The nation-state is one powerful entity that makes race. For instance, the mid-twentieth-century South African apartheid racial state cultivated a triracial hierarchy through officially naming three groups into law: White, Black (native African), and Coloured, with Coloured being defined and situated in the “racial middle” as neither White nor Black African. Yet because race is a social construction that is adaptive and dynamic, the state’s role in making race is also malleable and changing. This study offers a case study of how modern racial states re-make racial categories by focusing on the potential for re- or de-formation of the Coloured racial category since the end of apartheid in 1994 and 25 years into democracy. In conducting a critical race discourse analysis of official state forms and laws, the author finds that the post-apartheid nation-state challenges Coloureds’ racial categorization and position in the racial middle. It does this by simultaneously supporting nonracialist (i.e., color-blind racist) strategies and rewriting Coloured as Black as a means for racial redress. Moreover, the author argues that contemporary South Africa practices coloured blindness through both de-formation and then re-making of the Coloured racial category, thus contributing to the potential shift to a dichotomous racial hierarchy. This project demonstrates how the racial middle can be re-made to uphold state racial projects transformed by changes in the sociopolitical context.

民族国家是制造种族的强大实体。例如，二十世纪中叶的南非种族隔离种族主义国家通过正式将三个群体（白人，黑人（非洲裔）和有色人种）正式命名为法律来培养了一个种族等级制度，其中上色被定义并位于“种族中间”，即无论是白人还是黑人非洲人。然而，由于种族是具有适应性和动态性的社会结构，因此国家在种族竞赛中的作用也具有延展性和变化性。这项研究提供了一个案例研究，说明了自1994年种族隔离制度结束和进入民主25年以来，有色民族的重塑或变形潜力，这些现代民族国家如何重新划分民族。在对官方国家形式和法律进行批判性种族话语分析时，作者发现，种族隔离后的民族国家挑战了Coloureds在种族中间的种族分类和地位。它通过同时支持非种族主义（即色盲种族主义）策略和重写“黑色为着色”作为种族补偿的手段来做到这一点。此外，作者认为，当代南非的做法通过变形然后重新制作有色种族类别来解决色盲问题，从而有可能转变为二分种族。该项目展示了如何重新塑造种族中间人，以维护因社会政治环境变化而转变的国家种族项目。