My white world’s racism shame
THE greatest challenge to white people, and especially to white anti-racist activists, is admitting to our own racist indoctrination and unconscious racism.
The challenge is recognising that we are part of the fabric of a global system of domination, which bestows privileges onto us by virtue of the colour of our skin and thus we are never “not benefitting” from our whiteness.
As white folk, are we ever able to overcome completely the racist indoctrination we were brought up with and can we ever fully claim the status of nonracists, even those of us who are practising antiracism activists?
Through years of deep reflection on my upbringing and learnt racism, I have come to recognise that a deeply held conviction that is entrenched in the collective white psyche from the moment we pass into the realm of language is that to be human is to be white.
This is the inevitable indoctrination of those who grow up in a white Christian settler society that has its ideological roots in a colonial narrative of black bestiality (the bodily being) and white supremacy (the disembodied pure being created in the image of God).
This narrative excludes the humanity, the intellect and the spirit of black folk and retained these qualities as exclusively belonging to white folk.
Colonial discourse created the construct of a black primal and uncontrollable sexuality. The enslaved black man was constructed as inferior, savage, and ungodly.
The notion that the black man had an insatiable craving to conquer the bastion of pure and pious white womanhood was concocted to control white women.
It also served to justify the behaviour of white slave masters, who projected and performed their lust on their female slaves.
The message is that whites are a morally superior race and that blacks are dangerous and prone to committing the most heinous acts of crime against the most innocent in our society.
These constructed stories that white communities tell themselves are validated both privately and publicly and circulated by the social and mainstream media.
The story of the black rapist forcing himself on the white female is the one pushed most determinedly. A white rape victim is often given more media time to share her traumatic narrative than a black woman is. In fact most rapes of black women attract very little attention.
The horrible truth is that from the moment white children of my generation could comprehend their surroundings, we were exposed to a system in which whiteness was central to privilege, rationality and superiority.
Blackness was marginalised and supposed black inferiority justified the usurpation of independence and livelihood and turned an entire nation into slaves and later, cheap labour.
This began with the settlers in 1652 (although Portuguese slavers were active in South Africa since the 1400s) and culminated in the 1913 Land Act. This oppression of black people was systemically entrenched in apartheid.
This is the central premise of white supremacy, which all white people are born into. Thus white people cannot claim that they were not, or have never been, racist.
None of us escape this racist conditioning. If it did not come from our families then it most certainly came from the system that pushed blackness into the shadows, onto the outskirts, into prisons and poverty-stricken homelands.
It was a system that reduced black people to servants and cheap labour status. It was this reality that was embedded into the consciousness of SA’s white society and dished out the strong message that black people were less valuable than whites.
Many of these propagated lies about blackness found their way into our unconscious and I would go as far as to say that any white person who claims to be untouched by this supremacist programming is not being honest.
We have to ask how this historical conditioning plays out in the contemporary collective mind of white people who were (and still are) raised to think that they are central to everything in relation to other races.
It is a painful thing to come to terms with our role in the subjugation of other races.
But if this work is not done then the residue of racist programming is always there, lurking just beneath the surface and it will rear its ugly head when least expected. It is inevitable.
It is the dark shadow of shame about the oppression of fellow humans. It is a psychological and emotional cancer.
Junot Diaz asks, “How can you change something if you won’t even acknowledge its existence, or if you downplay its significance? White supremacy is the great silence of our world, and in it is embedded much of what ails us as a planet…”
It is painful to come to terms with our role in subjugating others