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Ronelle Carolissen. Picture: academic.sun.ac.za
Ten years ago some colleagues 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 are 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 are 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 10 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 “compliments” 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 10 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.
