STEVEN FRIEDMAN, Professor of Political Studies, University of Johannesburg CLAIMING, as South Africa’s official opposition the Democratic Alliance (DA) does, that policy must ignore race in South Africa, is like insisting that economic inequality should have been ignored in nineteenth-century Europe. The party resolved at a recent policy conference to oppose policy that uses race and gender as a criterion. This aims to set it apart from the governing African National Congress, which endorses affirmative action as a means of addressing the inequities created by centuries of minority white rule. Although this decision must still be ratified by the federal…