/ 27 August 2010

Racism’s untraceable stink

Racism's Untraceable Stink

In “Sniffing out racial intolerance on campus“, Professor Jonathan Jansen is right to caution against a finger-pointing manner of addressing racism. But I disagree with his reasons and with his optimism about the conversational, therapeutic model for overcoming racism on campus. If only talk in a non-threatening environment were enough, racism would probably have ended decades ago.

Jansen’s recommendations remind me of the attempts by some well-intended Jewish Israelis to engage in non-threatening, friendly, reconciliatory exercises with Palestinians. These conversations have had next to no impact, primarily because they are conducted in terms that in no way threaten the power structures that keep oppression alive. True, the dynamic is somewhat different in South Africa, for power relations are more complex here given that political power is largely in black hands and economic power is still largely white.

So it may not seem clear to some who have the upper hand in the power stakes, but I think it is fair to say that the symbolic order informing the way in which the people of our country see themselves in relation to others is largely one informed by centuries of white oppression.

What is presupposed by the finger-pointing approach that Jansen rejects is that racists actually know what they are doing. Sometimes they do, but for the most part they do not. And they do not, in part, because racism is indeed an extremely complex and subtle phenomenon, something that can be smelled but which we are still far from being able properly to understand and describe. I smell it every day in the heavy air of South Africa, on campus and off.

‘Racism invisible to the racist’
Racism is typically invisible to the racist. That is why the racist can claim in all honesty that he or she is not one when the evidence plainly attests to the contrary. Not long ago, I had a conversation with a woman who rented rooms to students. She said she was not a racist and then proceeded to tell me that she would not rent rooms to black students because they were too different. They — oh, that terrible “they” — like loud music, she said.

Next door was a white student digs (an example of voluntary or semi-voluntary segregation on the part of students). They were a rowdy bunch who enjoyed loud music and throwing random objects into their neighbour’s garden. Just across the road lived a group of black students. They were a model of good behaviour and never played loud music.

The evidence was there for her to realise that she had no good reason not to rent to black students but she did not see what was directly in front of her. This suggests that her racism is largely subconscious, largely subliminal, largely something that conversation alone cannot cure her of, for she is largely unable to make good of the evidence that would challenge her racist beliefs.

Here is another case, one that would have been fodder for the Frantz Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks. A young black student descends from her car. A black car guard addresses her respectfully in what I think is Sepedi. She replies, clearly having understood, in English. With her choice of language, she was telling the car guard that she was made of altogether different stuff. In a deeply disturbing way — for she was subliminally the target of her own prejudice — she was informing her behaviour with the view that she was not black like him, that she was black in another way, wearing a white mask.

This is one example of a kind of subconscious self-loathing — yes, self-directed racism — that has deep effects on the fabric of society, including the fabric of university life. One way to avoid the pain caused by the inferiority complex spoken of by Fanon and, following him, Steve Biko, is to reject your blackness by speaking in the currency of whiteness, which today is the neoliberal currency of the selfish pursuit of wealth. I am not suggesting here that wealth is an exclusively white phenomenon. But there is a certain type of greed that is identified as a marker of whiteness and that is being embraced with a vengeance by our new black bourgeoisie and their university-going offspring.

I am speaking here for the most part of those with the “heaps of education” Jansen referred to, as opposed to those who allowed themselves to be humiliated by the abject video made by the aspiring cinematographers of the University of the Free State, alluded to by Jansen in order to contrast an attitude of servile compliance with those of black students and staff.

‘A tool of self-denial’
Clearly, the woman I saw who spoke in English would never allow herself to be humiliated in that way but I think she humiliated herself by using English as a tool of self-denial, a tool to convince herself that she is what she is not. Self-loathing is affecting her as it is affecting those who willingly participated in their own explicit humiliation.

Class today is used by many black people to combat the inferiority complex instilled by centuries of oppression, but it comes at the cost of a disturbing type of self-denial, a self-denial that requires that the black poor be pushed away as creatures of another species. The racism evident in such cases plays no small role in maintaining current injustices. It is extremely subtle and also radically misunderstood. Much the same can be said about the more standard racism of white against black.

Rather than underemphasising the complexity, as Jansen and those he attacks do, we need carefully and bravely to understand why it is that racism can be smelled in and out of university campuses in our country before recommending relatively easy solutions.
Jansen hinted at a move in the right direction when he alluded to Black Consciousness. But I think we need to take Black Consciousness far more seriously than we have in current public debate. Biko is known by all as a liberation hero, but how many of us take his words seriously? How many of us even know what his views are?

I suggest that if we were to take Black Consciousness seriously, conversation in safe, non-threatening spaces would not be seen as the magic pill that will solve the problems of racism on our campuses. To be sure, neither will the trigger-happy, wolf-calling attitudes that Jansen rightly cautions against. A new sort of intelligence is required, perhaps informed by Biko’s largely forgotten legacy.

Pedro Alexis Tabensky is associate professor in Rhodes University’s philosophy department