Shout and burn down the fences
Iam responding to Milisuthando Bongela’s article “Some histories to keep our interracial friendship honest” (Friday, March 16). I acknowledge the biases of my “female whiteness” and that it will take an entire lifetime of knowledge to deconstruct my perceptions of the world.
What I find troubling is your failure to recognise you are engaging in the same colonial discourses that encourage segregation propagated by those “acerbic-natured disciplinarians and high-voiced disciples, devoted to shouting”. I am very familiar with those relics of colonialism: it extended well beyond racial lines and blasted anything nonconformist or “other”.
The favourite tactic is to keep a line between “us” and “them”. We are forbidden to cross into the world of the other and the African was always the other. Now, according to your article, I have become the other. This is perfectly acceptable but it does have implications. I believe you are falling into a trap I have spent my entire life trying to escape.
You left white friends because they failed to understand you as “complex African person” and the responsibility was left at their feet.
How is this different from colonial attitudes that endorse separate fields of existence? The other cannot understand a different form of cultural identity and so must remain isolated in their ignorance.
The whiteness you describe as stable and unmoving can no longer exist. The colonial protective bubble is a historical construct that is being demolished.
Whiteness is forced to re-examine itself as it is exposed to the truly hybrid nature of humanity. You underestimate the powerful forces of democratisation.
Does this mean white racial prejudice does not exist? No. But racial discrimination is no longer the dominant discourse in white ideological concepts of existence, and the white woman in your article is more than capable of challenging them.
We are no longer passive recipients of historical ideologies.
The only way to truly fight colonialist ideological discourses is through dialogue across cultural difference, and not by maintaining the status quo of separatism and otherness.
Any race or culture is capable of adapting or falling for the seductive discourses of otherness and natural difference. I know you do not encourage an ideology of separatism, because you hope that we can one day reach “a plane where light can reach”. But there is still the fence of the “historically imbalanced power dynamic”, which will remain as long as everyone still fears it — as colonialism intended.
History and democratic revolution have ripped wide holes in that fence, and now its remnants must be torn down. We challenge it daily by interacting across racial divides and by promoting friendships across cultures.
Shout at the white woman as you would your African friend.
As long as you remain silent, she will not understand. Shout at her boldly and loudly, and she must hear. You will notice how quickly the fences burn. —