I've been absent for a few days for several reasons - a few "load shedding" evenings that cut into my preferred writing time and several long days outside filled with sunshine where I've been too busy living here for my last week so I haven't had as much interest in posting. But there is also another reason - I knew that I wanted to write a post about race, how I've encountered attitudes towards it and how its conception or enactment has manifested in my experiences here, but it's not really something that is easy to write about because it should be attended with care and it is something that is very important to write about. In individual emails and chats, I've told some of my friends and colleagues the encounters I have witnessed or been (often unwillingly) implicated in, but I have been reticent to write about it more broadly because I can admit - I'm not qualified to say what race relations are like in all of South Africa. I can only speak to instances I have noticed, that have led me to make incomplete deductions and assumptions about how some people talk about race here and how race is enacted as part of the everyday here.
Another reason I was reticent to write about it is that the difference between where I have situated myself isn't simply that I went from the United States to South Africa. It is more particular than that - I moved from a Midwestern, academic environment where I primarily lived near and associated with people connected to a large, tertiary institution to the largest urban environment in the KwaZulu-Natal province where I associated with a wider range of people (including those connected to NGOs, the local university, people living in townships, people living in affluent suburbs, and so on). This distinction is important because what I want to say is - I have encountered and been asked to listen to more overt and linguistically explicit racism - but this is not merely because I am in South Africa. It is also because I'm outside of a university environment where, at least outwardly - respect of race, culture, and gender - has become a norm or expectation, at least in public discourse.
Situating my statements in that way, I can say that I have been asked to listen to racist speech here that has absolutely shocked me and is unlike anything I have encountered living in the United States (whether it was in a lower-middle class neighborhood in Hampton, VA, in Los Angeles, or in a smaller Midwest university town). Perhaps what has been most shocking is the way those who expressed their racist beliefs did not let my presence, often with knowing me for only a few moments, mitigate or impede their expressions of hatred in any way. I was offended in those moments because it made me wonder if the person actually suspected I would be the type of person to identify with or even want to listen to the sentiments they expressed.
I don't want to relate each moment in explicit detail, but there is one that is representative of how a white, paternalistic, colonialist attitude still exists in some South Africans (this particular person is an older woman in her 80s who has lived in Durban all her life). In my first encounter with her when I told her what I had been researching in terms of NGOs that organize craft production with "marginalized" groups her response was simply, "Oh, they're good with their hands, aren't they?" I sputtered through a response about how wide varieties of people enjoy craft production, both as an activity or as a potential means for economic advancement, but I really held back what I wanted to say about her problematic comment.
During my next encounter with her, however, I couldn't ignore the explicit hatred she expressed. When the subject of crime arose, she described the indigenous Africans in South Africa as "savages" who had "ruined the country." I was genuinely surprised that a word that figured so much in 18th and 19th century British colonialist texts actually remained in circulation. I tried to remain calm and suggest that she consider where the construction of an idea of "savage" came from and reminded her about what kind of country, in terms of universal human rights, she was positing as ideal or "unruined." Finally I excused myself and told her I did not want to listen to her hate.
As much as I have encountered far more explicit racist and stereotypical generalizations about groups of people in Durban and South Africa (these large groups being referred to as "the Blacks", "the Coloureds," "the Whites," "the Nigerians," "the Indians," and so on), I can say that overall, I have encountered more discussion about race and its relationship to the nation. As much as this discussion has sounded problematic to me - in terms of my issues with its typification, racist assumptions, and so on - at the same time I have to say: people are talking about race. People talk here about what it means and what race relations are like here. They express anxieties about the predominance of the African National Congress while applauding its past efforts towards universal rights, including suffrage. They worry about the transition of power from Mbeki to Zuma. In nearly every conversation and encounter I have had, however problematically a person has expressed it, people nearly always reference and talk about what is going on, what has changed, what remains a problem, and what the future looks like. It's even in the South African "soapies" that play each day, where issues about crime, HIV/AIDS, poverty, housing, and so on, become active parts of these dramas (in contrast to the, in my opinion, vacuous, self-obsessed, whitewashed American soap operas they play in syndication here that largely deal with personal problems over broad social issues).
So to try to sum up what I have been trying to say - I have been shocked to hear that explicit racist and colonialist beliefs are alive and well, but I have also been so impressed that an active concern with the country (its development, its relations between people, and its role both regionally and globally) is so widely shared and discussed.
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