Although this author knew very little about the details of "Brown v. Board of Education" as a legal matter when he read about it as a young second-year student at the University of Cape Town in 1954, the Court's verdict had a direct influence on his political perspectives and on his aspirations as a would-be teacher for the rest of his life. In one way or another, he was inevitably involved in what was ultimately the political struggle of resistance against the racist policies and practices of the ever more self-confident and aggressive apartheid ideologues and bureaucrats of that period. In this chapter, the author focuses on recent developments in South Africa, where they are in certain respects going through a replay of what happened in the United States from the 1950s to the 1980s. The author considers the deeper implications for the shaping of social identities and for the cohesion of the society inherent in the implementation of an affirmative action strategy under the social and historical conditions obtaining in post-apartheid South Africa. (Contains 14 notes.)