The abiding sting of racism
It’s been almost 30 years since the end of apartheid – and racism is alive and kicking (it kicks and it hurts).
V and I were kicked at an otherwise happy event – the wedding of friends – last week. Quite late in the evening, we sat at a table to take a breather from festivities and were joined by a person who lives in our area. I asked her if she had met my husband, V.
Because it is relevant here, I will tell you that V’s forebears came from India. Mine came from England and Germany. In fact, many South Africans’ forebears came from somewhere else.
When we married 37 years ago, the Mixed Marriages Act and Section 16 of the Immorality Act had just been repealed. Before that, our relationship was illegal and we could have been jailed for it; many were. I wrote about embracing normality and freedom here. We’ve come a long, long way as a society since those laws were lifted – but not far enough.
Icky
“I do love an Indian!” the kicker declared. My skin crawled. “And I love curry and samoosas.”
She continued: “Hey, Naidoo, let’s dance.” Naidoo is a fairly common surname among South Africans of Indian descent. V’s surname is not Naidoo.
Perhaps fortunately, V could not hear much of this as the music was loud. I know he would have reacted much louder and with more choice words than me.
But I did react. “That’s rude,” I said. “That’s like him saying to you, ‘Hey, honky’.” (“Honky”, if you don’t know, is a derogative name for a white person.)
Her response, with a few “f… f…” under her breath: “Don’t judge me!” So, it’s okay then to point a finger at someone’s race and label them?
An underlying disease
Days later, I could still feel the ickiness of what she had said. I felt dirty, and even more so because racism does not get puked up in an isolated way – it’s deeply entrenched in our society. It goes much deeper than highly publicised incidents, which are eruptions of an underlying disease. This person just brought it home for me. V told me that he experiences some form of racism often.
We see racism playing out in appalling xenophobia and police brutality – all targeted at black people with lower incomes. And it’s fuelled by inequality. South Africa is now officially the most unequal society in the world and race is a key driver.
And we see racism fuelled when people – mostly white people, it must be said – simply refuse to acknowledge that apartheid still has an impact on us. Reflected in their privilege is the battle that many black people wage from a disadvantaged beginning – an uneven playing ground. They will tell you: “I worked much harder than other people (read: ‘those lazy blacks’) to get here.”
Clinging to classification
We have one of the most progressive Constitutions in the world. It protects the rights of all, and it’s great on paper. We even have a National Action Plan to Combat Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. You can find that here.
Yet our government clings to race classification.
The Population Registration Act classified us according to race and was the basis of racist laws like the Mixed Marriages Act and the Group Areas Act (which reserved the best residential and business areas for people classified white). This race classification was even the foundation for the Bantustans (the “homelands” that the apartheid government declared as “independent” countries and the home of black people). The race classification law was lifted in 1991, but 32 years later, our government asks for our race on its forms, claiming that it does this for data purposes to overcome inequalities.
There is a big push now towards classifying people according to income and need, not race. You can read about that here.
That same BBC article quotes clinical psychologist Saths Cooper: “We always put a colour, we put external attributes to it and then we put maybe language and maybe belief to it and that allows for further division. That narrative then perpetuates itself.
“We haven’t given people enough reason to say we identify as South Africans.”
It is not just up to government (and many are losing faith that anything meaningful will come from that direction). And neither is it just up to great initiatives like the Anti-Racism Network of South Africa, facilitated by the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, which works to equip organisations to deal with racism issues in communities.
It’s up to you and me
At the end of the day, overcoming racism – and everything ugly that it represents and perpetuates – is up to all of us.
Not too long ago, I was part of a conversation between black and white women in my book club. We spoke openly and honestly about things like that uneven playing ground and black tax, whereby black people, often professionals, who have jobs support their extended families and communities. The beginnings of true understanding emerged, and it was a beautiful thing.
“In a racist society it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.”
Those were the words of US activist Angela Davis in the 1970s and they apply now more than ever. We have to actively confront racism in ourselves. We have to talk about race and racism. And we have to call it out.
