This presentation is part of a new research project that examines the relationship between the individual and society, professional expertise and political acumen, individual guilt and collective responsibility, ideology and common sense, justice and truth, and history and race in apartheid South Africa. The project uses these dyads to show how individuals made apartheid work. It draws on these pairings to illuminate the ways in which individuals fashioned a racial common sense that came to define (and continues to define) South African society. This racial common sense depended on individuals knowing their place in the racialized hierarchy that was apartheid South Africa. To be normal in South Africa was to know your racial (and sexual) place, to know the place of the other, and to know what to do with individuals who refused to assume their allocated positions. As the Population Registration Act of 1950—the law on which the racial catalogue of apartheid rested—put it: “A White person is one who is in appearance obviously white … or who is generally accepted as White…” Whiteness depended not just on what an individual looked like, but on his or her acceptance by others as white; on whiteness depended a host of privileges and public goods. Whiteness conferred on the recipient the de jure and de facto status of official beneficiary. But apartheid needed more than racial common sense for its viability. It needed individuals in its government offices, its classrooms, its hospitals, its military, and its police. It needed cafes, churches, corporations and ma-en-pa shops to apply without question its pettiest strictures (such as who could use which toilet in a building). Please register here to receive the Zoom link and join us for Professor Dlamini’s talk.