Despite fundamental reforms to South African education, large performance gaps still prevail
between former black schools and former white schools. Nineteen years into a democracy and
education in post-apartheid South Africa still retains a strong racial dimension between poorer
communities and more affluent communities. Differential access to power and privilege in post-
apartheid South Africa is the logical consequence of a racialised society, and the latter
constitutes the context in which pre-service students have to make sense of their racialised
subjectivities that ultimately affect their decisions and active agency to bringing about a less
polarised society. In this paper, Bonilla-Silva’s structural theory of racism is used as a theo-
retical lens to unpack the rationalisations used by four white pre-service teachers to make sense
of race and their own racial identities. By claiming that they were not part of apartheid, the
participants use various rationalisations to provide them with information to maintain a belief
in white innocence in racism and to disengage them from structural racism.

doi: 10.15700/201412071137