Xolela Mangcu
FAREED Zakaria’s interview with President Barack Obama for a two-hour CNN documentary titled The Legacy of Barack Obama is instructive. I quote extensively from it because of the parallels with discussions of race in South Africa.
Zakaria starts by asking Obama if he is comfortable that the first line of his biography will be that he was “the first African American president of the US”, despite the fact that he is bi-racial.
Obama’s father was a black man from Kenya and his mother a white woman from Kansas, US. He was brought up by two loving white grandparents, and an Indonesian stepfather.
“Are you comfortable with this characterisation?” asked Zakaria.
“I am actually,” Obama responded. “The concept of race in America is not just genetic. It’s cultural; it’s the notion of a people who look different from the mainstream, suffering terrible oppression but somehow able to make out of that a music, a language, faith and a patriotism.”
As if to illustrate the point, the documentary shows Obama reading from his book Dreams From My Father, in which he recalls a painful childhood experience at a bus stop with his grandparents.
His grandmother became scared of a black man and his grandfather got angry and told him: “She has had issues with men before, but do you know what’s different this time? Before you came, she told me he is black.”
Obama continued reading: “I stopped and felt the earth cracking under my feet. At that moment I realised I was utterly alone”.
In short, as so many black leaders have said since the beginning of time – from WEB Du Bois to Aimé Césaire and Steve Biko, race is not a biological concept. It is a historical concept.
These are the same historical definitions of blackness that some of us have been trying to share with our white colleagues at UCT as they went about questioning the validity of our self-identification as black people.
No, they would have none of it. We were basing our identities on a false biological concept of race. All of this to water down any use of race in admissions policies on the grounds that race was not good science, as if anyone had ever suggested it was.
Ignorance of a historical concept on such a collective scale I had never witnessed. I was recently invited to one of the best private schools in the US to talk about Africa.
The school has a distinctive teaching method. Each grade focuses on a particular theme for the year, such as ancient Greece in fourth grade, ancient China in fifth grade and Africa in sixth grade. And here we are in our universities with professors and heads of department who question the role of Africa in the historical production of knowledge.
This is not only racist; it’s an embarrassment for any university. And that is the reason I have over the years been calling for more black professors in our universities.
It is not a matter of bean counting, but of improving scholarship. The best universities do not try to run away from recognising people’s identities or are coy about it. They make those identities the basis of epistemological enrichment.
If you don’t believe me, just witness the richness of the conversation between Zakaria, a Harvard graduate from India, and Obama, a black Harvard graduate from Chicago.
That is what we want our students to become.
But those identities are an asset only in an environment in which they are appreciated and affirmed,