Social Problems, Vol. 57, Issue 2, pp. 294–314, ISSN 0037-7791, electronic ISSN 1533-8533. © 2010 by Society for the Study of Social Problems, Inc. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo/asp. DOI: 10.1525/sp.2010.57.2.294. Talking Race, Marketing Culture: The Racial Habitus In and Out of Apartheid Jeffrey J. Sallaz, University of Arizona This article uses the concept of habitus to address the puzzle of past-in-present racial formations. Although formal ideologies of white supremacy may be suddenly overturned, the embodied dispositions of the habitus should prove durable and may even improvise new practices that transpose old racial schemata into new settings. Evidence for these propositions derives from an ethnography of marketing practices inside a leisure firm in post- apartheid South Africa. In the organizational backstage, veteran white managers routinely categorize consumers as desired “whities” versus denigrated “darkies.” But a second discourse of marketing, found in the frontstage, uses survey data to divide the market into “blue-collar” and “jazz” types. By structuring marketing strategy to attract the former and repel the latter, managers exclude black consumers and euphemize such exclusion vis-à-vis the state and other public audiences. Findings extend not only racial formation theory, but also U.S.-based under- standings of discrimination. Keywords: racial formations, South Africa, marketing, habitus, discrimination. The twentieth century witnessed a dramatic transformation in dominant regimes of racial power. In its scale this movement was global, as postcolonial movements in the global south inspired “minority rights revolutions” in the global north, and vice versa (Skrentny 2002). The substance of new racial ideologies is remarkably uniform as well, with assumptions of “white supremacy” having given way to formal recognition of racial equality (Frederickson 2003). Progress in the political sphere, however, belies continued racial and ethnic segregation of mar- kets for key goods and services within societies the world over (Firebaugh 2003). This phenomenon, that of de jure equality coupled with de facto inequality, raises the question of whether standard research methods can capture new dynamics of race relations. Public opinion surveys, for instance, have demonstrated that white Americans’ racial attitudes have liberalized dramatically over the past half century (Bobo and Charles 2009). But actual reductions in material inequalities have lagged far behind these opinion shifts. So, during the same period in which white Americans increasingly voiced willingness to accept black families into their neighborhoods, patterns of residential segregation remained essentially unchanged (Roscigno, Karafin, and Tester 2009). How, as Howard Winant (2001) asks, are we to under- stand a “racism [that] operat[es] in societies and institutions that explicitly condemn prejudice and discrimination” (p. 307)? To study forms of racism that are institutional and hidden, as opposed to individual and explicit, social scientists have assembled a novel array of research instruments. In audit stud- ies, whites and blacks possessing identical credentials are sent to apply for jobs, with unequal rates of call-back signaling the presence of prejudicial thinking among employers (Pager 2007; Research for this project was supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the University of California Institute for International Studies. The article benefited greatly from the feedback provided by audiences at speaker series hosted by the University of Arizona Sociology Department, the University of Connecticut Sociology Department, and the Sociology of Work Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. Several anonymous Social Problems reviewers offered suggestions for revision. Direct correspondence to: Jeff Sallaz, Department of Sociology, Uni- versity of Arizona, PO Box 210027, Tucson AZ 85721. E-mail: jsallaz@email.arizona.edu. by guest on April 6, 2016 http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from