The vexed question of race-based admission to medical school.

Sixty-two years after the much reviled and now repealed Population Registration Act of 1950 was enacted, and 18 years into our new non-racial democracy, it continues to haunt South African public life. The Act classified South Africans into 'race' categories, thus creating the framework for the differentiated allocation of opportunity and privilege, and resulted in severe inequalities between the white elite and the black underclass. The historical inequalities continue to manifest themselves in all aspects of daily living such as housing, health, wealth, employment, skills, assets, education and more. Democratic South Africa has chosen to redress these inequalities through 'affirmative action' , a concept that is perhaps best expressed in the Afrikaans equivalent of regstellende aksie. It was US President John F Kennedy who coined the phrase 'affirmative action' back in 1961. But it fell to his successor, Lyndon B Johnson, to implement the concept, declaring that 'We seek … not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result. ' Since that time five decades ago, affirmative action has found wide application in all spheres of life in the USA, including preferential admission to university of African Americans, Hispanics and Native Americans. The objectives of affirmative action in South Africa are noble enough: to redress past 'race'-based deprivations, promote equity, broaden access by all in previously racially exclusive terrains, and foster diversity and normalisation of the demographic profile in socioeconomic spaces and institutions previously demarcated as the exclusive domains of the erstwhile socio-political elite. However, to implement this remedy, South Africa has resuscitated the 'race' categories of the Population Registration Act as markers of historical disadvantage and as indicators of progress in redressing disadvantage. At every turn, South Africans are therefore required to declare their 'race' by ticking the appropriate box, and in government circles, transformation has been reduced to 'race'-based statistics calculations. In this setting, historically white universities have felt pressured – in order to retain credibility in the eyes of the government and the public – to implement 'race'-based admission criteria and procedures that set quotas and apportion preferential admission to black students, including those who do not meet the same matriculation scores as their white counterparts. This essentialist approach to transformation, which has long been a subject of vigorous debate in the USA, has now also come under increasing scrutiny and critique in South Africa. The University of …