Miss SA and the ‘non-white’ debate
Crowning raises tough question: isn’t it time to retire apartheid’s ‘coloured’ classification?
● There’s just no pleasing some people — coloured people, that is.
Tamaryn Green, the beauty queen from Paarl (you can’t get more coloured than that) has become a lightning rod for heated discussion about what constitutes “authentic colouredness” — and about whether coloureds are even black.
The latter, despite being a particularly regrettable discussion to be taking place 24 years since the advent of democracy, is nevertheless long overdue. It’s time to have an honest discussion about coloured people feeling, rightly or wrongly, that they have been marginalised by the national democratic project. Particularly if one considers that a couple of years ago, coloureds quietly knocked whites off their perch as the second-largest race group in South Africa.
While there are many coloureds celebrating her win as Miss South Africa, Tamaryn Green, with her delicate features, has flung open Pandora’s box, with some commenting that a coloured woman is not “representative” of South Africa.
This confirms a view held by many coloureds that, as the saying goes, they weren’t white enough under apartheid, and they’re not black enough under democracy.
Not that beauty pageant wins are a litmus test, but this is further reinforced when the chatterati start pulling out pictures of former Miss South Africa winners to claim that Jacqui Mofokeng was the first black woman to hold the title, when in fact it was Amy Kleinhans the year before.
One recalls how media at the time described Kleinhans, a coloured woman, as “the first nonwhite” winner. In the case of Green, the spectre of the “non-white” label looms as large.
When it comes to representation, it is regrettable that as blacks we still have a crabs -ina-bucket mentality: instead of revelling in how far we have come since whites-only contests, we want to take it down to levels of melanin.
Not that it’s all been seriousness. Some coloureds have been lamenting that the problem isn’t that Green won, but that she did so with her Western beauty. A girl like her, they say, with “small features” and hair that’s “type 2” was far more acceptable than one with a broad nose and a kroeskop. For those not in the know about coloured coiffure, this is hair that could do with a GHD but not yet tubs of Sheen Hair Strate.
Leaving aside notions of acceptable beauty standards, the discussion of where coloureds see themselves in South Africa today is a timely one.
A useful barometer for coloured sentiment is the Proudly Coloured brigade that inhabits Facebook. Its adherents have been commenting at length on how “one of our own” has been crowned the fairest of them all.
This group subscribes to the notion of coloureds as a race apart (from other blacks, that is).
All sorts inhabit Planet Proudly Coloured. There are the colourful, who are just there to revel in glorious coloured pastimes like the jazz and eating a gatsby. There are the historians, who want to educate us about the glorious lineage running through every coloured’s veins (usually a Khoisan chief or a Malay prince).
Then there are the crypto-racists, quick to anger— who imagine there is a sinister conspiracy to sideline coloureds. They were out in force during the Ashwin Willemse saga a few weeks ago, going on about how the former Bok wasn’t just sticking it to The Man, but standing up on behalf of coloureds everywhere.
Planet Proudly Coloured has its share of trolls, with racist epithets directed at those who say Thando Mfundisi would have been a more “representative” winner.
That there is still debate around whether coloureds are “real blacks” shows that there remain deep-seated and uncomfortable issues.
The anti-black racism displayed by a minority of coloureds on social media is by no means representative of a whole population group, but those of us who grew up among coloureds know all too well that the distinctness coloureds claim for themselves is more often than not used as a cover for prejudice — directed not just at “the blacks” but at coloureds who look and act “too black”.
Light-skinned person of colour (POC) privilege existed under apartheid, and exists today. This has bred an arrogance in certain coloured circles; they wear the Proudly Coloured label not as cultural self-expression, but as an assertion of a worrying and divisive coloured nationalism.
Real questions must be asked about whether an apartheid-era classification that was part of the National Party’s divide-and-rule machinations should persist.
In South Africa — and South Africa alone — people of mixed heritage are classified as a separate race in the population register. Once designed to enforce coloured privilege at the expense of other blacks, it appears that, all these years later, it continues to enforce apartness between coloureds and the rest of the black population.
As coloureds are at pains to point out, they are not a homogenous monolith. This isn’t merely a rejection of stereotypes that paint everyone as a gangster, a skelling antie with curlers at midday, or a banjo-strumming buffoon. It is also a quest for recognition of the racial, cultural and even political diversity that exists among coloureds.
Given the diversity of the coloured gene pool, it makes even less sense that they should be classified as a separate race group. The one-drop rule should surely apply. And this is to say nothing of the ridiculous sub-classification of “black African”.
Accepting that no single race can lay claim to being “pure” in the world today, isn’t it high time we abolished the nonsensical category of coloured with all its apartheid hangover connotations?
Either that, or we abolish the term “black”, and make us all coloured since we are in reality.
After all, if everyone is coloured, no one is.