White identity in a changing SA PART V
'Under the African Skies' is the fifth and last narrative of our review of Melissa Steyn's book, "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be - White Identity In a Changing South Africa."
The narrative comprises of three sub-narratives or strands, namely: 'I just don't know what to do, being white', 'I don't wanna be white no more', and 'Hybridisation, that's the name of the game'.
Their doubts, fears and insecurities about the future of white South Africans notwithstanding, all but one of the sub-narrators represent a marked departure from the master narrative discussed in the beginning of the review, five weeks ago. They acknowledge the implications of whiteness and genuinely seek an emancipating identity that is non-racial.
In this review, we summarise the characteristics of the previous narratives, after which we illustrate the main tenets of the present narrative. This is followed by a brief discussion of what impelled us to undertake the review in the first place.
Narratives of whiteness
During the last four weeks, we discussed four narratives of whiteness as discussed in the book, "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be - White Identity In a Changing South Africa."
These narratives are:
- 'Still colonial after all these years', which "holds on to a sense of importance of whiteness..." in which "power is, and should be, in the hands of whites to influence change along European, 'white' ways..."
- 'This shouldn't happen to a white'. This narrative still clings to whiteness and sees the changes taking place in the country as having a "disempowering" effect "with catastrophic implications" to whiteness. According to Steyn, "This is a story about whiteness besieged, insulted, and victimised by present circumstances, which have robbed it of its power to control, and even influence the future."
- 'Don't think white, It's all right', which sees whites as having lost power and, as a result, envisages options of "new forms of subjectivity within a more inclusive structure". The essential characteristic of this narrative is that it does not encourage or discourage the abandonment of white identity as ordained by colonial and apartheid power relations.
- 'A whiter shade of white' avoids acknowledging and confronting the personal - and therefore collective - implications of South African socialisation. Steyn calls it "a narrative of denial: engaging in thinking about one's own racialisation is blindly terrifying".
As indicated above, the present narrative under review, 'Under the African Skies', conveys hope for the country as it attempts to deal honestly with the implications of whiteness, our racist past and present, in search of a non-racial tomorrow.
It is worth noting that the non-racial narrative, however defined, is not new in South Africa. The struggle against apartheid itself, as with our nation building commitment, represents a narrative in favour of an inclusive identity. The history of our struggle is replete with examples of the heroic role played by white patriots against racist oppression. Therein lies yet another narrative, arguably more revolutionary than the one we are reviewing, which, though a significant step forward, is incomparable from the non-racial narrative forged in the struggle against apartheid.
Below we discuss the tenets of the narrative, 'Under the African skies'.
'I just don't know what to do, being white'
According to Steyn, this sub-narrative consists of feelings of ambivalence and duality, a measure of not knowing whether one is coming or going, so to speak. The narrators do not always know how to negotiate the terrain of the unfolding process of change. A secretary who belongs in this province of the narrative captures the sense of loss in which one gleans her desire to move ahead when she says that her whiteness "is a position of artificial privilege which is being challenged strongly by an emerging black consciousness". As she sees it, "whiteness now caries the stigma of apartheid much as in Nazi Germany with 'Aryans'."
The narrators tend to appreciate identity as a social, rather than as a natural pre-ordained, fact (about which nothing can be done). Because of this, argues Steyn, they have the possibility to master a sense of perspective "on the way in which the changes impinge on them personally".
Their confusion and fears aside, some of the communicators of this narrative demonstrate a genuine desire to move forward. An academic development officer confesses to the importance of a "positive shift", and wants to "work hard to break down the stereotypes because, as he puts it, he wants to be seen in "the 'complex' me, not the label."
About this process, Steyn remarks: "A willingness to take on the implications of one's racialisation into 'whiteness', and to cooperate in dismantling the structural privilege it entailed, can be painful and lonely. Feelings of inadequacy and alienation are inevitable, but are not the last word. No one said it would be easy."
But there can be a sense of regression, a theatrical showmanship, whose benign manifestation serves to obscure more than it illuminates. This is represented in the next sub-narrative discussed below.
'I don't wanna be white no more'
The oracles of this strand of the narrative are consumed by the guilt of the crimes of the past. Rather than engage honestly with guilt, they project an outward posture of non-racialism, which is false. They romanticise blackness in ways that are insulting to the very black people with whom they profess to identify. (In short, they love black people more than black people love themselves.)
The purveyors of this narrative will tend to evince the supposedly politically correct statements, accompanied by what they perceive to be politically correct actions. In his book, "Lords of Poverty", Graham Hancock provided a detailed illustration of supposedly helpful, but actually disastrous, approaches adopted by international donor agencies in the developing world. Whether or not one agrees with his analysis of the reasons behind the problems within the agencies, Hancock highlights manifestations of the romantic mentality to which purveyors of this strand of the narrative are prone.
Citing the response of the aid community to the Somali famine of the mid 1980s, Hancock says, among many other shocking things, "Amongst useless drugs designed to remedy the ailments of affluent patients, the poor and hungry, in what is one of the hottest countries in the world, have also received frostbite medicine shipped from Minnesota, electric blankets, and huge consignments of Go-Slim soup and chocolate flavour drinks for dieters."
He adds that "Laxatives and anti-indigestion remedies are other favourites amongst agencies that provide humanitarian relief to the starving." Of some of the agencies, Hancock says, they are "riddled through and through with notions of compassion that are, as one observer has put it, 'inherently ethnocentric, paternalistic and non-professional'."
And so, a narrator of this strand of the narrative in Steyn's book professes: "Whiteness is boring - superficial and very thin in comparison with the black/brown spirit - rhythm, joy, love, kindness, simplicity -and everything that counts a great deal." Deep down this perception of blackness is a colonial representation of the African as nothing but an exquisite entity, a sub species that provides peculiarities as a source of permanent wonder. Like the aid workers in Hancock's "Lords of Poverty", this is inherently paternalistic and racist.
'Hybridisation, that's the name of the game'
The narrators of hybridisation demonstrate a healthy and honest attempt to come to terms with whiteness and seek to forge a truly non-racial identity that accords with post-apartheid ideals. They understand the socio-historic genesis of whiteness. Unlike the previous narratives, they do not seek to hide their racial socialisation and consciousness and find the unfolding process of change as liberating and enabling them to move forward.
Although he has some demonstrable misgivings about the future of his children, a lecturer confesses to feeling good about the process of change. He is "more healthy [and] free of ... guilt". Contrasting the old and new South Africa, a management consultant says "It was possible to grow up in South Africa and be totally disconnected from the way the majority lived and coped and to create a separate reality. The effects on me as a white woman relate more to being linked to an atrocious system through colour and therefore association, and the emotional and mental consequences of that have affected me. Black South Africans suffered more, though, in every way."
Yet another respondent, a mathematical statistician has this to say: "I realise that many white people are claiming ignorance of anything before February 2, 1990, when De Klerk unbanned the ANC. Blacks began remarking about the 'new skins' white South Africans were offering to one and all. Whites try to ingratiate themselves by claiming to have always been non-racial, to have never voted the National Party, to have always had black friends etc."
The ability to confront the past, even their complicity through acts of commission and omission puts these narrators in good stead to grapple with change. It involves having to acknowledge that their advantage as white people was occasioned by a social system founded on the racial subjugation of others.
Steyn says of these narrators, "losing dominance does not simply equate with personal defeat, though it certainly is the end of the story of whiteness as the Master used to tell it." She adds that "The process requires renouncing the role of the white master on the continent, foregoing the assumptions of a God-given place on the continent, recognising the legitimacy of Africans ... dismantling the edifice of South African whiteness and finding humility."
At an interpersonal level, it involves levelling questions of power within human relationships, such that Steyn depicts the narrators of the present sub-narratives as honest brokers of interpersonal relations among their fellow non-white humans.
The last word goes to the consultant: "When encountering or experiencing relationships, one looks for commonality rather than difference - I have taken on more Africanness through my friendships and become less 'white'. Through this process, I am becoming more aware of my own identity, and my internal/less obvious/developed racism and prejudices. I am acquiring more of a feel about who I WANT to be in the New South Africa."
Conclusion
Five weeks ago when we began this review, we pointed out that the ideal of a non-racial, non-sexist and democratic South Africa has guided our movement since its inception. It is an ideal for which many of our people died.
We also observed that the attainment of a truly non-racial society requires of all South Africans to engage, constantly, in dialogue about its nature, its implications in practical daily life, in our interactions as fellow South Africans in different walks of life.
Throughout the five weeks of the review, we consistently returned to what we believe is an unhelpful tendency in the attainment of a non-racial society, namely, the resistance to discuss race and racism as a social category. We observed this growing tendency in public discourse that finds expression in newspaper columns, books, the airwaves and the persuasive industries as a whole.
In keeping with this tendency, we note that media reporting about this review and the book, "Whiteness Just Isn't What It Used To Be - White Identity In a Changing South Africa", was only covered in the Afrikaans press with a deafening silence from the English Press including media houses that have effected black economic empowerment transactions and are now part owned and managed by the historically oppressed.
Furthermore, we are aware that none of the local book publishers have considered publishing the book despite the fact that it concerns itself with an important feature of our country's transition. None of our local book distributors too will distribute the book, demonstrating a deadly stranglehold on the production and distribution of ideas.
To this end, we are obliged to ask questions about the democratic commitment of our persuasive industries including the very remedial policy measures needed to effect change.
And so the question, and the issue, of hegemony remains!
The legacy of apartheid engineering in South Africa today is still what Ashley Montagu calls "an endemic disorder", in his monumental, "Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the fallacy of race". Montagu coined this phrase in 1942, during the years of Nazi tyranny.
In page 58 of his book, he quotes the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, who wrote in his "Treatise on Human Nature" as follows:
"I am apt to suspect that all negroes, and in general all other species of men ... to be naturally inferior to the white ... No ingenious manufacturers among them, no arts, no sciences ... Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity."
At the time when the apartheid republic of South Africa was declared in the early 1960s, the time of the Sharpeville Massacre, and the resumption of the armed struggle through the formation and actions of Umkhonto we Sizwe, Phillip Tobias, one-time Head of the Department of Anatomy, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, explained the meaning of race as "a national neurosis of the obsessional variety".
Epilogue
Where is the progressive intelligentsia that is willing to join Melissa Steyn to counter the present day David Hume's? What magic wand shall we use to inspire all South Africans honestly to admit and accept that objective racism and subjective racism remain potent factors in the physiology of our society?
What cataclysm must occur to convince all of us that recognition of the reality of entrenched racism in our country is the fundamental precondition for the success of the struggle to eliminate race as a defining feature of our humanity? What impulse will compel all of us to listen to the words - he who has ears to hear, let him hear!
** "Whiteness Just Isn't What it Used to Be - White Identity in a Changing South Africa", by Melissa Steyn: State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. 2001. |
