Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Sadly, racism is alive and unwell
Centuries of destructive behaviour and toxic attitudes cannot be wiped out in 20 years, writes Réjane Williams
THE RECENT surge in the number of reported racially charged incidents has brought the issues of race and racism back into our public discourse.
As a nation we still carry a deep concern about the real nature of race relations and continue to be alarmed by these public eruptions.
This raises questions about how we have dealt with the issue of race since 1994, whether we could and should have done better, and what legacy we might leave to our children and future generations.
Apartheid South Africa was preceded by centuries of colonialism and slavery. Although these three might have operated differently, each systemically enforced white supremacy and privilege – the belief that white Western groups were superior to darker-skinned peoples of the south.
Apartheid systematised these beliefs through legislation, policies, and institutions. This included the regulation of where and how people lived, the education and medical institutions people could access, where they shopped, worshipped, and where they engaged in sport, cultural, social and leisure activities.
The eventual dismantling of apartheid and the processes of democratisation have needed to respond to decades of racialised programming to which all people in this country have been subjected.
We must acknowledge the implementation of an anti-discriminatory constitutional and legislative framework that attempts to create an enabling environment for all who live here.
However, we have to ask whether we have done enough to address the psychosocial impact of decades of indoctrination that supported a particular unjust and unequal systemic organisation of our society.
We have to consider that more may need to be done to bring about change at the personal, attitudinal, and cultural levels.
In our new and developing democracy, we have not addressed our past of racialised programming with a level of robustness that is comparable with that of colonialand apartheid-era race thinking and practice.
We also cannot ignore that race, racism and racialisation are international issues and a cause of inequality and conflict across the globe. What is to be done? First, in 1980s South Africa, discourses around race, racism, antiracism, and non-racialism were far more critically engaged in communities of struggle. The concept of “race” was debunked as a biological concept and the principle that there was only one race, the human race, informed thinking and action aimed at dismantling apartheid.
Since 1994, we have slipped into a lazy engagement with the concept of race. We no longer sufficiently problematise the concept nor are we teaching our children the true history and meaning of race as a social construct.
We cannot continue to let ourselves off the hook by thinking of race as a legacy problem and creat- ing the illusion that it is not a current problem.
Race thinking is an undeniable part of present-day democracies and a mark of neo-liberalism. We are called to reflect consciously on how we engage non-racialism as a lived practice and not just an intellectual ideal.
Second, we have underestimated the psychosocial impact of racism on all our people’s lives. While we may be aware of material inequali- ties, the psychological and emotional well-being of different groups remains largely unacknowledged.
We don’t often address how we have all been at the receiving end of race thinking and racialisation: that at the conscious and unconscious level, race thinking has contributed to who we are, how we behave and our expectations of ourselves and each other.
Whether or not we care to admit this, this has a generational impact as we pass these often unexamined teachings on to our children.
Racism and the process of racialisation has resulted in generations of groups believing or living as if they are superior or inferior to others. Those regarded as superior have lived with a sense of entitlement – that they have the God-given, naturally assigned right to their beliefs, values, practices, wants and needs. They therefore have learnt to live with dominance, privilege, greater self-esteem and life expectations as if this were the natural social order.
The psychosocial consequences for this group is an unexamined sense of entitlement to have the world as they want it, an overinflated sense of self, and to feel insecure, threatened by and fearful of what they might lose.
Often those who recognise their unearned privilege live with feelings of guilt and shame.
On the other hand, those regarded as inferior have lived the reality of being second-class citizens – they were taught and expected to be of service, to lower their life expectations, to accept their lower station in life.
The psychosocial consequences for this group include a lack of selfesteem, anxiety, frustration, a sense of non-belonging and living life as a constant battle with marginalisation and oppression.
Given the ways in which race thinking has been internalised in these ways, why do we believe that, after only 20 years, we can claim racism is a relic of the past and we have done enough to undo this history; that we have done enough to prevent intergenerational transmission of racism; that we have done enough to address the disastrous psychosocial effects of our past, while the effects of material inequality stare us in the face?
Neither we nor our children can claim to be immune and unaccountable within a context inescapably shaped by the past. We have to begin to take responsibility for the whole problem – and not only the ways in which we are individually affected.
We all have to have the renewed energy to continue to address racism and the psychosocial and material consequences associated not only with oppression, poverty, inequality, and marginalisation, but with dominance and privilege.
This is the present-day problem our children need to be equipped to address as part of their lived realities here and as citizens of the world.
Race also remains a form of oppression that intersects with other forms of marginalisation, such as sexism and classism. At the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies we are strong proponents of a curriculum for critical diversity literacy as part of school, tertiary and workplace education to build our capacity to deal more effectively with these issues.
Part of this education means learning to understand the effects of our identities on our own lives and the lives of others and to engage this more consciously and effectively.
We are also strong advocates of active citizenship education and community building where we all start to take responsibility for the whole and not only the divided groups into which we have been inducted.
We all have work that needs to be done for the well-being not only of ourselves, but, equally important, the well-being of others, our children and generations to come here and across the globe.
● Réjane Williams is based at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies.