INDEPENDENT MEDIA A Ridgevale Primary School teacher allegedly told a pupil who failed to answer a maths question he reminded her of the president, who could not read or count properly. File picture: Bongiwe MchunuWe cannot pretend to be living in a non-racial society. Nor can we deny we are one of the world’s most racist societies, writes Gillian Schutte.
Johannesburg - Racism remains endemic in South Africa, though we are 20 years into a democracy that is founded on the principles of non-racism and non-violence. Despite the fact that we are an independent African country under black leadership, we continue to witness racial violence manifest in the frequent attacks on blacks by whites.
These attacks take place verbally, physically and psychologically as well as via institutional racism, which is a practice that remains entrenched in the corporate world and in our institutions of learning.
Just recently at the Jan Kempdorp Landbou High School in the Northern Cape, a mixed-race schoolboy was raped with a broomstick handle by four white boys intent on dehumanising him. His was a two-hour ordeal of sexual torture in which he was insulted with degrading racial slurs. This act was clearly motivated by racism intersected with institutionally entrenched attitudes of homophobia, bullying and white male entitlement.
The nature of the attack sent shockwaves through our society and has finally forced much-needed social debate about why racism remains pervasive in our schools and the wider society in a country that preaches non-racism in its progressive constitution.
This month we heard of the Curro Roodeplats Private School in Pretoria separating white and black pupils into different classrooms and, at the Hoërskool Reyno Park in Witbank, Mpumalanga, white teachers were exposed for calling black parents and their children “stupid baboons”.
We can no longer pretend we live in a non-racial society. In fact, we must face up to the reality that we remain one of the most racist countries in the world.
The question remains as to why in an African country, with black leadership, so many whites continue to feel a sense of entitlement and act out their racism with impunity?
We also have to question why so many whites remain in denial about the severity of the problem in South Africa and still claim we “have passed all of that” and now live in a rainbow nation.
No matter how denialist we may have become, we have to push aside the rose-tinted glasses and face up to the fact that not much has changed, with the exception of a dose of economic transformation.
This fuzzy denial of racism is part of the fabric of polite liberal racism and does nothing to transform attitudes in the country.
Instead of being passive and ignorant about racism we should be reflecting on our own racialised upbringing – attitudes that eventually develop into a commonsense discourse that upholds and feeds societal and structural racism.
We need to address these attitudes carried from our apartheid childhood because it is these attitudes that continue to influence the younger generation. After all, children learn racism at home first and society second.
If we go back to our own apartheid-era childhood, we would have to admit that much of our learning about black folk was premised on deeply embedded negative beliefs around blackness, whether our families considered themselves liberal or openly racist.
These beliefs were further reinforced on us through structural racism as experienced via the “whites only” social spaces and schools, hospitals and buses. These beliefs were also performed through the laws of the land that subjugated blacks and elevated whites.
Our cultural world was based entirely on white representations and if we were exposed to blackness it was usually through a white lens, such as films that demeaned and degraded black culture.
The passive or active acceptance of the system of one race subjugating another is adequate complicity for all South African whites to be implicated in the scourge of racism.
A repulsive truth, which many of us do not reflect on, is that the moment white children born in the apartheid-era could comprehend their surroundings, we were exposed to a system in which whiteness was central to privilege, rationality and superiority while black- ness was marginalised and deemed irrational and inferior.
Supposed black inferiority justified the usurpation of independence and livelihood and turned a nation into slaves and later cheap labour. This began with the invasion of these shores by settlers in 1652 (although Portuguese slavers had been active in what is known as South Africa since the 1400s) and culminated in the 1913 Land Act. Finally, this oppression of black people was systemically entrenched in the apartheid administration.
We have to examine how this historical conditioning plays out in the contemporary collective mind of the majority of white people who were (and still are) raised to think that they are central to everything in relation to other races. The underlying premise is that whites are devoid of race and colour and thus naturally human while people endowed with colour are objectified, characterised and “othered”.
In this system, whiteness is the default “human race” while black people are racialised and thus dehumanised. Whiteness thus became, and still remains, the invisible factor while blackness is rendered hyper-visible and deserving of white derision.
This is clearly seen in the industry that is built around whites critiquing blackness in cartoons, satire, puppet shows, art, comedy and socio-political opinion. It is seldom that they turn their lens onto whiteness.
Richard Dyer describes this phenomenon in his book White by explaining that since “whites are everywhere in representation, they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites”.
Historically, the whiteness construct has set about systemically reducing “othered” races to a lower rung of humanity, rendering whiteness as the master signifier that constructs belief, self-identification and social structures to which all else must bend in obeisance and subservience. This is the central premise of white supremacy, which all white people are born into. Thus I argue that white people cannot claim that they were not, or have never been, racist.
This is what I refer to as the “whiteness default”, which I view as the natural outcome of this racist phenomenon that relies on belief in white entitlement and domination and thus assumes natural superiority to other views and moralities.
White South Africans have grown up in a society that has entrenched white supremacy and systemic oppression of black folks. Whites who grew up in an apartheid South Africa were sure of their ascendancy over black subjects and it seems many whites have remained stuck there.
None of us can escape this racist conditioning. If it did not come from our families, then it most certainly came from the system that pushed blackness into the shadows, onto the outskirts, into prisons and poverty-stricken homelands. It was a system that reduced black people to servants and cheap labour status. It was this reality that was embedded into the consciousness of white society and which dished out the strong message that black people.
This culminates in a negative white attitude towards black people and negative beliefs around black body and black psychology. Mostly white people were taught to have zero empathy for black people.
This is why we continue to witness heinous racial attacks on black bodies in our society. It is the reason why black voices are so seldom heard by whites unless to denigrate them as we witness so often in white satire, on social media debates and via mainstream media.
We see it in the lack of public response to issues that affects the black population, such as resource deprivation and state violence deployed against the poor when rising up to demand basic rights.
We see it in the fact that black schoolchildren in both private schools and township schools have expressed to me in the media savvy workshops I run, that the mainstream media makes them feel bad about themselves – and the message they receive is that to be black is to be corrupt and lack leadership skills.
If this is how black kids feel then we can be sure white kids feel superior and we can be certain that societal racialised discourses are re-inscribing white supremacy and black inferiority.
How do we even begin to undo this multi-layered monstrous damage etched into our societal make-up through centuries of systemic destruction of the fabric of black people’s lives and livelihoods?
How do we transform an indoctrinated white population who are intent on looking after their ill-gotten privilege and who, in the end, perceive black progress as a threat to this privilege?
How do we deal with insidious racism perpetuated by whites who claim to be non-racist and critique white supremacy but who continue to adhere to white privilege?
Racism needs to be seen as a central issue of our time and dealt with aggressively. It can no longer be subverted to secondary status lest we have more casualties, like the brutalised black teen. For far too long, whites have been given the message that they can get away with violence towards black people.
* Gillian Schutte is a founding member of Media for Justice, a social justice and media activist as well as a documentary film-maker.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
Sunday Independent
Related Stories