Given that more than a decade has passed since the initiation of the “new dispensation,” a book about the present and future of South Africa that reassesses connections with the past seems appropriate. In this book, Michael MacDonald investigates the evolution of racism and racialism and their linkages to state legitimacy and governance. This empirical examination of South African politics and political economy is well ensconced in the literature. The author provides a rigorous case analysis within the literature of race and class.

MacDonald's main thesis—that the ideology of the apartheid regime consisted of racism built on racialism, and that the latter is still the organizing basis of politics and economy in the country today—provides an important lens for examining the difficulties of the African National Congress (ANC) government today as it struggles with legitimation. The government's approach, based on the ideology of nonracialism, is recognition of the fact that race remains a fundamental characteristic of contemporary South African politics.

African identity, as MacDonald notes, is something that developed due to apartheid's racialism and racism. As he states about the early years of the ANC, “[T]he nation for the ANC was an outcome made by historical experiences, including encounters with the white who introduced the notion of ‘nation’ to Africans. The ANC's nation, in other words, came to exist through the participation of the (white) ‘other’” (p. 100). As Steve Biko, noted “we are oppressed because we are black” (p. 121). Thus, black nationalism, as derived from the action of white racism, contradicts the principles of nonracialism. The ANC's power bases are based on racialism, according to MacDonald. “… Africans constitute the electoral majority only on the condition that they conceive themselves racially and only on the condition that their peoplehood as Africans is supreme over their other identities” (p. 126). Therefore, it follows that government policies, such as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), are racially motivated and necessary to legitimize a “capitalist system” and get the “buy-in” of the majority population.

MacDonald notes aptly that there is a crisis of legitimacy in South Africa today. Beyond tying the crisis to ANC's abandonment of socialism and the embrace of neoliberal capitalism, he evaluates the record of the ANC. While acknowledging a mixed result of economic and human development in the country since the end of apartheid, he states that “South Africa under ANC government has achieved economic and development success” (p. 147). He also notes that the International Monetary Fund recommended neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution program represented a fundamental philosophical shift in the party's economic thinking in contrast to the 1990s (p. 144). That said, he points to the population growth in South Africa as a major contributor to the problem of poverty (p. 149). It should be noted that the issue of the successes and failures of the ANC government is currently ongoing. There are other more critical perspectives about the socioeconomic record of the ANC government based on a Marxian analysis, including that by Patrick Bond (2005), and David Selden, and Leo Zeilig (2005).

The ANC economic system, MacDonald notes, may have been able to promote the development of middle class blacks, but it has not been successful in creating a black African capitalist class. He states that by 2002, BEE consortia owned less than 2.2% of the firms capitalized on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (p. 155). Thus, President Thabo Mbeki has made the creation of black African capitalists, a clearly racialist notion, top government priority and has asked poor blacks to agree to “sublimating their particular interests as poor people to the general interest of the African people” (p. 156). In other words, the good of the black African entrepreneur is necessarily good for the black majority. In MacDonald's analysis, racialism trumps class according to his analysis and the ANC is moving in a culturalist direction (p. 168). South African capitalist legitimation, according to MacDonald, has had to overcome its racist past and racialism is the current antidote to counteract that. In the South African context, “racialism ‘lubricates’ democratic capitalism” (p. 172). The end result: a democracy and a capitalism that are less vigorous and competitive (pp. 185–86).

Overall, Why Race Still Matters makes a cogent and important contribution to understanding the dynamics of state-society relations in as complicated a context as South Africa. Perhaps its major contribution that politics and economics in South African politics have become reracialized then requires us to reexamine the implications for class-based politics “to the left of the ANC.” In particular, the intersection of class, race, and environmental justice in the social movements sprouting up throughout the country attests to the importance of examining new forms of progressive politics in South Africa. How will the government address the problem that more than 70% of the South African citizens feel that the ANC government does not represent their interests? The conflicted and incongruous basis of state legitimacy in South Africa rests on the tenuous juxtaposition of officially defined and articulated notions of racialism and nonracialism, on one hand, and an embrace of socialism and capitalism, on the other. This juxtaposition represents both a recipe for success and potential future disaster in the country. Yes, race matters now and into the future, but class matters even more so, as both tear at the seams of a fragile and eroding legitimacy.