POLITICS: Two very different responses to the recent attack on liberals
Margaret Legum
IN her autobiography, Mamphela Ramphele quotes Steve Biko’s opinion that white liberals “lacked a coherent critique of racism and its socio-economic manifestations”. Since then white liberals have been accused of unconscious racism, patronising behaviour and refusing to countenance criticism of themselves, while passing judgment on everyone else.
What Biko and others meant by “white liberals” is the group of white people which opposed race discrimination and supported a non-racial meritocracy, assuming this would produce equality of opportunity and freedom from racial oppression. This group is mystified and infuriated by the charge of racism.
My own emotional/intellectual journey convinces me that Biko was right: white liberals lack a coherent theory about what racism is, where it is rooted, how to recognise it and, therefore, how to deal with it.
They tend to use words like race prejudice, race discrimination and racism interchangeably, as though they mean roughly the same thing. This allows them, for instance, to equate job reservation against Africans with the formation of a black people’s support group in a white organisation, calling both of them “racist”. Superficially there is a similarity; but everyone knows they are not equivalent — just as we know that the killings committed by French Nazis are not morally equivalent to those committed by the Resistance.
In fact, there is a huge difference between race prejudice/discrimination — which describes negative attitudes acted out by one person against another on the grounds of their race — and racism.
Racism is not only about actions based on negative personal attitudes. It is the result of generations of control by one “race” of people over another, such that the culture, norms, theories and practices of the dominant group have become at least partly internalised by both groups. Both groups act out the theories of the dominant group.
That is the essential core of racism: both groups in some degree believe the theory that one group is intrinsically inferior to the other. It is this which distinguishes racism from race discrimination.
Thus the formation of a black people’s support group constitutes discrimination against white people. But it is not racism because it does not carry the implication that white people are inferior to black people, nor does it have the power to generalise the dominant norms which racism delivers.
It follows that our actions as white liberals in opposing race discrimination do not exempt us from the effects of racism. To say they do is to claim a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the only people who have ever grown up without being affected by their culture.
The question is not whether we are “racist”, but in what ways racism has embedded itself in our psyche.
This applies to black as well as white people; but not in the superficial sense in which racism is usually defined. Black people need to become aware of how white racist theories about black inferiority have affected their thinking, their behaviour and their feelings about themselves, other black people and white people.
Most South Africans — including black people, women of all races and Afrikaners — find this model about racism coherent and a good basis for action. They understand from their own experience what it is to internalise concepts of inferiority about themselves, because the ruling group held those theories and controlled the culture in which everyone lived.
The one group which finds this model difficult is that which has always been privileged: it lacks the personal, gut-level experience which allows a painful truth to penetrate. If we have always correctly anticipated a seat in the front row and never had to deal with self- destructive belief systems set up by our “superiors”, we tend to believe that our achievements are due entirely to our own virtue and character, and that less successful others are simply less valuable or hard- working. We underestimate others’ relative disadvantage. We describe efforts to end privilege systems as political correctness, whingeing or “leaning over blackwards”.
Most white liberals tend to fall into this group. They carry a further disadvantage in terms of (mis)understanding the character of racism: their actions during the struggle have relieved them of that sense of generalised “white guilt” which many white people brought with them into the new South Africa. White South Africans who did very little during apartheid are open to the knowledge that their racist conditioning was powerful and pervasive. It helps them digest painful truths.
White liberals are denied even that path to understanding. Often their childhood homes were liberal. They were taught to respect black people and to fight against apartheid – — which they did, often to their cost. They have no sense of personal guilt. They can genuinely believe they have no internalised racist heritage. They are hurt by the very idea and are quick to take offence.
This is my culture. My family was always anti- apartheid. We tried to make friends with black people. We were extremely generous with our time and our money, and endured unpopularity among our peers. We acknowledged that as allies we were weak vessels, lacking the courage to risk prison and torture; but within those limits we were dedicated to supporting change.
My recognition that this opposition to race discrimination in South Africa is not the whole story was slow and painful. I realised that I had no idea whether an Indian man who courted me was attractive or not: his skin colour defied the question itself. I constantly felt I had to be helpful to black people, even that I was responsible for their well-being. My intellectual and emotional judgment was clouded by my concept of them as “poor things”. I was terribly hurt when my quizzing of black people (“only being friendly”), while sharing nothing of myself, was experienced as patronising. I never took seriously warnings about the danger of entering black areas, because my image of black people excluded anything but gratitude to me.
All this was horrible to discover. I hated others knowing it and, above all, I thought black people would use it against me.
My experience is that black people already knew it but had been too polite or fed up to tell me. They were glad when I woke up to it. The only people who have used it against me are a few white people. Recognising some of it in themselves, they hate its exposure and dismiss it as my personal neurosis.
Today, I regard myself as a survivor of that form of learning disability called white liberalism. I am not alone, there are lots of us.
As survivors we no longer think the greatest thing we can say about a black person (and ourselves) is that we don’t see them as black — as though there were something wrong with their colour, or with our eyesight.
We know perfectly well people’s colour will radically influence their experience and identity; to ignore it is to deprive our contact of a large part of its content.