 2025 Gordon Hirabayashi Human Rights Book Award, Sociology of Human Rights Section, American Sociological Association
Honorable Mention, 2025 Bourdieu Best Book Award, Sociology of Education Section, American Sociological Association
Shortlisted, 2025 Barrington Moore Book Award, Comparative Historical Sociology Section, American Sociological Association
Shortlisted, 2025 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize, British Sociological Association
Shortlisted, 2025 MSA First Book Award, Memory Studies Association
Finalist, 2024 C. Wright Mills Award, Society for the Study of Social Problems
How are histories of racial oppression dealt with in contexts of diversity? Chana Teeger tackles this question by examining how young South Africans, born into democracy, confront their country's racist apartheid past in high school history lessons. Drawing on extensive observational, interview, and textual data, Distancing the Past vividly chronicles how students learn that racism is a thing of the past, even as they experience it in their everyday lives.
Teeger shows how teachers' desire to avoid conflict between students mirrors a national focus on racial reconciliation, leading to the historical distancing of the recent apartheid past. This historical distancing allows schools to present a façade of transformation. Beneath the surface, however, the lessons reproduce unequal power relations at school and legitimize inequality at the societal level. In documenting these processes, Distancing the Past illuminates the subtle reconfiguration of racism in the era of civil liberties. It shows how acknowledging the racist past is not enough. When the past is remembered-but its legacies ignored-racism can continue unabated in the present.
Distancing the Past is a timely account of the remaking of race and inequality in the aftermath of de jure discrimination. It offers vital lessons for other societies grappling with their own racist histories.
