Moving through whiteness to prosperity
If we want to get to the root of the anger felt by black middle-class people about white racism, the most obvious examples are the wrong place to look. It is not the likes of Penny Sparrow’s outburst that hurt most, I don’t think, nor Helen Zille’s remarks about colonialism. It is when black people find they are complicit in fuelling a sense of white superiority — and that there is nothing they can do to stop their complicity — that the deepest wounds are opened. And I think black middle-class people find themselves in this position all the time.
Take the sphere of education. In a recent article published in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Mark Hunter, one of the most perceptive social scientists working on SA today, writes about the desegregation of schooling in Durban over the past quarter of a century. When formerly white public schools started competing fiercely with one another in the early 2000s, Hunter observes, many began investing heavily in rugby. Some parents were outraged. Why spend egregious sums of money on sport if your goal is to do better academically? The answer, Hunter argues, is that schools that wanted to attract the cream of both black and white parents needed to project “a white tone”.
Why would black parents want their kids to enrol at such schools? Because “the advantages [they] offer in addition to high academic standards”, Hunter writes, “include prestigious accents, connections to businesses and social networks that emerge from relatively privileged schoolchildren being concentrated in the same institution”.
Schools with “a white tone”, in other words, are the arenas in which the postapartheid elite, both black and white, acquire the cultural knowledge and the connections to move up in the world.
We are dealing here with a level of complexity that may just begin to account for the depths of black middle-class anger. White school principals spend money on keeping a white tone, not because they are racist but because they want, among other things, to recruit black kids from influential families. And black parents pay good money to enrol their kids in such schools not because they are self-denigrating but because that is how they ensure that their families remain upwardly mobile.
This situation is, in part, a consequence of the nature of the settlement SA reached in 1994. That the professions and the corporations remained predominantly white meant that whiteness remained the touchstone of advancement. This is not what black people bargained for back in 1994. It was not imagined that to get to the distant shore of prosperity one had to swim through a sea of whiteness.
At a rugby match at a Durban high school in 2012, Hunter saw the power of this multiracial whiteness at work. “I walked with a teacher around the pristine pitch and socialised in an expensive new stand funded by an old boy,” he writes. “Being a white man myself, I was not surprised that I would be welcomed into this mostly, but by no means exclusively, white male world. With my host to introduce me, I moved, always with a firm and friendly handshake, from ‘old boy’ to parent to pupil. In these brief encounters I felt a sense of openness to networking that I had not anticipated — as if an exchange of business cards was only a short step away.”
This saturation in whiteness, of course, brings dividends for black kids. “One black former student of the school where the rugby match was held told me that when he interviewed for a job, he struck up an immediate rapport with a white interviewer who had attended a competitor rugby school and was offered the job.”
The costs of this journey through whiteness to prosperity are surely very high, the more so because the feelings evoked are so ineffable, so ambient, so hard to pin down. I do not think Sparrow would inspire such rage if black people did not have to embrace whiteness on their way up. Nor would Zille’s comments on the good side of colonialism invoke such anger if they were solely about the past. There is nothing as uncomfortable as a form of submission in which one is complicit. It is because the world Hunter describes is so powerfully real that race remains so incendiary as if every scene of connection between black and white is littered with mines that might explode.
National politics in all its forms is consumed by the vigilance required to avoid stepping on these mines. That is why a careless tweet has ended an illustrious political career. Zille’s sin was not to have raised a debate about the past. It was to have been deaf to the most difficult aspects of being black here and now.
I DO NOT THINK SPARROW WOULD INSPIRE SUCH RAGE IF BLACK PEOPLE DID NOT HAVE TO EMBRACE WHITENESS ON THEIR WAY UP