Category: Race, Tribe, Caste and Class

Apartheid became the official policy of the Government of South Africa in 1948, following the election of the Herenigde Nasionale Party, later renamed the Natio al Party. Under this policy, racial discrimination was institutionalized. The lives of the Africans, who made up almost 75 per cent of the population, were controlled by the unjust segregation…

The history of the evolution of Man tells us that all humans belong to a single genus and a common species, called Homo Sapiens. This indicates the biological commonalities between all humans that distinguish them from other animals. At the same time, we note that each individual of this highly populous group (now more than 6.8 billion)…

Of the several ways in which societies get stratified, three ascriptive groups (namely Race, Tribe and Caste) and a category based on the criterion of achievement (Class) are used as the prominent strata. Reviewing the trends in sociological research in the 1980s, Neil J. Smelser noted that the ‘three words … —“race”, “ethnicity”, and “class”—enjoy…