Page Content: If we treat racism as taboo or a responsibility for someone else to resolve, we will make little progress in its demise and our joint futures, writes Prof Ronelle Carolissen in an opinion piece published on www.city-press.news24.com on Wednesday (23 March 2016).
Ten years ago some colleagues of mine and I designed a teaching and learning research project for fourth year Occupational therapy, Social work and Psychology students at the Universities of the Western Cape and Stellenbosch. They could talk to each other about community, self and identities, concepts central to their work as professionals in a diverse society.
For our students to become the best professionals and active citizens that they could be, they needed to learn how to work and live together with people who were different from them while affirming the importance of their shared humanity. It involved facilitated deep dialogue in small groups as well as joint seminars at both universities. During these difficult conversations about difference and their commonalities, students learnt much about each other's realities. Doing drawings on community assets in different locations, as a catalyst for group discussions based on their experiences, anchored the course. They also spoke about apparent similarities that were materially substantially different. For example, one student asked "You and I are both Christian and speak Afrikaans, but is Afrikaans and Christianity the same in Paradyskloof (Stellenbosch) as it is in Strandfontein (Cape Flats)?
Research suggests that many post-Apartheid black and white students believe racism and Apartheid was something of the past. Many of our students' views were no different, in spite of the fact that many collectively depicted the ongoing effects of institutionalised racism in their drawings.
Why could so many black and white students not see racism? Many students in my classes ten years ago, could not see the consequences of white social power in their drawings of their communities because they viewed racism as a prejudiced attitude.
Racism is commonly misunderstood as a prejudiced attitude, a deviant personality trait. In this view, black and white people have equal ability to be racist and are pathological individuals. I have even read that people like Penny Sparrow must be jailed. By scapegoating Penny and her distasteful comments, we fail to see how we, as black and white South Africans, are all immersed in institutional racism. Individualising racism and scapegoating individuals as racist allows us to avoid our personal and collective responsibility as South Africans to disrupt racism from flourishing if we want to determine our joint futures together.
We have to consider institutional racism. It is an organised system of social relations, locally and globally, that consistently and intentionally privilege whiteness – white people, white cultural attributes – at the expense of blackness – black people and black cultural attributes. Whiteness is a norm in society where everything associated with it is equated with competence and success and everything equated with blackness, as inferior to the standard of whiteness. This norm gives white people, as a group, unearned privileges in society. The scarcity of Black professors, as a group, and minimal images of Blackness in university curricula, were recently condemned by student protestors, who resisted Black immersion in whiteness in South African higher education. But racism cannot only be about individuals or institutions. Racism lives because we allow it to flourish in our everyday activities.
Philomena Essed, a leading scholar on racism, writes about everyday racism. Like her, I believe that it is important to understand what makes it possible for racism to proliferate in the everyday, in what most black and white people do, that support whiteness as a norm.
The norm of whiteness allows affirmative action to be equated with unearned black advancement or black exceptionalism. Black people who do very well are seen as existing outside the norm because incompetence is viewed as the standard for Blackness. One of my colleagues "complements" me saying that I am not an affirmative action candidate because I am too competent. I tell her that I am an affirmative action candidate: the university may never have appointed me if policy did not demand it, even if I am competent.
The current public gaze on affirmative action is often critiqued from the position of Whiteness that is affirmed and Blackness that is minimised. The criticism focuses on black incompetence and lowering of standards when crucifying affirmative action. Affirmative action policies are a very common source of anxiety for many white people who increasingly feel they are disadvantaged in the current South African job market. A colleague of mine, recently invited to an interview for a senior post at an academic institution, expressed concerns about getting the job because of the fact that she was a white woman – to which I answered that research shows that white women are actually the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action in South Africa (as well as globally) - she in fact got the job. However, under current affirmative action policies, white men and women cannot continue to be the only beneficiaries of jobs and promotions, as was the rule in Apartheid South Africa. During Apartheid, white men received most, and white women received less.
So why do some black students not recognise racism? Many younger students grew up with public narratives or stories that serve whiteness by excluding race from the equation of success, and promoting a very convenient myth of 'colourblindness' and merit. Some stories about excelling in our global society are about colourblindness ("we are all the same") and merit ("if you work hard, you will succeed"). Some black people assimilate into a white world, at times at integrated schools and universities, to fulfil their and their parents' quests to aspire to middle-class lifestyles. They ignore or fail to see their blackness, like most white people deny their whiteness, to better fit into the norms of whiteness, until the realities of racism catch up with them and they 'get their call' as black individuals. I suspect that many students who were involved in recent protests recognised their calls at university and felt deeply betrayed by the myths of whiteness, similarity, colourblindness and merit that many of them had been reared on. I doubt that many of my students from ten years ago would today insist that racism was part of only our Apartheid past after hearing about the challenges of racism experienced by black university students in South Africa over the last six months.
Norms of whiteness are prisons for black and white people. They lock us in hostile and suspicious engagements, preventing us from recognising our common humanity and moving towards a joint future. We all have a responsibility to learn from each other and face the discomfort that frank conversations will evoke in all of us. It is imperative that we work in all our institutions – families, schools, universities, religious organisations – and open doors to undo the structures that keep whiteness firmly entrenched. If we treat racism in our society as taboo or a responsibility for someone else to resolve, we will make little progress in its demise and our joint futures.
*Professor Ronelle Carolissen is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of community psychology in the department of educational psychology in the faculty of education at Stellenbosch University. Her current research focuses on teaching approaches that foster equity. She also explores everyday dynamics of belonging in higher education contexts.
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Nelson Mandela Foundation keynote 30 March 2016.pdf
