Racial diversity, interracial trust, and mental distress in post-apartheid South Africa

The emerging difficulties and tensions in establishing inclusive and multicultural societies in the contemporary globalised world have necessitated the generation of ample empirical evidence in support of the socioeconomic and health benefits of racial diversity. This study contributes to the scholarly and policy discourses by examining the effect of racial diversity on mental distress in post-apartheid South Africa after several decades of racial segregation. We used all five waves (2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2017) of the National Income Dynamics Survey (NIDS). After addressing the endogeneity problem in the racial diversity-mental distress nexus, our findings show that an increase in racial diversity is associated with a decrease in mental distress across the 52 districts of South Africa. This finding is consistently established when different quasi-experimental methods and alternative conceptualisations of racial diversity are employed to generate the results. We also found that racial diversity decreases mental distress more among females and urban residents. Further analyses revealed that interracial trust serves as a potential pathway through which racial diversity transmits to mental distress. We argue that people living in highly racially diverse neighbourhoods have the potential to experience a decrease in their mental distress through improved interracial trust.