There are two views on racial quotas in sports teams: that they are inherently insulting, or that they are crucial for representative transformation. Which view prevails would, of course, depend on context and history. Taking both into account, in South Africa, the second view overrides the first.

As with every other political, social, and economic activity, South African sport suffered a distinct skewing during the apartheid years. Laws ensured that only white South Africans could represent the country on the sports field, eventually leading to international boycotting of the country's teams. After the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s, however, South Africa's political leaders felt that the country's sports teams should reflect the country's population: 79.0% black, 9.6% white, 8.9% Coloured (mixed-race) and 2.5% Indian. Although soccer has always been popular among the black community, with the majority of the present national team being black, the other major sports, cricket and rugby, are not yet fully integrated.

Cricket has long been the game of "English-speaking" white South Africans, while rugby is played more by white Afrikaners, members of the community that held political power during apartheid. Initially, there was a hope that non-white players would spontaneously enter teams as soon as the laws blocking them were removed. But supporters of racial transformation had failed to take into account the "background racism" of the almost entirely white infrastructure of coaches, selectors, and players. There are some rather distasteful examples of this kind of racism. For example, during the 2002-2003 South African cricket season, two provincial white coaches referred to their black players as "garden-boys" during a telephone conversation. Chester Williams, the first non-white South African to play for the national rugby team (the "Springboks") after apartheid, was regularly called a "f-g kaffir" by a white teammate ("kaffir" being one of the most insulting racial epithets in South African society). In 2003, a white Springbok's refusal to share a room with his Coloured teammate at a training camp made national headlines. It is difficult to believe that people with such prejudiced mindsets will "spontaneously" work to integrate, or even to accept, more non-white players into national sport.