S2 E9: Institutional racism and how it manifests in the African context

In conversation with Dr Joel Modiri

Dr Joel Modiri is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Jurisprudence in the Faculty of Law at the University of Pretoria. He holds the degrees LLB cum laude and a PhD both from the University of Pretoria. His PhD thesis was titled ‘The Jurisprudence of Steve Biko: A Study in Race, Law and Power in the ‘Afterlife’ of Colonial-apartheid’. Dr Modiri mainly teaches in the field of Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy. He has convened and taught a number of law subjects such as Social Justice and Human Rights, African Human Rights, Research Methodology, Legal Problems of HIV & AIDS, and Law and Transformation. He has also taught portions of courses in Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology and Public Policy presented by the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Pretoria. He currently convenes the LLM/MPhil in Law and Political Justice.

In light of the lives of black people that have been sacrificed senselessly at the hands of police brutality, Dr Joel Modiri discusses and explains what institutional racism is and how it manifests in the African context. He discusses the correlational link between institutional racism and police brutality. He reflects on the victimisation of black people at the hands of police and armed forces and other forms of racism. He assesses the impact of this on the South Africa’s democracy project. The discussion also analyses the effectiveness of legal responses to racism and provides strategies on what can be done to eliminate racism.

This conversation was recorded on 29 June 2020.

Music: Inner Peace by Mike Chino https://soundcloud.com/mike-chinoCreative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/0nI6qJeqFcc