Wednesday was a red-letter day for a South Africa yearning for change. The symbolic meaning of a student protest moving far beyond campus and onto the parliamentary precinct amid stun grenades and police armed to the teeth is one likely to be analysed for years to come.Yes, it is about fees, and access to education, but it's also a microcosm of the myriad things that keep us in a holding pattern where some still eat from the silver spoon on the emerald lawn, others scratch in the dirt waiting for another jobless day to end, and many others in-between just save up for the house with off-street parking above the track.Perhaps this is the fallout from plastering over the wounds of racial identity and all the pain embedded therein by forcing the hand of (rainbow) nationalism, when other countries were in fact casting it aside.After a great tide of nationalism that had swept European countries since the 19th century, the European Union was formed in 1993. An effervescent cocktail of countries, it could now don its paper umbrella and swizzle stick, intoxicating the borders and currencies that once primarily defined who people were.Less than six months later, when we held our first democratic election, the majority of South Africans could for the first time in forever be proud of the country from which they came.Overnight, the word "nationalism" got a makeover, and with it, a starring role in ad campaigns that would have us believe white boys loved soccer, black boys sat glued to rugby games, and that they all loved the same brand of beer and drank it together while laughing.But the gaping wound underneath the plaster never healed, and though students of all races were protesting this week, racialised poverty still lies at the heart of what is happening.Naomi Klein, in her brilliant book No Logo, was commenting on how, by the late 1980s, identity politics had taken centre stage in many other countries.It was no longer about which political party you backed. And what that party stood for.It was all about the rights of people you most closely identified with because of your race, or religion, or gender, or sexual orientation.Most of the battles were about "representation" - from campus feminists arguing over how many women appeared on the reading lists, to gay people wanting better representation on television, to rappers waxing lyrical about representing the ghetto.South Africa was coming off such a low base that the smallest changes in representation were met with applause.But today, in the year that our democracy became an adult, it cannot be about how many people of colour are represented in spaces of privilege.The same old fish bowls we've had since before 1994 cannot still be used as barometers for "how far the country has come".For the born-frees, it might be hard to imagine that in affluent areas, a shopping mall, or campus, or school classroom, filled to the brim with only white people was once the norm.For those hard-wired by apartheid's "success" in keeping people apart in all sites of daily life, the spectacle of a racially mixed space (of education or consumerism or whatever) was all the proof needed that the country had changed.The problem is, if you're only seeing the mall, and not the endless tracts of land inhabited by people who can't afford the bus to the mall, let alone the overpriced Nikes being punted there, you're unlikely to see (really see, not just know theoretically) how brutally asymmetrical this country still is.The same goes for campus life.The rage against fee increases is a rage against a ticket system that defines the rest of your life, and that of your child, and in all likelihood, his or her child too.We cannot measure transformation by analysing the demography of the student body at the universities.We can only measure it by the millions of others who are kept in lock-down beyond the glass walls of the city.And then we will see - this isn't just about education...