Race relations in South Africa have come a long way since 1994 or even 2004 but the progress is patchy and doesn't extend across all the country.
A good place to look is the IJR 2014 reconciliation barometer which is a yearly report that tracks this kind of thing. Here's an article that explains it.
The most interesting thing I found from the report and the article is that South Africans of different races like each other less and seem to be moving away from the idea of an inclusive South African identity but the levels of interracial trust are growing steadily.
So we might not like each other as much but we trust each other more.
I'm in my mid twenties now so I don't remember the 'bad old days' very much but I have lived in the rural areas and 2 of the 3 major urban areas.
So my home town is a small Afrikaans farming town about 150km from Cape Town and yeah back in the 90s it was pretty racist. My primary school actually took down the flag pole in 1994 rather than fly the new South African flag. They only put it up in 2000/1 when we got a new principal and then we flew the new flag. Even as late as 2009 I've had weird looks walking down the street with a black friend and a mixed race friend so still pretty conservative.
Then throughout the 2000s I lived in Cape Town. Cape Town is very liberal (and has been throughout Apartheid) but has problems cos of the group areas act which left the city incredibly segregated. Which means that while a lot of the youth are quite liberal they actually don't always have a huge amount of friends outside their own race group. I think that also has to do with there isn't as much of a black middle class in Cape Town.
Moved back to SA a year ago and took up residence in Johannesburg, so spent the least time here.
Depending on where you go in Jozi I have found it to be the most integrated of SA's cities (that I been to). Not everywhere though but yeah loads of places here where you really get a feeling of "yeah I am in a more tolerant country", especially in the city center that's now being made less dodgy than it was in the 90s.
But yeah there were two things that really struck me as cool and indicative of how far we come. The one is the number of times I get invited to people's houses in the townships just cos they not used to seeing white guys using minibus taxis especially in Jozi. Been to a couple of traditional weddings and one Sunday lunch like that.
And the other was like two weeks ago there was a great music festival in what used to be a prison for women and again very multi cultural event, I mean like 20 something years ago political prisoners were being held there and now I'm doing shots of Tequila listening to one my favourite bands with a crowd full of South Africans from every background.
Also the prison is now part of our Constitutional Court complex (freedom boner!).
So yeah we still got our problems with racist douche bags of every colour but with a little effort and luck we'll carry on moving forward.
