African Identities

ISSN: 1472-5843 (Print) 1472-5851 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cafi20

Due process vs. access: a discourse analysis of

topoi in the Overvaal High School incident

Marthinus Stander Conradie

To cite this article: Marthinus Stander Conradie (2019) Due process vs. access: a discourse
analysis of topoi in the Overvaal High School incident, African Identities, 17:3-4, 258-276, DOI:
10.1080/14725843.2019.1670619

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2019.1670619

Published online: 01 Oct 2019.

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AFRICAN IDENTITIES
2019, VOL. 17, NOS. 3–4, 258–276
https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2019.1670619

Due process vs. access: a discourse analysis of topoi in the

Overvaal High School incident
Marthinus Stander Conradie
Department of English, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article undertakes a discourse analysis of blame games sur- Received 6 September 2018
rounding the Overvaal High School controversy. It investigates the Accepted 7 September 2019
modes of reasoning that apportioned or deflected blame from key KEYWORDS
actors. Blame, in this context, involves culpability for escalating the Toulmin; argumentation;
racialised tensions that become a centrepiece of the debacle. topoi; discourse analysis;
A model of argumentation premised on topoi is applied to opinion overvaal; racism
pieces published online in reaction to the event. The primary aims
of the article are to index dominant patterns in the argumentative
structures that shaped these opinion texts, and to examine the way
these arguments situate Overvaal in relation to systemic issues of
racial equity. This agenda stems from the contention that online
news, including opinion pieces, can play a cardinal role in constitut-
ing public knowledge of, and reactions to, divisive social events.

Introduction
This article responds to calls for discourse-based research into publically accessible
blame games. These are conceptualised as ‘offensive and defensive symbolic perfor-
mances by various individual or collective social actors’ (Hansson 2018, p. 228). Its
contribution includes a theoretical proposition, centred on my contention that amalga-
mating Toulmin’s (2003) model of argumentation with Durrheim, Mtose and Brown’s
(2011) race trouble can yield insights into public argumentation on race-relevant issues,
especially the systemic longevity of racial inequities. Additionally, the article also
responds to an especially divisive race-relevant event in the landscape of South
African education: the High School Overvaal debacle. My response attempts to read
this incident within wider concerns over racism in contemporary South Africa.
Toulmin’s (2003) model attends to context-sensitive modes of reasoning. Its multilevel
framework can drive interrogations into communicators’ efforts to justify claims about
who deserves blame for what in relation to social problems and the historically-anchored
nuances of intersecting problems. By comparison, race trouble adopts a more specific
focus. It advocates analysis of the discursive construction of racism. That is, instead of
conceptualising racism a-priori before measuring its presence in whatever context is under
study, race trouble maps how racism is constructed by discursive practices that become
serviceable to particular agendas. Although widely used in communications research,

CONTACT Marthinus Stander Conradie conradiems@ufs.ac.za

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 259

Toulmin (2003) has not yet been applied to race-sensitive issues affecting South African
education, nor has his work been combined with race trouble.
This article combines Toulmin (2003) with race trouble, and applies the combination
to opinion pieces on the Overvaal High School controversy (treated below). The findings
call attention to attempts to blame an individual politician, and a particular construction
of racism that rationalises this blame-making argument in the opinion pieces.
Conjoining these two approaches illustrates some of the ideological consequences of
this interplay. More specifically, I call attention to the repeated marginalisation of the
systemic dimensions of racism in blame games orbiting Overvaal, and education in
South Africa more broadly. I propose that this elision in mass-mediated argumentation
dilutes an opportunity for frank and collective engagement on issues that imperil the
growth of South African education and democracy. Although the opinion pieces under
study raise questions that merit widespread public debate, the obfuscation of other
elements of racial injustice, endangers possibilities for candid intra- and interracial
communication on how the recalcitrant legacy and destructive presence of racialisation
and its oppressive dynamics can be comprehensively addressed.
Before outlining the Overvaal incident and the research aims of the article, I affirm
that the study does not propose the guilt or innocence of any stakeholder. Instead, it
aims to qualitatively analyse how arguments around the controversy apportion blame,
as a precursor for highlighting problematic nuances of the preponderant argument.
Nevertheless, I take issue with the above-mentioned risks attendant on obfuscating
some of the most pernicious and pervasive aspects of racial injustice and its intersection
with language and education, on grounds that will expounded in the conclusion. As
such, my critical gaze turns toward the opinion pieces.

The overvaal incident

In late December 2017, the Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) instructed Overvaal
High School to admit fifty-five learners in addition to its existing intake for 2018. Situated
in Vereeniging (South Africa), the school’s governing body (SGB) refused this instruction,
citing an already filled admissions capacity, as well as its language policy. Overvaal
provides instruction exclusively in Afrikaans. Since the fifty-five learners would require
teaching in English, the SGB asserted that altering its infrastructure to accommodate
English would delay the fifty-five learners’ education. The GDE responded by accusing
the school of underusing its capacity, and promised to provide English materials and
teaching staff. In January 2018, Member of the Executive Council (MEC) for Education in
Gauteng, Panyaza Lesufi, took centre stage in these deliberations and, consequently,
features prominently in news reports, including opinion articles. Moreover, the SGB’s
resistance incited allegations of racism. To clarify, Apartheid racial categories remain
proximal to post-1994 politics, including metrics of restitution, such as the number of
black learners who complete high school education (Reygan & Steyn, 2017). Using
Apartheid classifications, those excluded from Overvaal are categorised as black, con-
trasting with a predominantly white body of existing learners. Subsequently, the school
entered legal battles with the GDE.
An investigation by the Pretoria High Court ruled in favour of the school. While the
GDE directed an appeal to the Constitutional Court, family members of the fifty-five
260 M. S. CONRADIE

learners staged protests outside the school gates. Protesters were ultimately joined by
members of several political parties, notably the African National Congress (ANC; cur-
rently the governing party) and the Economic Freedom Fighters. Violent confrontations
between protestors and other members of the local community seized media attention,
provoked police intervention and resulted in several arrests. During the research pro-
cess, the case remained unresolved at the level of the Constitutional Court.

Research aims
The salience of researching blame games in online news discourse derives from the
demographic reach of internet platforms. The mediating influence of news sites can
disseminate and valorise specific forms of knowledge wherever the internet is accessible
(Cresswell, Whitehead, & Durrheim, 2014). This study investigates how mediatised
debates engage with language policies as sites of struggle that continue to provoke
disagreement for their potential implication in maintaining Apartheid-based imbalances
(Reygan & Steyn, 2017).
The analysis unpacks a purposively sampled set of opinion pieces, published online in
response to the Overvaal debacle. This overall aim is delimited into three strands. First,
the study ascertains the key stakeholders who attracted blame. Second, it explicates the
underlying argumentative premises that link claims about where blame for the con-
troversy should be lodged with the evidence cited to support claims. Specific attention
is given to the most prevalent argumentative framing. Third, within its theoretic
approaches, the study critically assesses the prevalent pattern for the way it embeds
the event and its stakeholders within wider concerns over equity in post-1994 South
Africa. This agenda is seated in the discourse analytic sensibility that media discourses
retain a potential to construct, normalise and valorise particular interpretations of socio-
political events (Nijjar, 2015).
The procedures for analysing the underlying argumentative premises in the sample
originate from Toulmin (2003), but also rely on Hansson’s (2018) elaborations. Hansson’s
(2018, p. 228) extensions are specifically honed to discourse strategies in political ‘blame
games’ in online opinion journalism. Combining Toulmin (2003) and Hansson (2018)
enables an interrogation of the justifications that link the claims of an argument with
supporting evidence. These links between claims and evidence are often expressed
implicitly. Consequently, they play a subtle yet potent role in constructing the normative
assumptions that authors rely on to communicate with target audiences. Toulmin (2003)
and Hansson (2018) conceptualise these links as context-specific warrants, or topoi (as
expounded at a suitable junction).
The investigation of topoi develops in two stages. First, it reconstructs the most
frequent topoi that emerged from the sample. This step necessitates awareness that
topoi, ‘being rules of inference are tied more strongly to concepts than to words’;
consequently, ‘the same topos can potentially be phrased in numerous ways’ (Grue,
2009, p. 309). Second, the study also explicates how these topoi work in authors’
attempts to assign or deflect blame for problems at Overvaal. This second-level analysis
invites a critical appraisal of the way context-specific warrants/topoi acknowledge or
circumvent links between the Overvaal incident and historically-conditioned inequities
in South Africa.
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 261

To pursue the second-level analysis, Toulmin (2003) and Hansson’s (2018) works are
linked with race trouble (Durrheim et al., 2011). After expounding race trouble in the
next section, I situate the study’s approach to news discourse and opinion pieces. Next,
I review existing research on topoi to develop the framework through which the sample
of opinion pieces were analysed in terms of the attribution or denial of blame in political
and news discourse.

Race trouble
Racialised injustice ranks among the most vexing obstacles to social cohesion, economic
growth and democratisation in South Africa. For example, the impact of ‘severe inequal-
ity in education provision sees more than half of those who begin schooling leave
before they have completed the senior cycle [mainly] poor and working-class black
South Africans’ (Reygan & Steyn, 2017, p. 69).
One recurring aspect of racialised antagonism emanates from dissonant criteria for
labelling an utterance, behaviour or policy as racist (Brokensha & Conradie, 2017).
Disagreements over the precise structural facets of racism and its connectedness with
individual and social psychological mechanisms dog public debates. The recondite
manifestations of this disagreement in public discourse also undermine participants’
willingness to critically and cooperatively deliberate racially-charged matters. Grasping
how racism is constructed during interaction, what it is understood to entail, sheds light
on the complexities of these divergences.
Some elements of public discord on what racism constitutes resonate with scholarly
debates. For instance, one stream of research attends to the psychological processes
that inculcate discrete racist behaviours. Another strand discerns the systemic arrange-
ments that mark societies with historic and contemporary racialised disparities. Much of
the most acclaimed research links the two by situating lived experiences and everyday
behaviours (often termed micro-aggressions) within systemic dynamics such as the
institutional cultures and infrastructure of public education (Reygan & Steyn, 2017).
Cresswell et al. (2014) endorse a complementary approach to the latter field. Rather
than conceptualising racism a prior before measuring the frequency of its presence in
a discourse setting, they encourage analysts to chart the construction of racism in situ.
This entails broaching racism as an interactional resource. That is, in discussions where
‘racism is either implicitly or explicitly at stake’, researchers scrutinise the ‘practices and
activities through which race-relevant social divisions are produced’ (Cresswell et al.,
2014, p. 2513). Such analyses divulge how participants perpetuate or resist ‘taken-for-
granted [. . .] knowledge about categories of people’ and the bearing of these categories
upon lived experience and institutional praxis (Cresswell et al., 2014, p. 2513).
To elaborate, launching accusations of racism against individuals and/organisations
carries assumptions about the nature of racism (i.e. the accusation constructs racism).
These assumptions are either explicitly stated or implicitly presupposed (which suggests
the utility of attending to warrants/topoi, as expounded below). Similarly, refuting accusa-
tions of racism involves the construction of racism in ways that support this defence. For
instance, one set of participants might construe racism as a matter of individual prejudice
alone, divorced from social dynamics. Adopting this individualist construction could impel
the claim that institutional language policies are race-neutral, given that they express
262 M. S. CONRADIE

collective and ostensibly logical decision-making, produced by diverse individuals. Inversely,

opponents of this individualist construction can point to its elision of systemic linkages
between language and racial inequity, thus concurrently questioning both the earlier
construction of racism, while framing a different one that drives a different agenda, such
as more socially alert pictures of racialised dynamics. Taking this approach does not deny
extra-discursive and material realities of racialised inequities. Instead, it supplies a means to
examining how such elements are acknowledged or elided.
Race trouble fosters sensitivity to the dual capacity of a text to construct racism in
ways that concurrently justify an accusation against opponents, while pre-empting
counter-accusations. Reflecting South Africa’s political landscape, especially its official
commitment to identifying and resolving racial inequality, this process of both launch-
ing and defending against charges of racism has developed into a perennial feature of
online and offline citizen interactions. Citizens engage in debates over the social
structures that sustain inequity and therefore require change, and sometimes accuse
individuals and groups of obstructing change. Language policies sit at a vital junction of
this context. The processes that yielded them, and the consequences they exert on
people’s lives, can become embroiled in allegations and counter-allegations of main-
taining racist power imbalances (Cresswell et al., 2014; Reygan & Steyn, 2017). Against
this backdrop, understanding how such discursive manoeuvres of blame-making and
blame-denial are enacted in public spaces, including online news sites, necessitates
inquiry into the implicit or explicit constructions of racism that uphold and ostensibly
rationalise blame games (Cresswell et al., 2014). This article argues that race trouble and
Toulmin’s (2003) model offer one avenue for examining how constructions of racism
underpin arguments over race-relevance issues.
More specifically, the article proposes that the blame games developing in online
news texts represent one naturally-occurring site where contestations over the character
and scope of racism can be investigated. This argument resonates with longstanding
observations that ‘concerns about race and racism are always ready to hand to explain
events’ with the consequence that ‘race and racism are continually being refashioned to
serve particular situated interests’ (Cresswell et al., 2014, p. 2513). Since the language
policies of South African institutions continue to attract attention for its potentially race-
laden dynamics, and since opinion columns constitute a site for the mass consumption
of arguments, this article narrows its focus to the argumentative structures that shape
a sample of opinion pieces on the Overvaal incident. It questions whether, and how,
competing understandings of racism inflect the arguments emerging from these pieces.

Discourse analysis and opinion pieces

Opinion pieces, like other news formats, are multifunctional texts that can be explored through
numerous theoretical and analytical lenses. This article is grounded in a characterisation
of opinion pieces as a persuasive variety of media communication, embedded within
evolving and systemic power relations, with argumentation as one of its chief components
(Hansson, 2018).
Reflecting the persuasive and argumentative attributes of opinion texts, this study
narrows its scope to the underlying premises (warrants/topoi) that lend coherence to
the various claims about where blame for exacerbating social problems should lie. To
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 263

elucidate these implicit argumentative premises, the study relies on insights from
discourse analysis, and developments in the post-1994 South African media landscape.
One of the guiding precepts of discourse-driven inquiry into journalistic coverage
proceeds from the theorisation of all media discourses as simultaneously socially con-
stituted and constitutive. This entails alertness to the role of news media in affecting the
normative horizons of public interpretations of, and reactions to, controversial events.
News reports, opinion columns, editorials and reader comments are analysed for their
potential to ossify or rupture the prevailing frames within which events and stakeholders
are understood (Mihailidis, 2014). Nijjar (2015), for instance, illustrates how oversimpli-
fied framings of groups involved in protest actions are often recycled in journalistic
reports, even when reports concern highly dissimilar incidents. Consequently, more
sophisticated and critical interrogations are obscured by an overreliance on familiar,
over-generalized framings. Potentially, this pattern militates against the critical faculties
and expanded knowledge of its audience. Similar patterns might surface in reaction to
Overvaal. Brokensha and Conradie (2017) also gesture to this point by showing that the
framings adopted in news items affect the direction of readers’ comments.
Additionally, the selection of online texts for this study is prompted by the observa-
tion that South Africa’s online environment, including its news portals, has been char-
acterised as the country’s new racial battleground (McKenzie, 2016). Numerous incidents
of explicit and implicit racial discord have provoked accusations of hate speech, and
counter-accusations of racist witch-hunting (Brokensha & Conradie, 2017). One perennial
feature of this multifaceted conflict is disagreements over criteria for labelling an
incident as racist. The discursive manoeuvres espoused by these contestations resonate
with Hansson’s (2018) conceptualisation of blame games. That is, attempts to label or
deny racism pivot on “symbolic performances by various individual or collective social
actors’ (Hansson, 2018, p. 228). Within this context, a combination of Toulmin (2003),
Hansson (2018) and race trouble (Durrheim et al., 2011)affords one method for probing
the ‘mechanisms through which the continuing salience of race in South Africa [is]
reproduced’, while simultaneously attending to the implicit warrants/topoi undergirding
various accusatory or defensive arguments (Cresswell et al., 2014, p. 2512). Despite this
potential, no study has yet attempted this combination.
Such an analysis can offer insights into the continuing evolution of the relationships
between people who are unequally positioned in South Africa, especially in terms of the
country’s dedication to identify and address historically-informed racial inequalities.
Finally, although the nuances of argumentation in South African opinion journalism
remain the focus of this article, its results can nevertheless offer a comparative base for
race-relevant argumentation in other contexts. More specifically, comparisons may be
drawn between other communicative contexts and the preponderant pattern in this
sample, which sees an entwinement between attempts to blame an individual politician
and a truncated construction of racism.

Arguments and blame games in media discourse

This section conceptualises argumentation and its centrality to race-relevant opinion
pieces. The portion immediately afterwards delineates Toulmin’s (2003) model and
Hansson’s (2018) extension.
264 M. S. CONRADIE

From a discourse analytic perspective, argumentation involves sets of discourse moves

that advance a position on the issues at stake, clarify the nuances of that position, and
forward reasons as to why this position merits acceptance among the target audience.
Conducting an argument constitutes one of the pivotal components of journalistic opinion
pieces (Hansson, 2018).When such pieces involve blame-games, both accusations and
defences can take recourse to a wide spectrum of argumentative frames. Various combina-
tions of cognitive and affective discourse strategies are deployed to modulate perceptions
of the agency for social problems. The intention is to persuade audiences to at least
contemplate and possibly accept the author’s perspectives on the causes and conse-
quences of events, and the culpability of blame-targets (Hansson, 2018). Persuasive strate-
gies are directed towards the entire public, but especially the most stable audience
segment, such as the core readership of an online news portal (Mihailidis, 2014).
The influence of these strategies on shaping public debate deserves critical scrutiny
(Hansson, 2018). Of course, this influence is never exerted simplistically, as though audi-
ences passively absorb media messages. Nevertheless, the discourse practices that pattern
media reactions to pressing issues can contribute to creating new ways of thinking, or to
perpetuating existing assumptions. These assumptions include ideas about the conditions
under which individuals/groups are accountable for harm. Concerning blame games in
particular, research into the dynamics of victim blaming, depictions of youth violence, the
unemployed and contestations over racism have affirmed the primacy of charting the forms
of argument that frame media representations (Nijjar, 2015).
Opinion pieces inspired by social problems are often typified by efforts to explicate the
causes of the harm incurred, and to broach potential solutions to reduce or forestall future
suffering. Consequently, persuading the audience that blame should, or should not, be
imputed to a specific individual, group or abstract entity can become the fulcrum of the
text’s overall argument (Hansson, 2018). Assigning blame carries a particular weight in post-
1994 South Africa, as elucidated in the following segment.

Claims and warrants in blame games

Attributing blame to individuals and socially constructed groups is particularly salient in
South African journalistic texts that deal with race-sensitive questions (McKenzie, 2016).
Post-1994 South Africa continues to grapple with the repercussions of its racially-
inflected history. One manifestation of this tension involves determining when
a behaviour, comment, or institutional practice should be classified as racist.
An expansive corpus of discourse-based research illustrates the rhetorical man-
oeuvres through which interlocutors struggle to confirm or repute racism in a wide
range of social phenomena, including language policies (Cresswell et al., 2014; Reygan &
Steyn, 2017). However, to my knowledge, discourse-based studies have yet to examine
the efficacy of Toulmin’s (2003) model for disclosing the warrants/topoi that animate
competing arguments in race-relevant journalistic discourses. This section expounds
Toulmin’s (2003) framework, emphasising its relevance to opinion pieces centred on
the imputation or refutation of blame. Since Toulmin’s (2003) framework was initially
designed to probe arguments from a flexible range of settings, the exposition below
also incorporates Hansson (2018), who concentrates on political blame games.
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 265

Toulmin’s (2003) analytic rubric conceptualises argumentation as composed of the

components indexed in Table 1.
Hansson’s (2018) elaboration of this framework for political blame games focuses on
the discourse functions that claims and warrants fulfil in allocating blame.
Claims typically work to further specific objectives in blame games. First, when
attributing blame, claims function to affirm that an event/action was indeed negative
and that the damage incurred merits widespread alarm. Second, claims can elucidate
the causes of an event/action and the concomitant blameworthiness of those implicated
in these causes. For examples, claims can posit that the exclusion of fifty-five learners
from Overvaal represents a covert act of racist discrimination. Subsequent claims may
situate the event as symptomatic of wider racial inequality, rooted in Apartheid machi-
nations. Individual decision-makers and SGBs may consequently attract blame for main-
taining this legacy. Conversely, blame avoidance strategies can hinge on claims that an
event cannot be classified as negative, or at least as nothing of major public concern. As
a case in point, it might be claimed that other schools in the nearby area can accom-
modate the fifty-five learners. A third discourse strategy allocates or avoids blame by
establishing the obligations and capacities of blameworthy stakeholders. Claims are
made that blameworthy stakeholders are officially obligated to anticipate and circum-
vent injurious developments. Subsequent claims can address stakeholders’ capacity to
obey this obligation (capacity is variously understood as including the necessary knowl-
edge, information and resources). Claims regarding obligations and capacities are vital
for establishing stakeholders’ intentionality – whether harm has been caused intention-
ally or not. In all these cases, claims can be corroborated by various types of evidence,
depending on the communicative context and culture (Hansson, 2018).
Warrants pose a particular challenge to discourse analysts. They are often conveyed
by implication. Authors routinely expect audiences to ‘fill in the gaps’ when interpreting
links between evidence and claims, based on ‘assumed common ground’ (Hansson,
2018, p. 232).To illustrate, an author could claim that charges of racism at Overvaal
constitute a case of race-baiting and self-serving politicking. As evidence, the author
may cite earlier instances that are regarded as cases in which accusations of racism were
(presumably) revealed to advance the interests ofindividual politicians or parties. To link
the claim and its evidence, and to understand how the link relates to Overvaal, readers
must extrapolate a warrant that can be reconstructed as follows: if accusations of racism
are premised on self-serving political goals, then the targets of the accusation do not
deserve blame. This process of reconstructing the warrants underpinning an argument
is accomplished by formulating the implicit causal/conditional links, as demonstrated
above (Boukala, 2016; Hansson, 2018; Zagar, 2010). However, additional contextual
knowledge is exigent to this process. In this case, regardless of readers’ personal
agreement or disagreement with the claim, evidence and warrant, audiences require

Table 1. Toulmin’s (2003) components of argumentation.

Claims: Statements or conclusions that remain contestable and require corroboration/justification
Data: Evidence or reasons provided to substantiate a claim. The nature of acceptable data is defined and
negotiated within the contextual parameters of the discourse setting.
Warrants: Discursive elements that bridge data and claims, creating the logical infrastructure on which an argument
is premised. Warrants are typically rooted in presumably shared views and values between addressers
and addressees.
266 M. S. CONRADIE

some knowledge of a trend that sees accusations of racism met with counter-
accusations that racism is being exploited. That is, by relying on this warrant, the text
assumes that the audience is familiar with the notion that casting an individual or group
as racist can advance the political goals of the accuser/s. Potential advantages include
garnering votes or painting individual politicians as stoic anti-racists (Brokensha &
Conradie, 2017).
Claims and evidence constitute the ‘surface’ structures of an argument, because they are
often explicated, while warrants typically operate at a ‘deep’ or unstated level (Zagar, 2010,
p. 23). In part, this dynamic of warrants stems from their status as components of the implicit
common ground that authors (presumably) need not explicate. The implicitness of warrants,
therefore, emanates from a drive towards communicative economy coupled with authors’
assumptions (accurate or not) about the background knowledge that target audiences
bring to the reading process (Boukala, 2016; Hansson, 2018; Zagar, 2010).
This attribute of warrants renders them especially valuable to discourse analysis.
Exploring warrants can disclose authors’ assumptions regarding the content of the
common ground that audiences presumably have access to when they infer implicit
warrants. Toulmin’s (2003) scheme is suitable for exploring the subtleties, complexities
and interrelatedness of warrants that are specific to a context.
Similarly, the discourse analytic precept that mass media discourses are both con-
stituted by existing social norms, while also playing a constitutive role in perpetuating or
inflecting social norms, invites inquiry into the types of warrants that emerge in reaction
to volatile socio-political events (Reygan & Steyn, 2017). Finally, in keeping with the race
trouble approach, this article argues that warrants/topoi can play a pivotal role in
maintaining or shifting axiomatic assumptions surrounding race, racism and political
power. Significantly, to adopt this approach demands that researchers refrain from
judging competing arguments as superior or inferior, in favour of focusing on the
underlying assumptions that drive arguments. The next section explicates how warrants
were identified by treating the related concept, topoi.

Warrants as topoi
Socio-political argumentation is inevitably inflected by its contextual nuances.
Cognisance of this influence necessitates close attention to ‘topic-related argumentation
schemes’, including context-specific warrants (Hansson, 2018, p. 233).Following Hansson
(2018), Boukala (2016) and Zagar (2010), this study is especially attentive to the recon-
struction of context-specific warrants, also referred to as topoi.
As alluded to earlier, researching the topoi that emerge in reaction to events requires
the identification of claims and data, unless claims are left unsubstantiated. The transi-
tions between data and claims are conceptualised as topoi/warrants. They operate as
‘content-related conclusion rules’ that rationalise transitions between evidence and
claims or vice versa (Hansson 2017, p. 233). Crucially, the context-specific nature of
topoi implies that although they rationalise claim-evidence structures, the topoi them-
selves are also contingent and worthy of critique. However, the implicit expression of
topoi, as parts of presumably common knowledge, means that they often escape
interrogation unless subjected to critical examination (Hansson, 2018).
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 267

Reconstructing the topos in the example referenced in the previous section identifies
what could be abbreviated as a topos of politicking: if accusations of racism are premised
on self-serving political goals, then the targets of the accusation do not deserve blame.
During the analysis reported below, this process of reconstructing each topos that
emerged from the sample is coupled with an investigation of its frequency across the
sample, as well as a detailed reading of its function to promote specific constructions of
the issues at stake (Hansson, 2018). Toulmin’s (2003) model also contains subcomponents
that qualify and nuance relations between claims, data and warrants. However, owing to
page constraints, these do not occupy a central place in this article.

Sampling procedures
Following Cresswell et al. (2014), purposive sampling was used over a three-month period.
Collection was conducted through a Google search of all news items regarding Overvaal,
before narrowing the results to texts that were explicitly marked as opinion pieces. Opinion
articles are often marked by the heading opinion and/or disclaimers from the news organi-
sation, confirming that the text does not reflect the views and values of the host site
(Hansson, 2018). Starting a few days after initial protests outside Overvaal High School,
collection continued until the end of April 2018. Ultimately, nineteen texts were sourced
from various outlets including: Eyewitness News, News24, Mail & Guardian, The Times Live,
The Citizen, Business LIVE and ACTIVATE: Change Drivers (simply Activate henceforth). The
complete list of articles, authors and outlets is summarised in Table 2 in the next section.
The sampling method introduces a potential weakness into the structure of this study.
A core tenet underscoring this research is the discourse analytic position that media
constructions of blame-worthy stakeholders in polarising events can shape and normalise
broader public understandings and reactions. However, collecting online opinion pieces
excludes readers without internet access. On this weakness, Cresswell et al. (2014, p. 2513)
note that, ‘ownership of smartphones on which users can read [. . .] news articles is relatively
widespread, even in informal settlements’. Additionally, social media promotes the sharing
of online news through Facebook and Twitter etc., including opinions that readers find
persuasive or offensive. In fact, the practice of disseminating news links through social
media networks has steadily grown into a pervasive dynamic among adolescent citizens
(Mihailidis, 2014). Therefore, the weakness in sampling, although noteworthy, does not
preclude the study from contributing to academic understandings of some of the topoi that
circulate around issues of race, education, and equality. On the topic of social media,
comment sections to online opinion pieces yield opportunities for collective interrogation
of the arguments and strategies deployed in the opinion piece (or news report). However, in
the present article, I do not examine comments, having done so in other publications (cf.
also Whitehead’s astute 2019 analysis).
Additionally, owing to page constraints, this study does not examine variables
regarding audiences’ psychological preparedness to engage with opinions that might
contradict their own, pre-existing values. Instead, I concentrate on the arguments and
constructions as they emerged from the opinions pieces (Mihailidis, 2014).Page con-
straints also prohibit a detailed account of the background of each news portal from
which opinion pieces were sampled. Finally, substantial information on the background,
political positions and personal identification (including racialised identification) of all
Table 2. Topoi in opinion pieces on the Overvaal High School incident.
Topos Description
Diversity If schools desire a diversity of
viewpoints, they should promote
a diverse body of learners.
Utility If education in English secures access Every child will eventually need
to social resources, state-funded
schools must each in English
Autonomous If schools are permitted to pursue
integration racial integration autono- mously,
integration will be successful
Government If government can anticipate
obligation problems in educational
infrastructure, it is obliged to
implement precautions
Law/protocol If a government official disregards
policies/laws, that official is guilty
of omission
Title, author and source of opinion Primary targets of
268
pieces that employ this topos blame Extract
How can our schools ensure a more SGBs of Afrikaans The advocates of language policies believe that admitting
diverse and non-racial society? medium schools other language groups creates a diversity of viewpoints in
(Panyaza Lesufi, Eyewitness schools, the major reason why racial division remains
News) entrenched in our society.
SGBs of Afrikaans State-funded schools cannot by any means argue to teach in
English (Molula Musa, News24) medium schools only one language that is not English. Considering the fact
that those learners are supposed to go to universities where
M. S. CONRADIE
the medium of instruction is English, I would like to believe
that’s not fair.
Double medium schools ideal for The ANC-led If you look at double medium schools in Sasolburg, you find
racial integration (Motsumi government racially integrated schools that give quality education. Racial
Ntsebo, News24) integration, however, was not forced upon these schools. It
is something they chose to do and it happened over the
years
Language should not be the The ANC-led My take is that the ANC has failed all South Africans in nation-
dominant factor (Molefe Lengana, government building and education. I’m a firm believer that
News24) The EFF and a government governs for all.
EFF is protesting at the wrong ANC-led The ‘esteemed’ ruling party must have known at least
place (Anita Ferri, News24) government 7 years ago how many children they would have had to
accommodate but unfortunately with the ANC there isn’t
a problem until there is a problem! No foresight, no
planning. They are NOT proactive, they are reactive.
Was the Hoërskool Overvaal crisis MEC Panyaza See section on topos of law/protocol.
a plot by Gauteng’s education Lesufi MEC
department? (Anthony Still, Panyaza Lesufi
Business LIVE) MEC Panyaza
Hoërskool Overvaal: Lesufi’s awful Lesufi
record (Sara Gon, Politicsweb) MEC Panyaza
Lesufi ignored the constitution in Lesufi
Hoërskool Overvaal sage MEC Panyaza
(Katharine Child, Timeslive) Lesufi
Upgrade infrastructure and hire MEC Panyaza
passionate teachers (Craig Lesufi
Joseph, News24)
Education problems: Are
Afrikaans schools to blame? (Paul
Colditz, News24)
Overvaal: Where is the moral
leadership (Melanie Verwoerd,
News24)
(Continued)
Table 2. (Continued).
Topos Description
Human development Since mother tongues are linked to
personal identity, multilingual
education should be provided
Cross-generational If systemic injustice continues to
injustice affect racialised groups across
generations, affected racial groups
merit urgent redress
Co-operation If citizens co-operate, problems can
be solved
Race-neutral parents Because parents want a good
education for their children, they
are not concerned with race
Title, author and source of opinion
pieces that employ this topos
Language: An emotive issue (Bert
Olivier, Mail & Guardian)
Hoërskool Overvaal: blame SA’s
wealth gap (Sydney Majoko, The
Citizen)
Hoërskool Overvaal, where
language is a proxy for race
(Prince Charles, Activate)
Double shifts for schools (Tobie
Henning)
Time to get our priorities straight
(Matthew van Rensburg, News24)
A good teacher knows no race
(Johann du Toit, News24)
Primary targets of
blame Extract
The ANC-led Because one’s ‘own language’ – the one closest to you – is
government inextricably and intimately bound up with your being
human. [. . .] It is therefore misguided on the part of the
ruling party, and a great pity for indigenous African
language-speakers, that it seems hell-bent on creating an
educational environment of English monolingualism, which
is linguistically and culturally impoverishing for IsiZulu,
isiXhosa, and other indigenous mother tongue-speakers in
South Africa.
Apartheid-inspired Court rulings that enforce the rights of Afrikaans-speaking
economic pupils to be protected at all costs are legal. The side that
arrangements does not have the wealth must turn to the courts to force
Apartheid- government to build schools where they are needed. But
inspired they are very aware their disadvantaged economic position
economic is being used as a gatekeeping mechanism to keep their
arrangements children from gaining access to institutions
The situation at Hoerskool Overvaal is a microcosm of our
nation and how it continues to approach issues of
transformation [. . .] as Ivo Vegter eloquently articulates it
‘we cannot replace the dominant social order of whiteness
which caused so much harm with blackness, which will
cause just as much harm’.
MEC Panyaza We have a real problem in South Africa. However, it does not
Lesufi require racially based arguments to get to a solution Let’s
All South African harness the intellectual powers we have and get the schools
political parties to run with two shifts. [. . .] Let’s be positive and make things
work.
It’s time to knuckle down TOGETHER and start building for
all those who don’t have and to kick to all the self-serving
politicians, ANC, EFF, DA and everybody in between out the
door as they only serve to divide us.
Overvaal teachers All parents want a good education for their children. Overvaal
and SGB should feel privileged to be a school that parents want their
AFRICAN IDENTITIES
children to attend. [. . .] In all my years of teaching I never
had a parent complaining about me being white. All they
wanted was a teacher who is on time, well prepared, knows
the learners, is a specialist in his/her subject.
269
270 M. S. CONRADIE

the authors involved in producing the opinion pieces are not consistently available for
each text. This precludes a rigorous, theoretically-defensible examination of intersections
between personal identification and argumentation in individual opinion pieces.
All texts were analysed qualitatively by means of Toulmin’s (2003) model, which
demands a first-level reading aimed at identifying overall themes, prior to a close discourse
analysis. The latter step involves identifying the positions adopted in each text by scrutinis-
ing the sets of claims that comprise the text’s argumentative thrust. Subsequent analyses
examine the extent to which corroborating evidence is furnished to buttress these claims.
Finally, the surface claim-evidence structures of each text are investigated to reconstruct the
warrants/topoi that authorise the transition from evidence to conclusions, and the implicit
common ground or background assumptions that animate these warrants/topoi.
Finally, studious elucidation of every topos oversteps the scope of the present
endeavour. The analysis and interpretations forwarded below will therefore detail the
argumentative character and implications of the most preponderant topos.

Findings
Topoi surrounding overvaal
Table 2 reconstructs the premises of all the topoi uncovered by an application of
Toulmin’s (2003) scheme. To clarify, the topoi listed below are not inherently relevant
to strategies of blame allocation/avoidance. Instead, the topoi are steadily incorporated
into an overall argument, as indicated below.
Table 2 showcases that blame primarily accrued to MEC Panzaya Lesufi. To a lesser
degree, the entire ANC-led government is accused of failing to fund adequate educational
infrastructure for English-speaking learners, especially black learners in rural regions across
South Africa. Although all the topoi in Table 2 merit methodical elucidation for their
incorporation into blame games, this article focuses on the principal blame-taker across
the sample. The blame levied against the MEC finds expression in a recurring topos that will
be examined below by reconstructing its premises, followed by a deeper analysis of its
allocation of blame across the opinion pieces in which it featured.

Topos of law/protocol as a centrepiece of blame games

The topos of law/protocol exceeded the alternatives in Table 2. This section undertakes
a more finely-grained reconstruction of the topos and its incorporation into blame-making
strategies directed against MEC Panzaya Lesufi. Doing so necessitates inquiry into an
alignment between this topos and a specific enactment of race trouble. The final section
of the article engages with the implications of the relative reoccurrence of this topos.
The argumentative fulcrum of six texts hinge on a topos of law/protocol that can be
reconstructed as follows: If a government official disregards policies/laws, that official is
blameworthy. Although the exact claim-evidence chains of each text differ, the same
topos rationalises the recurring claim that Panyaza Lesufi ‘lights the racial fires’ instead of
combating racism (Extract 1). Similar to blame games between government and opposition
parties in Hansson (2018), culpability for aggravating problems at Overvaal derives from
a construction of government officials as obligated to safeguard public interests, instead of
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 271

promoting personal stakes, and to abide by constitutional prescripts. Contravening their

obligations render officials liable to public outcry and even disciplinary action. On this basis,
one method of undermining Lesufi’s accusation of racism against the Overvaal SGB is to
construct the accusation as a breach of conduct, aimed at advancing personal interests (as
elaborated below). In this respect, levelling blame at the MEC simultaneously absolves the
SGB, and circumvents more nuanced interrogations into systemic inequalities at schools,
such as intersections between power and language.
To elaborate, these opinion pieces frame Lesufi’s reaction to Overvaal as an incitement of
racial tension, rather than advocacy for social justice. This claim balances on the topos that
disregarding government protocol renders the transgressor blameworthy and, conse-
quently, suggests that the official acted from self-interest. Corroborating evidence for the
claim that the MEC has broken protocol is sourced from his earlier actions. As an exemplar of
these claim-topos-evidence chains, one opinion piece builds its case on Lesufi’s prior
reactions to race-sensitive incidents. The extract below starts with a heroic-crusader meta-
phor, before framing the MEC as undeserving of this reputation, owing to breaches of
conduct during previous inquests into racism (Gon, 2018):

To some in the local media, Lesufi is a superstar – articulately and in dulcet tones slaying
white, racist dragons in schools for violating the rights of their black victims. Except, this
crusader often lights the racial fires or feeds the conflagration.[. . .] In the Koeitjies En Kalfies
[Cows and Calves] pre-school debacle, his reaction was a knee-jerk allegation of racism
deduced from a photo on social media. Lesufi tweeted that he was going there to ‘face-off
with racists’ [and] invited his 29 000 Twitter followers to join him in confronting the school.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, he re-tweeted photos of the toddlers‚ which enabled the
public to identify them. Now he has tarred Hoërskool Overvaal with the brush of racism

After the opening metaphor, the contrastive conjunction ‘Except’ initiates the author’s sum-
mary of an earlier case, during which Lesufi responded to charges of racism at a Gauteng day-
care centre for young children (the piece includes a link to one news report on the incident). As
the opinion piece elaborates, a mother had received a photograph from caretakers at the
facility, showing her black child sitting alone, while the majority white children were seated
apart. The MEC launched accusations via social media after receiving the photograph from her.
The author adopts Lesufi’s reaction to the crèche as evidence that his conduct promoted rather
than addressed racial antagonism. This mode of reasoning turns on the citation of two facts.
First, Lesufi tweeted the picture of the black child sitting apart from her white peers, without
guarding the anonymity of the children. Second, Lesufi’s tweet denounced the incident as
racist and invited his large following to join him, prior to a rigorous investigation.
Invoking this previous occurrence creates a platform for proposing that a similar
neglect of protocol marked Lesufi’s response to Overvaal. The link between his earlier
conduct and Overvaal rests on claiming that in both cases Lesufi launched premature
accusations of racism, without painstaking investigation or deference to legal stipula-
tions (Gon, 2018).The proposal, therefore, affirms that if Lesufi had followed appropriate
methods, factors such as the following would have been considered:

Overvaal is an Afrikaans-medium school. Its refusal to accommodate the 55 was because the
school was already at capacity, with pupils who accepted Afrikaans as the medium of
instruction, including black children. A single-medium school cannot become a dual-
medium school overnight. The Act [Gauteng Schools’ Education Act 6 of 1995] sets out
272 M. S. CONRADIE

grounds for admission: Section 18 (A) provides that the governing body must determine the
language policy of the school subject to the Constitution.

As signalled in the extracts below, the enactment of a topos of law/protocol played a similar
rationalising function to support the same conclusion in other opinion pieces. That is, formal
procedures and earlier rulings evidence claims that the MEC had contravened official
obligations, and should be held accountable for staging premature allegations:

The Rivonia Constitutional Court judgment summarises three similar cases. Lesufi should
therefore have known he had no chance of telling a school to take in 55 learners speaking
a different language at the last minute in December‚ without fair procedure. But he went
ahead anyway. In short‚ what Lesufi has done is pure politicking‚ turning an issue of
insufficient places at quality schools into a spectacle. (Extract 2)

[SGBs] are allowed to choose Afrikaans as their medium of instruction. They are also free to
choose any other language, but in practice the only other language chosen is English. This is
unlikely to change, despite what some ideologues might hope. Overvaal Hoërskool is full.
This was confirmed by Judge Bill Prinsloo. [. . .]Gauteng MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi
ignored the Constitution when he turned the Hoërskool Overvaal wrangle into a racial
drama with inflammatory statements like ‘there is no racist that can hide behind
a broomstick’. (Extract 3)

Grue (2009) and Boukala (2016) propose that a topos derives much of its persuasive
power from its implicit appeal to a target audience’s existing assumptions and
worldviews. Doing so eases communication and invites members of the audience
who hold these values to read the argument as legitimising these assumptions.
Concurrently, these implicit appeals to existing assumptions mark the author as an
advocate of the target audience’s views and values, especially since the topoi in
question invoked these assumptions tacitly. The above analysis suggests that a topos
of law/protocol appeals to an assumption that inattention to legal stipulations
discredits accusations of racism. Moreover, sidestepping due legal process also posi-
tions the MEC not simply as careless, but as culpable of instigating and aggravating
racial turmoil. This assumption rests on an existing discursive practice that sees
racially febrile situations constructed as exploitable moments. To explicate, racial
tensions are interpreted as moments that self-interested individuals/parties can
react to in ways that secure personal political gain, including self-presentational
projects such as creating and bolstering an anti-racist reputation. The first extract
cited above expresses this construction through a crusader metaphor.
The assumptions on which the topos of law/protocol depends are closely aligned
with a specific construction of racism: as a political resource that is serviceable to the
parochial agendas of individual politicians and/or parties. The crusader metaphor in the
first extract cited above, poignantly demonstrates this construction. Efforts to construe
racism as a political resource have been mentioned tangentially in earlier applications of
race trouble to other types of online news discourse (Brokensha & Conradie, 2017;
Cresswell et al., 2014). However, by unpacking topoi, the present project indicates at
least one way in which it enters and influences public argumentation. In the texts under
study, this combination redirects the debate towards politicking and away from ques-
tions of access to education.
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 273

Obligation, capacity and race trouble

Critically appraising the combination of a topos of law/protocol and the construction of
racism as a political resource, demands an examination of the way representations of
obligations and capacities feature in these modes of reasoning.
Hansson’s (2018) treatment of blame games in the opinion pieces authored by opposi-
tion parties in the United Kingdom, stresses the pervasiveness of claims that establish the
socio-political obligations to which government officials are subject. Such claims are
cardinal since audiences will channel blame against targets whose perceived account-
ability has been affirmed in some way. Efforts to direct blame at officials not only rest on
claims regarding their obligations, but also on their capacity to meet obligations (includ-
ing relevant knowledge).The texts investigated for this study evince similar framings.
All opinion pieces that incorporated a topos of law/protocol centred on claims that
Lesufi had breached the obligations incumbent upon MECs. More specifically, the MEC is
reproached for making public allegations of racism, via twitter in particular, prior to
intensive scrutiny of the particularities of Overvaal, as well as evincing unfamiliarity with
earlier legal cases and relevant constitutional regulations. An evidentiary corpus for these
claims is advanced by citing previous cases (the Rivonia Constitutional Court judgment),
naming legal provisos (Gauteng Schools’ Education Act 6 of 1995), referencing details
about Overvaal High School’s legal rights and admissions capacity, as well as the MEC’s
behaviour in earlier race-sensitive situations (chiefly the Koeitjies En Kalfies crèche).
The expectation that MECs must be familiar with legal prescripts underscores Lesufi’s
capacity to meet his obligations. In combination, therefore, officially prescribed obligations
and the capacity to satisfy them, bolster an argument that MEC Lesufi deserves criticism
for aggravating racial tensions. As signalled earlier, these modes of reasoning aim not
simply to inculpate the MEC of negligence, but of self-serving intentions, both at Overvaal
and at previous cases. The topos of law thus supports the conclusion that racism has been
abused as a facile and self-serving resource for the MEC’s personal political gain.
To reiterate, this study does not aim to prove or disprove the answerability of the MEC or
Overvaal SGB. Instead, it analyses how arguments around the incident apportion blame and
to suggest potentially problematic nuances of these arguments. In terms of the relation
between Overvaal and broader issues of educational equity, it should be noted that the
suggestion that Lesufi’s negligence obviates the possibility of racism at Overvaal is not an
axiomatic or inevitable link. To clarify, a topos of law/protocol does not automatically
suggest that questions of racism need not be asked at all. Nevertheless, this connection
becomes the crux of the opinion texts that use it.
The above-mentioned argumentative framing, in which the neglect of protocol becomes
the grounds for excising questions of racism altogether, can be problematised in at least
one crucial respect. As the opinion articles construct racism as a rhetorically-exploitable
resource, little space is spared for interrogating its systemic aspects. Consequently, the
Overvaal controversy is not meticulously positioned within wider, asymmetric power rela-
tions. Cognisance of the constitutive role that power relations play is increasingly recog-
nised as a principal skill for navigating debate in contemporary publics (Reygan & Steyn,
2017). However, in this case the relevance of power imbalances is marginalised. Instead,
only three textual references to structural imbalances were incorporated, as detailed below.
274 M. S. CONRADIE

One of these alludes to historic inequities and its contemporary repercussions, but does not
take further cognisance of these points during its subsequent argument:
Let me also emphasise that I am totally infuriated by the fact that so many children,
particularly African children, still have no access to a proper education. I am ashamed at
the role my ancestors played in this legacy. (Extract 4)

A second reference quotes the Rivonia Constitutional Court ruling, including its citation
of systemic injustice, but uses this reference to propose MEC Lesufi’s culpability:
“Apartheid has left us with many scars. The worst of these must be the vast discrepancy in
access to public and private resources. [. . .] Unequal access to opportunity prevailed in every
domain. Access to private or public education was no exception.” [. . .] It [the Rivonia
Constitutional Court] went on to say: “It is how we manage those competing interests
and the spectrum of views that is pivotal to developing a way forward.” The Constitution
provides us with a reference point ‒ the best interests of our children. The trouble begins
when we lose sight of that reference point‚ when we become more absorbed in staking out
the power to have the final say‚ rather than in fostering partnerships to meet the educa-
tional needs of children. As tensions simmer outside Hoërskool Overvaal‚ it is hard to
conclude that Lesufi has taken the best interests of the children into account. (Child, 2018)

Finally, a third opinion piece invokes society-wide discrepancies as a rebuttal to its own
overall argument that MEC Lesufi should attract the primary portion of blame. The
rebuttal, however, is not accorded further consideration, and is quickly discarded
based on the limited capacities/resources of individual schools:
Functional schools are making every effort to reach out to disadvantaged communities and
schools in the midst of their own overcrowded programs. This includes Afrikaans schools.
However, there is little that any individual school can do to cope with or solve the massive
systemic problems. (Extract 5)

This article highlights a problematic aspect of this trend, premised on the position that
a topos of law/protocol and an elision of the systemic underpinnings of racialised issues
are not axiomatically linked. They are not mutually exclusive. However, the inclination
towards combining them runs the risk of narrowing public understandings of, and
critical responses to, both the event itself and its relation to wider concerns.
Only two of the nineteen texts sampled for the study, pin its arguments on a construction
of racialised inequality as nested in the contemporary repercussions of Apartheid arrange-
ments. A cogent exposition of these pieces merits more space than is available in the
present article. Instead, the analysis focuses its scope on contrasting the infrequency of this
construction with the blending of a topos of law/protocol with a construal of racism as
a politico-rhetorical resource. Reygan and Steyn (2017) make a compelling case for the
urgency of inculcating critical literacies among South African citizens, particularly to culti-
vate alertness to subtle power dynamics. Against this background, the elision of systemic
factors from the majority of the sample is alarming.

Conclusion
Online news media constitute a public space where blame games are performed and
negotiated in view of an overhearing audience, with volatile consequences. Combining
Toulmin (2003) and race trouble (Durrheim et al., 2011) offers an analytically fruitful framework
 AFRICAN IDENTITIES 275

for interrogating the competing modes of reasoning that cluster around context-specific
issues in South Africa. As such, the combination affords one way of probing the nuances,
limitations and affordances of politically-sensitive and publically-accessible blame games.
I interpret the results yielded by applying this conjoined framework to opinion pieces on
the Overvaal incident, in an attempt to disclose how a specific topos patterned reactions to
the event. Despite the probability that this topos is, hypothetically, serviceable to an
unpredictably wide spectrum of argumentative claims, the analysis has indexed its close
connection to a specific construction of racism. This entwinement between the primary
topos and construction of racism is significant. My venture to untangle the latter was
propelled by an application of race trouble, which suggested that formulating racism as
a politically exploitable resource, while concurrently invoking a topos of law/protocol,
extruded meticulous inquiry into the constellations of systemic factors, which continue to
impact access to education, both at Overvaal and at national levels.
The discussion conducted in the previous section concentrated primarily on the possible
consequences of this pattern. However, as one reviewer to this article pointed out, it also
foregrounds at least one other set of questions. To explain, the pattern highlights questions
around the racialised dynamics of public interaction on racially fraught incidents like Overvaal.
In particular, how should the racialised identities of the authors of such opinion pieces be
factored into analyses of argumentation (the same question could also be directed towards
discourse analyses of reader-reactions to news texts)? Glancing at the name, surname and
pictures (if available) of the authors in question, and entering this information into an analysis,
runs the risk of essentialising race (Whitehead, 2019). That is, it threatens to treat race in causal
and solidified terms, rather than a social construct that remains susceptible to various
discursive performances and contextual inflections. Even so, the patterned conjunction of
the topos of law/protocol with a construction of racism as exploitable resource aligns with an
exhortation that Samantha Vice issued in 2010. Public (and private) interaction on the
perpetration of racial injustice necessitates, ‘mistrust [of the] verdicts and evaluations ren-
dered by a worldview implicated in whiteness’ (Vice, 2010, p. 327). Thus, on the one hand, the
possibility that accusations of racism can be manipulated to secure political advancement
doubtlessly deserves methodical consideration and publically collaborative deliberation.
Crucially, however, favouring this risk to the extent that mediatised arguments excise
a rigorous contextualisation of Overvaal, as historically and systemically embroiled, imperils
democratisation. Consequently, such oversights merit collective and personal self-reflection
on the serviceability of particular arguments for entrenching ideological systems, including
whiteness. The influence of whiteness remains exigent for grasping some of the racialised
underpinnings of mediatised debates in online platforms.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Marthinus Stander Conradie holds a PhD in critical discourse analysis and inferential pragmatics
from the University of the Free State (South Africa), where he is currently employed at the
Department of English. His research interests emanate from Foucauldian discourse analysis and
276 M. S. CONRADIE

its application to everyday political argumentation, the construction of race and racism as well as
whiteness. His publications include analyses of South African students’ online discussions of
personal experiences of racial discrimination and micro-aggressions on university campuses,
citizens’ online deliberations via asynchronous news forums, as well as media depictions of
Africa in print advertising. Presently, his strongest interests centre on blame attribution and
political argumentation in online spaces where racial dynamics are implicitly or explicitly at stake.

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