Racism is Alive And Kicking ...

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Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)

OPINION
May 24, 2001
Posted to the web May 24, 2001

John Matshikiza
Johannesburg

And so, lest I be tarred in perpetuity with a brush that says I have only ever had frivolous words to add to the debate about racism (and therefore must belong to "the other side") let me try and sort out a few thoughts on the subject.

Racism is alive and well, and thriving in South Africa and the world at large. Racism is both overt and subliminal. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the one from the other.

Overt racism is in the face of the white farmer who shoots at black children crossing what he thinks of as his property, or in the face of the other white farmer who covers a black worker from top to toe in silver paint to make a point about what the farmer considers to be insubordination.

Overt racism also used to reside in the pass laws, job reservation, separate development, slavery and the trade in Africa slaves, Jim Crow, lynch mobs, Tough-On-Black-Ass "traditions" like back-of-the-bus and theatre seats for niggers high up in the rafters, and segregated schooling systems that gave white kids an unquestioning subliminal leg-up in the race for survival at home and abroad.

Overt racism today is what only black people can feel in their day-to-day dealings with certain kinds of white people, dealings that are simultaneously both too brutal and too subtle to catalogue. Overt racism has gone underground, but is all the more boastful for its newfound need to be out there and unrepentant.

Subliminal racism is the way in which otherwise enlightened white intellectuals avoid the subject. "What's wrong with South Africa?" an unchosen dinner companion will ask. "Look around you. Everything is working normally." And to demonstrate his vision, he will point around at the ranks of happily oblivious white diners tucking in to duck de foi gras and Canadian salmon in the restaurant you have found yourselves in somewhere in the secluded northern suburbs, where the only black faces are those serving table or clearing away the mess in the kitchen. In fact, in the best places, even the waiters (or waitrons, as they are called in these days of gender, if not racial, sensitivity) will be white, like the bulk of the clientele.

So the black majority, the African bit of the feast, will be represented by the peelers and the cleaners. And, of course, the odd interloper like me, who sits there at table and orders wine and oysters as if he came from that other world, while internally feeling distinctly odd, if not a little embarrassed.

Why should I feel embarrassed at subliminal manifestations of racism, while those who manifest it at the dinner table are more at ease with the security of the new South Africa than they ever were with the old? But that's another long dialogue.

Let us plunge deeper into these dangerous waters.

Is a white person, or are all white persons, inherently racist? No. Is the Afrikaner inherently a racist? No. Is racism a white thing, with blacks forever the victims, or can racism work in reverse? This becomes more difficult to be definitive about. And if it can work in reverse, how much damage can it do? Could black racism ever wreak the devastation that white racism has wrought over the centuries?

All raw stuff. But it is provoked out of me at this time by the seemingly high-flown but in reality banal manner in which the subject of racism is being approached by many public figures at this time in South Africa.

Yes, racism is alive and kicking in the streets of our town, of our country, of our world. Last year, for example, I dropped in for a few hours at the Aardklop Festival of Afrikaans Culture (or so we were told it would be) in the university town of Potchefstroom. There were no "Europeans Only" or "Slegs vir Blankes" signs to be seen (except perhaps in jest) but it was a chilling experience nevertheless, because, whatever the nouveau intelligentsia of Afrikanerdom might have thought, the bedrock of their culture, the hoi polloi that was filling up the streets and buying the vital hotdogs in the streets, was still mired in old habits of racial superiority, and had simply reengineered their binoculars to deal with the irritating realities of the new South Africa. White culture was being celebrated in spite of the superficial impositions of the new reality.

As my daughter, a young woman who never experienced hard apartheid but nevertheless has eyes to see, observed: "It was as if we weren't there. They just looked right through us."

So there we were in the streets of Potchefstroom, pretending we were there, but in reality being as absent in the minds of the people who really do own those kinds of shindig because, if they couldn't ban us or remove us, they could simply ignore us. Once again, the only black people who "were there" were the cleaners and the peelers, who had to stay in the background while keeping the boerewors stalls ticking over and clearing up the mess at the end.

Is there a conclusion to this?

Maybe not. South Africa keeps on ticking. That is the problem. Laws have been changed, but physical and economic realities remain their smug selves.

Believe me, I am tired of talking about, and even of thinking about, racism.

It hits you like a cold slap in the face everywhere you turn, whether on the African continent or in Europe or America.

But if it is to be dealt with at all, it needs to be dismembered with terrible accuracy, fibre by fibre, with a clear understanding of its governing logic.

What we have in our public debate at present is more akin to petulant finger- pointing, the oppressed hurling accusations at the oppressed, rather than the scientific scrutiny and skilful repositioning that is called for.