By ‘Maleruo Leponesa
According to Marzia Milazzo, author of Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, racism is still very much alive, with various “sugar coating” strategies used by racists to perpetuate this narrative. Milazzo explains, “This term ‘colorblind’… at least we know in this case serves as a metaphor for not considering race.”
She explained this while discussing the book’s contents with the audience at the book launch held at Amazwi Museum on Monday, 25 August 2025.
Milazzo added that the social scientists are making an argument that, since World War II, racism has fundamentally changed. She argues that, “we now have something completely different, and it’s called many different names, including colorblind racism, new racism, cultural racism, race without racists.” She further expressed that all of the terminology used for racism does not refer to a new concept at all. “I am saying, what is this obsession with newness and conceptualising racism after World War II as new in the first place? This thing , is not something new in the first place, but it’s a constitutive technology of racism.”
Mandisi Majavu, professor at Politics Department at Rhodes University was present as a respondent, he said, “the book is very caring, because even today, that racism narrative is used to argue that even Cape slavery is almost democratic right, because white settlers are hiding.”
“No, our slavery is not as cruel and violent as other slave societies, and actually we love our slaves and so on, so forth. So, we do see some of that, you know, other narrative that sort of fits through to South Africa as well, ” said Majavu.
Who is Marzia Milazzo?
Milazzo is an accomplished scholar in the fields of English literature, critical race theory, and comparative studies.
She currently serves as an Associate Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg, where her teaching and research examine the poetics and politics of both racist and antiracist discourses
Previously, she held an Assistant Professorship at Vanderbilt University in the United States, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University.
Milazzo’s first book, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, presents a transnational study of anti‑Blackness and white supremacy. She argues that colorblindness is not a recent phenomenon nor a benign ideology; but rather a constitutive technology of racism that spans from colonial modernity to today. The book reveals how “colorblind tools” are deployed globally; from Brazil and Cuba to Mexico, Panama, the U.S., and South Africa, as strategies that obscure and perpetuate racial power structures.
Colorblind Tools was honoured with the 2023 Association for Ethnic Studies Outstanding Book Award
Prof Milazzo is currently working on another book tentatively titled Darkening Rainbow: Post-Apartheid Writing and the Politics of Race, which examines contemporary South African literature in relation to racial politics.
