Pan Macmillan

A Bantu in My Bathroom

A Bantu in my bathroom!

Is it morally acceptable to stipulate the colour of your housemate?

Is it really possible to leave your privately-held views on race at home?

Are we really prepared to accept the requirements of a non-racial democracy?

 

Last year I came across an interesting ad in The Star while searching for accommodation. The person who placed the ad was willing to share her house with a stranger. But it was the description of the preferred lodger that really caught my attention. The advertiser – call her Sally – made it clear that she was looking for a white person.

I could not resist. I picked up my phone and called her.

‘Hi there. Is that Sally?!’

‘Yes it is!’ a rather friendly voice answered. She could not possibly be racist, I thought. Racists can’t be so jolly, surely?! Racists are supposed to be angry and have heavy Afrikaans accents. This woman did not sound like someone whose late husband wore khaki shorts. She sounded like someone who could make us cute little cucumber sandwiches and a fresh pot of Earl Grey tea – using tea leaves. She could have been Mrs Higgins, the wonderful old white lady who taught me to play the piano at primary school – St Mary’s Primary, for poor coloured kids in Grahamstown. And, like Mrs Higgins, I imagined Sally owned a bicycle with a square, brown basket at the front, which she cycled around her quiet neighbourhood, especially when she needed to go to a grocer to stock up on Earl Grey tea leaves.

But, of course, it is difficult to recognise a racist only by the tone of their voice, so it would be unfair of me to deprive Sally of a chance to defeat a stereotype. Non-racists do not have a monopoly on being jolly. Besides, it didn’t help that I was ‘speaking well’. At any rate, I shouldn’t be hasty with character judgements on the basis of a phone chat. I needed to hear a bit more.

‘I’m phoning about the room that you advertised? I came across the advert in The Star and was wondering whether the room is still available?’

‘“Oh yes it is! Are you interested?’

Wow, how welcome can one be? Is the company of the family cat that tiresome after all those decades of unconditional love and dedicated companionship? Is the little puss no longer good enough as an old white lady’s best friend?

‘“I am interested, yes! I have been looking to move to Sandton ’cause it is closer to work. But … I’m not white, my dear. Do I have to be white?!’ (I suspect it is not necessary to confess parenthetically that I was having soooo much fun.)

‘Yes, as the advert said!’ There was a slight but noticeable shift in her tone now. A hint of irritation could be detected miles away and the possibility of a khaki-clad husband, still alive and well, could no longer be ruled out. In fact, I imagined a man called Gert sitting in the background, reading the back pages of Beeld, lowering the newspaper, and looking beswaard (‘gravely concerned’ in the most Afrikaans way possible; ‘beswaard’ is an emotion uniquely felt in the language and being of Afrikanerdom). I was on a roll now and decided to go for gold!

‘Don’t you think that’s a little bit racist?’ I asked.

‘Not at all! I just want to live with people of my kind! People I can relate to! What’s wrong with that?’

A fair response, perhaps? I wasn’t’ so sure. So I continued for a little while longer. I had nothing else to do that morning; no Earl Grey tea to serve visitors at my end.

‘But what does race have to do with getting along with someone? How do you know that your next best friend will NOT be a black person? You can’t know just by looking at someone’s skin colour whether or not you will get along with them, surely?’

‘You clearly have a chip on your shoulder!’ she snapped back. At this point I realised that she would make for a wonderful guest on my radio show. I started regretting not recording our exchange.

‘I am a talk show host at Talk Radio 702, ma’am and would like to … ’ and before I could finish she hung up. I was left with a naughty smirk on my face and my brain went immediately into ‘so-what-does-it-all-mean?’ mode.

I decided to share the anecdote with listeners of my weekly radio programme Politics and Morality on Talk Radio 702. I posed the question, ‘Is it racist to rent your room only to persons of a particular race group?’ It was one of the most revealing conversations I’ve had with a radio audience.

It goes without saying that each radio station – in fact, each showon a radio station – has a specific profile of listeners who self-select that station or slot. So I know we cannot draw easy generalisations about the entire country based on the viewpoints of one radio station’s callers. In fact, one can’t even take those whocall in during a particular time slot as representative of all those who are listening to that particular slot! But from somewhere deep inside my gut (if that counts for anything?), I suspect that the discussion which followed did probably reveal truths about most of us. Social scientists, of course, might have other thoughts. Anyway, here is what happened on radio that night.

There was a broad convergence in opinion among my listeners, black and white. The majority thought that it was not racist to have a racial preference for a tenant.

One group of listeners thought that since the property was privately owned, Sally could do whatever the heck she wanted to do with it so long as she did not break any general laws of the land. For this group, Sally’s preference was no different to someone who wanted to live only with non-smokers. It was not even a question of whether Sally’s attitude was justified. It was simply her right to have this attitude, finish and klaar!

A second group had a somewhat more complicated position. This group thought that if Sally had a flat or cottage in her yard and only wanted whites to live in it then she really would be a racist. However, from my description of the advert it was clear that we were talking about a room in the main house. That, apparently, changed everything. Your own house is a much more intimate, private space than a cottage on your property that you’re not living in yourself. And so Sally should be let off the hook for having race-specific preferences in her choice of housemate.

 

These arguments fascinated me. I was desperately trying to make sense of our racialism, and attitudes towards others, in this conversation. I disagree profoundly with both sets of opinions and wrestled with my callers for almost two hours. I understood where they were coming from but could not quite put my finger on a deep discomfort I felt with their convictions, especially those who fell into the ‘in-my-backyard-perhaps-but-NOT-in-my-house!’category. As is often the case with live radio discussion, the most precise language often only hits you after the fact. While I put up a good fight challenging my listeners, it was only really in the days and weeks afterwards that I figured out what had bothered me. The attitudes which lurked beneath those seemingly reasonable and innocent arguments were morally odious. When those underlying attitudes are fully excavated and closely examined, they betray a deeply ingrained and objectionable racialism – and sometimes outright racism – many years after democracy’s birth. I believe that those callers who argued that what happens behind the walls of private property is not up for moral evaluation, are just not thinking carefully.

First, let me make an important concession. There is definitely something both tempting and intuitively right about the claim that we all need a break from the burden of social and moral rules. Our private lives, including decisions about who we let into our homes, must be allowed to be beyond the wagging finger of moralists. ‘Allow us to be racist at least on our own turf!’ a choir of Save Our Sally (SOS) members might shout. To shout back ‘No!’ seems hasty.

There is something to be said for protecting the private space from public morality. If we value individuality and authenticity, as we surely must if we are to take seriously the meaning and point of liberal pluralism, then we must allow for conditions under which all of us can peacefully co-exist with maximum opportunity to be our true selves.

And, if your true self is someone who only wants to break croissants with whites (or only eat pap and chakalaka with blacks) then society must put up with those preferences. That is logic that I get, with which I agree for the most part, and which I am happy to attribute, in the non-white spirit of Ubuntu, to those Sally supporters who argue for her entitlement to do as she pleases with whomever, and on, her property.

But there is a difference between the right to rent your room to whites only and our entitlement to judge your actions morally. We do not think that a woman’s right to marry a misogynist bastard means we cannot criticise her decision. We do not think that a gardener’s right to accept his employer’s insistence on being called ‘baas!’ and his employer’s right to offer premium wages for being called ‘baas!’ mean that we cannot evaluate the moral quality of that relationship. And many of us seem to think that the right of a millionaire to display his or her wealth ostentatiously does not mean they are immune to moral comment. Remember, for example, the uproar when businessman Kenny Kunene threw lavish parties – he was criticised for behaviour that some regard as immoral even though he has a right to throw lavish parties.

Morality follows us just about everywhere, and so I don’t think we can simply say that just because Sally has a right to live with whomever she wants, and just because she should in general be given space to live a life she chooses for herself, that we cannot ever raise moral questions about her private choices. We can, and this ad I stumbled upon seems a perfect case in a country with our racial history, about which to ask probing questions about the motives behind these preferences, their origins and their content. So her domestic preferences are fair game.

Besides, I seriously doubt that Sally regards herself as acting immorally. Only someone who is genuinely amoral would truly not care about the moral quality of her actions, let alone what the rest of us have to say about it. Sally does care.

Sally was happy to engage me and offer reasons for her actions. She was implicitly accepting that she could be criticised but thought she had a sufficient defence for her racialised preferences. She is not a hermit. She is not a sociopath. She lives in society. She is of society. I therefore reject the all-too-easy (though tempting and seemingly reasonable) claim that how we behave privately and what we do with our private property cannot and should not be morally probed. It can and it should. And if we had a chance to meet Sally, I suspect she would agree, but simply say her preferences are morally acceptable. Well, are they? Before answering this question, there is one more aspect of Sally’s case that I want to comment on and which complicates the racial preference debate.

It crystallises around a recent visit from a friend of mine, John, who now lives in Oxford.

John was fascinated when I told him about the advert saga and the radio discussion it spawned. Being a near perfect human being, the original ‘Mr Nice Guy’, John confessed that when he had been on the lookout to share a house with someone in Oxford, he declined an opportunity to live with a disabled person. He did not think he could live with someone who had a serious physical disability. Agreeing to live with such a person he felt would effectively mean agreeing to take on a certain kind of responsibility, which he felt he was not capable of fulfilling. He had no prior relationship with the person and this lessened the emotional stakes somewhat when it came to turning down the offer.

Of course, he felt horrible about the decision because it feltcallous. But it was an honestly-made decision. It was based on truthful self-evaluation of what kinds of living arrangements were comfortable for John. And that, surely, is okay? We cannot be expected to be moral saints. This is also why it is okay, too, to simply not want to live with someone who is a smoker, say. But these factors – Am I ready to be a quasi-carer for a disabled housemate? Can I put up with puffs of smoke? – are not signs of a bad moral character, suggested John. They are simply a combination of satisfying one’s arbitrary preferences (‘I don’t like smoke!’) and considering practical facts (‘I just won’t be able to cope with negotiating the needs of a disabled housemate.’)

I’m not convinced that Sally’s preference is in the same category as these preferences. And it is, at any rate, debatable whether John’s attitude towards disability is acceptable, even if someone’s irritation for smoke is acceptable. These cases are too different to be treated in the same way, but there is something to be learned from the differences, and the false appearance of salient similarities. Is it possible, if we get back to Sally, that there is nothing more to Sally’s preference than convenience? John finds it inconvenient to live with a disabled person. Let’s say you find it irritating to smell smoke. So is there not simply a similar kind of inconvenience that Sally will experience in being ‘forced’ to live with a non-white person?

I hope no one finds this line of reasoning compelling enough to let Sally off the hook. My skin colour is not a disability. It is an arbitrary difference between me and Sally. And so it is not clear to me that Sally would be inconvenienced by a black skin in her house in a way that can seriously be regarded as too high a burden for anyone to bear. If I was judging Sally for not adopting twenty orphans, I think one could easily make a case for why it would be acceptable for the inconvenience of such an adoption to be a reason for Sally to politely decline. But my skin colour? The analogy between the disabled lodger and a black lodger is therefore unconvincing. (I will leave aside another response to John, of course, which is to challenge his assumptions about disabilities, and what exactly the ‘burdens’ would be living with a disabled person. I have no doubt that millions of self-sufficient disabled persons would rightly take deep offence at the suggestion that they are an inherent burden on abled-bodied persons. All that is important here, for my purposes, is for us to recognise that when someone says she only wants to live with white people in her house, she can’t justify that preference by saying it is ‘inconvenient’ to have a black person around. That is an honest response, perhaps, but a morally impotent one. In fact, one might even doubt the supposed honesty and innocence of the ‘inconvenience’ argument even: racism is often the operating motive, but how many of us are capable of admitting to that kind of motive?)

 

So where does all of this leave the first batch of my callers who suggested that it is Sally’s house, and so she can choose her tenant. I hope the arguments I have introduced make it clear why that is at the very least a hasty response from my listeners. In short, yes, Sally has a right to live only with white people but the fact that she has a right to make a random decision of this kind does not mean we can’t judge the way she exercises that right.

The more difficult, and much more important, question is ultimately whether there is something wrong with the preference itself? Is there something wrong with Sally wanting to live only with whites? After all, there are many preferences we have in life that are arbitrary, and acceptably so. I do not have to justify why I prefer white meat to red, Bon Jovi to Simphiwe Dana, Chopin to Mozart, Johannesburg to Cape Town, bulkier men over scrawny ones. So if there is so much in the rich texture of our lives that are merely preferences, the ingredients of our individual personalities and idiosyncrasies, then surely that can straightforwardly extend to preferences about the race of persons with whom we share a house? No?

I find it hard, I must admit, to be too prescriptive about what things should guide people’s preferences. But if we can have critical conversations about the basis of our preferences, then surely we should? I do not know the details of Sally’s preferences because we did not have a chance to take our conversation further, but I think we can make some reasonable guesses if we place her life within the socio-political context of our country. We live in a country in which all of our lives are racially saturated from a young age; this is particularly true of South Africans who grew up during apartheid. Sally is one such South African. It is very likely that she internalised the racial hierarchy of apartheid that assigned certain roles to different race groups and instilled in whites a sense of superiority and in blacks a sense of inferiority. We were legally forced, as members of different race groups, to live apart in geographically segregated areas. We socialised in reasonably homogenous groups for a large period of time. It goes without saying that as both co-conspirators and victims of this system many of us hardened our attitudes towards members of other groups.

So on the one hand, there is a certain kind of innocence about the preference that Sally expresses. It really just might stem from the way she was socialised, and she merely wishes for maximum comfort in her own home. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.

On the other hand, the origins of the preference are morally odious. The preference is the product of our racist past. And there is the conundrum: if I know that preferences stem from a morally odious past, should I not find ways to rid myself of those preferences, provided that it is possible to do so? This is difficult. The argument is only persuasive, I admit, if someone accepts that preferences that stem from a racist past should be eliminated. And it is not clear that there is a duty to do so.

I would therefore criticise Sally’s preferences, still, but in a qualified way:Sally’s racialised preferences are the product of a racist past and are therefore morally odious. But Sally does not have a strict duty to now get rid of those preferences as an adult since no one is demonstrably harmed by those preferences. However, to the extent that Sally accepts that she shares the goal of a non-racial, democratic South Africa, she might want to reflect on what steps she could take to begin to chip away at the enduring nature of her racialised preferences – steps that will involve now getting to know ‘the other’.

That, to me, seems like a more careful reaction to Sally’s preference than the crude, ‘It is her home!’ retort of many of my callers.

So what then of the second batch of callers who thought it would only have been racist for Sally to object to blacks in a cottage in her garden? When the second group made that distinction between the flat in the yard (which they think Sally should be comfortable renting to Sipho) and the main house (from which Sipho can be excluded) they betrayed dark secrets about themselves and our country.

Firstly, this viewpoint is an acknowledgment (indeed, an expression) of deep racial angst. Why else would you be fine with Sipho sleeping in the flat outside but heaven forbid that you should wake up in the morning and the first thing you see on your way to the bathroom is the heart attack-inducing spectacle of Sipho smiling at you, a horror that just might elicit a scream of apartheid proportions, ‘Help! There is a Bantu in my bathroom!’

There was an eeriness about the calm with which this group of Sally-supporters made the distinction between a flat in the yard and the main house; a kind of unreflective, resigned acceptance that racial angst is a mundane truth that is to be accommodated – though, of course, in the backyard only, not in my father’s house!

Secondly, there is no appetite here for extinguishingthis racialised preference. No one ever asked what Sally might do to overcome her insistence that only whites could be housemates. I was robustly engaged for daring to criticise what someone does with their private property. I was robustly engaged for not appreciating how a room in a house – as opposed to a flat in a yard – makes all the moral difference in our choices of who to live with!

Yet, not one listener, black or white, displayed the same robustness towards Sally. No one grappled with how it is that eighteen years after our democratic journey had started, race-specific friendship preferences (which, by her own admission was the basis of Sally’s search for a white housemate) could still endure uncritically. Indeed, the question did not even arise for my listeners. Racialism, it seems, has become something of an enduring meme.

Not that I am a proponent of non-racialism; rather, I was fascinated by the deep inconsistency that South Africans display. (Racialism, by the way, simply means that we recognise racial differences, usually on the basis of skin colour, hair texture, and other observable traits. It is unscientific, of course, but that is true of many other socially constructed categories also. We can and do ‘see’ race. Racism is something else: it is when you go a step further, using racial differences as a basis of unfair discrimination, going from ‘seeing’ race (racialism) to being prejudiced (racism). In contexts that are less personal (such as public debate about voting preferences), the same group of radio listeners are quick to bemoan racialism’s reach and endurance. But racialism’s reach and endurance inside their homes and hearts dare not be spoken about. Why can you complain so easily, in disbelief, about people with racial political preferences, but defend your right to have exclusively racial preferences when it comes to your friends? This is a tragic lack of self-examination.

The discussion confirmed just how deeply ingrained racialism is in our collective social psyche. Sally’s advert was not an exceptional affair. She was simply being honest and giving public expression to familiar, widespread racialism that can be easy to miss because it tends to be, for the most part, non-violent, privately-held and expressed away from the glare of public scrutiny. Sally is ultimately one of us. We cannot disown her.

Most importantly, and most tragically of all, is the failure of too many South Africans to see the intimate links between the private and public spheres. If you cannot imagine being best friends with someone of another race group, if you cannot imagine sharing a house with someone of another race group, then how on Earth do you think racial tension at work and in public spaces will ever be dealt a death blow? The very same radio listeners fighting for Sally’s right to display racialism privately are the ones who jam the phone lines in discussion and debate about race-based public policies like affirmative action and black economic empowerment.

‘How do you think we will ever achieve a non-racial South Africa if we still use race categories?!’ they will ask me rhetorically. Yet, the same old race categories are allowed, without a hint of self-criticism, let alone a hint of irony, to influence their most personal choices.

Clearly our private actions and attitudes provide a much more honest test of where we are at in terms of racial integration than does our willingness to participate in rainbow nation acts in the workplace or in a sports arena. Also, the amount of effort we put into eliminating racism (or racialism, if that is your goal also) in our private lives will also partly determine how successfully, and how quickly, we do so in the public sphere. This causal connection between the domestic and public spheres is lost on too many South Africans.

There are two insights we must take to heart: one is that we should be on the lookout for sophisticated tactics we all use (often subconsciously) to mask racism and racialism, such as seemingly innocent explanations for counter-productive attitudes and choices – ‘It’s simply a matter of taste (or preference or randomness ) that Sally does this or that!’; the other, and perhaps more important, conclusion is that we need to appreciate how public racism, and racialism, are in part sustained by what we do or do not do in the privacy of our homes. We take our private racism, and our private racialism, into the public space. We therefore cannot make progress in the public space without fixing what we do in private.

Non-racism, and non-racialism, begins at home

 

Racial baggage in four part harmony

 

 

Does our outrage over others’ racism not mask our own prejudices?

 

Sketch one:

A couple of days ago I had a rather embarrassing experience. I was sitting at one of my favourite spots at the Rosebank Mall — popular coffee shop and restaurant Ninos – overlooking the parking lot while waiting for my creative juices to kick in after a bout of writer’s block. I got distracted by some noise, and looked up. Two women seemed to be having a fairly tense conversation. One of them seemed to have bumped the other’s car. I didn’t see the accident, so had no clue which one of them might have been in the wrong. As they exchanged numbers, their conversation, judging by the increasingly wild gesticulation, seemed to be getting more heated.

I instinctively found myself silently egging on the black lady, as one might anxiously hold thumbs for your favourite boxer in the ring. The Indian lady seemed louder – I could certainly hear her voice more clearly – and this made me nervous about whether or not my player in the road rage match was going to win the verbal warfare. But alas, the black lady, though also talking a lot, seemed more timid, and so I feared that she might come out of it all worse for wear.

Why, you might wonder, did I instinctively side with her? Simply because she was black. I did not know her. I might never even meet her. For all I know, she could have been in the wrong, and hurled abuse at her Indian counterpart, thus deserving those loud protests. Yet, the fact that she was black was enough for her to get my sympathy and all my goodwill. There was no sympathy or goodwill, I’m afraid, for the person who looked less like me, the Indian lady.

 

Sketch two:

A good friend of mine, Seth, confessed to me many years after we first met that he had a rather horrible thought the first time he saw me. He walked into my philosophy tutorial at the beginning of his university career and when he realised that I was the tutor, he thought, ‘Oh dear, my luck to be assigned the incompetent black tutor.’ That is the sort of confession one can only trot out if your friendship is more solid than the skull of a politician. I chuckled, and we laughed it off over a pint of lager – or three.

We didn’t need to analyse the confession. It was obvious what was going on: my skin colour was assumed to be carrying information about me. And in this case, my black skin carried the warning, ‘incompetent!’ The onus was on me to disprove the assumption. Only white tutors could be assumed to be competent unless proven to be useless. It was the other way round for black tutors.

 

Sketch three:

Jessica dos Santos is a name we didn’t really know until early May 2012, but now her story has been filed in the annals of Twitter infamy. She is a white model who had an unfortunate encounter with a black guy who reportedly made unwelcome and unacceptable sexual advances towards her. She was so angry that she tweeted about the ‘kaffir’. She was quickly, and ferociously, sanctioned by almost every South African on Twitter. One magazine, FHM, almost instantly stripped her of some title she had won under their banner, and made it clear they would never work with her in future. She experienced the virtual equivalent of having a ton of rotten tomatoes thrown at her.

Not even a breakfast function at which she attempted to reconcile with another thoughtless tweep, a black woman who retorted with unacceptable racism (suggesting that whites ought to have been killed), could salvage her bruised image. She became the symbol of all unexpressed and latent racism that might exist in every nook and cranny in our country. And everyone wanted to prove their progressive credentials by venting more angrily than other tweeps.

I encountered at least two responses that typified the engagement with Dos Santos’s racism. One Facebook friend of mine gave me advice on my way to a recording for a television show on which I had been invited to appear to speak about the incident and its aftermath. My Facebook friend urged me to remind ‘these racists’ [my emphasis] that their racism was disgusting and that ‘they’ had no place in our society.

At a friend’s birthday braai, the incident, inevitably, also became a topic of discussion at some point in the afternoon. One guest lamented, ‘You know, I almost feel sorry for that white girl. She must have been raised in an incredibly closed and insulated community.’

The reactions of the online masses, and the reactions of my Facebook friend and my friend’s braai guest, are intriguing: they suggest that racists are not us. Racists are alien. They are outliers in our society. They are not typical. They are a freak fact of our lives. If we could get rid of the three racists spoiling our rainbow image, we would be living in perfect racial harmony. (Cue: ‘Ebony and Ivory’…)

I find this lie fascinating. Racists, in reality, are among us. We are the racists. ‘They’ are not from another planet. But we dare not indict ourselves.

 

Sketch four:

I was an obsessive competitive debater throughout my university career. And so when I arrived at Oxford University I was naturally drawn to the famous Oxford Debate Union. Probably the best part of my Oxford experience was the time spent growing as a debater, interacting with world famous politicians and newsmakers. The Union was a space that was so well respected that, frankly, it was a feather in the career cap of anyone – even a state president – to be asked to speak there. But make no mistake, you had to know your stuff, lest the ambitious young Oxford lions, donned invariably in black tie, would offer you a lethal point of information or, worse, deliver paper speeches from the floor, that crushed your evidence or your reasoning. Fun stuff. Challenging stuff.

And so, in my first term at Oxford, I joined the Union and attended as many of the events as possible. During one of my first attendances, I found myself sitting in the main chamber of the Union. I do not recall the topic, but it was magnificent stuff with good opening speeches from both sides. Then it was the turn of a black guy who had been invited to the event.

As the man got up and walked up to the podium, I found myself thinking, ‘Pleeeeeease don’t fuck this up! Pleeeease be the best speaker!’

The basis of my mixture of fear and hope was simply that he was black. When the other speakers spoke, I had zero feelings about how they might or should perform. Whether they excelled or sank was neither here nor there. I had no stake in how well they might do that night. And yet, this stranger induced in me – purely because he was black – fear that he might not be up to the task at hand, and a simultaneous desire that he should deliver a speech worthy of a two-minute standing ovation.

Isn’t it interesting that my racial affinity could do all this to me? Years later, I am not so sure if much has changed. I still, for example, find myself desperately wanting black debaters to beat white debaters in competition; not just because I happen to coach some of them, but because black excellence is far closer to my heart than white excellence. It is a reality that is found in every part of my psyche. It is, for example, more important to me that Pieter De Villiers, former Springbok rugby coach, should have a brilliant record as coach than it is important to me that one Jake White should have a brilliant record as national coach. What is the basis of my split loyalties? Pieter looks and sounds more like my dad and me than Jake White. (Well, actually, no one sounds like Pieterjie!) That’s how deep racial identity runs in me.

 

These four stories are variations on a theme: our racial baggage, as a nation recovering from a deeply racist past, is massive. Yet the way we deal with that past, in the present, is not very healthy.

First, we are in denial about the fact that racial identities are still very strong, and that they often form the basis of racial prejudices, and irrational racial affinities. Many of us who acknowledge this reality pull a different trick. We pretend the problem is small. Or we pretend that we never were, and never will be, part of the problem. The problem is out there. It is not in my home, in my heart, in my headspace.

This is why the collective outrage against Jessica’s racist tweet is slightly less comforting than it might appear at first glance. On the one hand, it is great that we collectively punish a racist in our midst. It means we do not tolerate racism rearing its divisive head. But there was, on the other hand, something disturbingly quick about the intense and voluminous reactions — something I am suspicious of.

My fear is that much of the outrage was less about Jessica’s racism than about deflecting attention from our selves. No one who came down hard on Jessica acknowledged their own racial baggage. The subtext of the criticism was clear, ‘I am not Jessica. I am different.’ And this is why my Facebook friend could so neatly distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The ‘us’ refers to us innocent ones, and the ‘them’ refers to them racist bunch! But this is disingenuous.

The real difference, frankly, between Jessica and us is that she got busted and we did not. It is a little bit like our outrage when a famous person gets caught for drunken driving. It is easy to be outraged by that person’s irresponsible behaviour. In reality, many thousands of South Africans drive over the legal limit every weekend and do not get stopped. Yet, with no hint of irony, these same offenders are often the first to throw stones in the direction of the busted one. It is a tactic that is aimed at drawing attention away from one’s own behaviour. It is a lie we cannot afford to encourage in ourselves and in others.

The problem with pretending that we are oh-so-different to Jessica is unless we acknowledge the scope of the problem, we cannot deal with racism and racial baggage. That is why it is important that we examine our own lives, and not just preoccupy ourselves with spotting racism in others.

It is for the same reason that I introduced gentle disagreement into the braai conversation at my friend’s house. I suggested that it was probably not true that Jessica grew up in a racist attic. But of course it is a wonderful fantasy. Since you and I live in amazingly progressive and cosmopolitan places, we never could have done what Jessica did, nor would we ever. After the attic, Jessica cannot handle the pristine multiracial space in which her modelling career has landed her. This is the logic underlying the other braai guest’s casual suggestion that Jessica grew up in a closed community.

Again, we should be careful not to convince ourselves that racial baggage is a small problem out there. Jessica grew up in our communities. She is not one-of-a-kind. She is our friend, lover, sister, daughter and colleague. She is not an alien, and her birthplace is not Mars – it is in fact South Africa. She was born in 1992, and so cannot even be written off as a relic from Verwoerdian days. She is a proverbial ‘born free’ – but, not quite. Rather, born into racial baggage. Like all of us.

We dare not pretend our racial issues are over and done with, or negligible. Jessica is one of us.

It is also evident that besides racial prejudice, racial identity runs deeper than we like to believe. This is not even necessarily a poisonous truth and yet we deny it. There is no inherent harm in my quiet desire to see black debaters excel. In fact, given the historic educational inequities that partly explain why no black African has won the South African National Debate Championship (at the time of writing this book), one might even say that my passion for disproportionately focusing my coaching energy on black debaters, is sensible. Yet how many of us would own up to be motivated by race in this fairly innocuous sense? Few of us, because we have closed the space in which we can be open about our racial identities.

My experience of the two brawling women in the Rosebank Mall parking lot is not exceptional. When I tested my story with many friends less ‘race-obsessed’ than me, a familiar smile ran across their faces – they recognised the story instantly. I got the same reaction to my tale about the black speaker at Oxford. There seems to be a kind of trope here that is unsurprising. If I grew up in a community that was predominantly black, and had my first real interracial contact, socially, at my former whites-only high school, then it isn’t surprising that I should have racial loyalties. It would be more surprising if I did not.

Yet we run away from these realities. We pretend it is only Eusebius who sees race everywhere – him and his handful of race-obsessed friends. But, how many South Africans reading this essay do not have friends or lovers predominantly from the same racial group? How many people reading this essay grew up in racially integrated neighbourhoods? How many of us, unlike the old white landlady in Sandton, could comfortably live with people who do not look like us? We have tighter social bonds with people of our own racial make-up than those who do not share the randomness of skin colour.

The story of multiracial, rainbow nation bliss is grossly exaggerated. We are not there, and we will take longer to get there if we convince ourselves that we have already arrived. We haven’t. If someone like my friend Seth didn’t own up to the fact that he took my skin colour as an indication of whether or not I was competent, then how could Seth ever have confronted his own racial stereotyping? It is only by acknowledging, in the first instance, that the racial challenges start with our individual selves that we have a fighting chance of achieving that elusive non-racial South Africa we chant about more often than we bother work at creating.

And this is why I am grateful that Jessica put up her racist hand and demanded our attention. In the end it is the Jessicas of this world who keep us brutally honest.

 

 

 

 

Cape Town’s dirty, coloured secrets

 

Is there a place for coloured people in the now not-so-new South Africa?

 

Last year I travelled to Cape Town and got off in Long Street. As soon as I was out of the taxi, two little midgets ran after me rather aggressively, ‘Mister! Mister! Something, please?!’ They looked about twenty, or perhaps slightly older, but with the bodies of eight-year-olds, and certainly not taller. They were incredibly persistent as they begged for money, running in front of me, blocking my path. They looked and behaved like feral animals. I felt a mix of emotions: anger, annoyance, sadness.

When I told the story about a year later to a liberal white guy (and someone who is rather passionate about defending Cape Town as a blissful haven for all), he was deeply offended by my use of the word ‘feral’.

‘How can you describe people as feral?!’ he hissed. Such is the smugness and self-indulgence of many white liberal South Africans that I knew he would not understand my point. So I didn’t bother trying to explain myself for more than a few seconds, and no doubt his respect for me – what little he had – vanished.

But I don’t take back my words; nor do I regret the depth and strength of emotion that I felt as I negotiated the two aggressive beggars. I tried a number of tactics to escape their gaze, but none worked. I tried to pretend they were invisible, but they persisted in blocking my path. I pretended to be deaf, but their hand gestures took care of that: palms facing up, one on top of the other, like a Catholic waiting for Holy Communion (but without the dignified silence of a parishioner). I tried to be direct and firm – ‘I don’t have money, leave me alone please!’ – but that was met with the unexpected observation, ‘You’s from JO-buuurg!’ By then, I had reached the door of the hotel, and could hurry inside.

This is my regular experience of the coloured underclass in Cape Town. It is obvious to anyone who knows this city that foetal alcohol syndrome is rife. It doesn’t help that many white farmers still pay coloured farmworkers with cheap wine, encouraging already high levels of alcoholism. This, combined with the toxic evil of drug addiction, , and the scourge of tik, results in babies being born with crippling physical and mental weaknesses before they have even had a decent shot at life. And this is why those men who harassed me had the bodies of boys: life had dealt them a cruel hand.

It is not surprising that they were aggressive: the alternative is suicide; or wasting away in a corner, slowly. They chose aggression. In the process they come across, and behave, like animals. This is not their fault. They are victims of society, victims of coloured communities’ fate on the South African landscape.

I wish it wasn’t so. But it is. And my white liberal acquaintance can go to hell as far I am concerned. These are members of my community who live like this. Those two could have been my cousins from Eersterivier, a very impoverished neighbourhood in Cape Town where tourist buses do not go.

It is inconvenient for wealthy Capetonians to be confronted with the truth in naked, unmediated, brutal language. Yet what they miss is that I feel the fate of my cousins, siblings, uncles and aunts. I feel it, I live it, and I drown in the shame and sense of helplessness, and the desire to wake up with a magic wand with which to make it all go away.

But for the guy who was disgusted by my description, coloureds are objects for academic study; for him, only unemotive language will do. He humanises the bergies (beggars) of Cape Town with language. I choose language that bears witness to the stripping away of their humanity. And I make no apologies for jarring the cocktail-fuelled conversation which was interrupted by my story. For me, coloured people are not objects of study. I am coloured. I love the coloured community, and it hurts to see how they live in Cape Town. Cape Town is brutally honest.

 

Yes, it has a mountain to die for. Yes, it seems beautiful. Yes, it is ‘chillaxed’. But that’s exactly the problem: we believe the lies of brochures. It is not really pretty. The realities of Cape Town are actually pretty ugly. And that is why I hate it. But not because lies don’t exist elsewhere. Jozi lies, too. It is easy to pretend that all there is to Jozi is Rosebank or Sandton or even bohemian Melville. But of course, like Cape Town, Jozi has dirty secrets that middle class people like to forget about when they rave about how integrated and cosmpolitan the place is. The dirty secrets of both Jozi and Cape Town are a stain on both cities’ images, like mud on a kid’s new white pants.

But I dislike Cape Town more. Not because I think it is worse than Jozi. That’s a lie too: the rivalry of the two cities’ passionate fans is silly. I personally like Cape Town less for the self-indulgent reason that its lies have personal consequences for me. Cape Town, you see, treats coloured people like dirt. And I cannot escape that fact as easily as I can in Jozi.

Try as hard as I might to call myself black, Verwoerd – the bloody bastard – had the final say.

I feel coloured in my heart of hearts. I feel fake when I describe myself as black. My black friends don’t really really think of me as black. Calling myself black is more a middle class luxury, right up there with wearing a Biko shirt, being intellectual-cool, playing around with racial labels.

This brings me back to Cape Town’s dirty secrets. In Cape Town, as soon as I land, I know that I am, and also feel, coloured. Coloured people are visible, as is their plight, in a way that is not the case in other big South African cities. This is not the end of the world, one might think, but the reason I cannot stomach that fact is because it forces me to deal with my coloured shame. Cape Town, unlike Jozi, keeps me honest. Too honest, and this hurts. It challenges me, makes me uneasy, and takes me into places deep inside that I do not want to be forced to go, at least not on racist Cape Town’s terms. I want to ‘go there’ on my own terms, in my own time – but Cape Town does not give me this control. Cape Town is brutally honest, and that is why I hate it.

 

As with most emotions, it is difficult to get a full grip on the nature of shame. It is also difficult to know when it is appropriate to feel shame. So I’m not sure if it really is shame that I feel about being coloured, and in relation to the coloured community.

I know it is not merely embarrassment at the sight of people who look like me, who look like my relatives, and who share a history with me, as members of the group ‘coloured’. You can be embarrassed about something without feeling implicated in the source of the embarrassment. Embarrassment is, for the most part, morally neutral. I can be embarrassed, for example, if I trip as I walk down the stairs of a restaurant. Embarrassment is not a cool emotion to feel, but it is fairly innocuous in the bigger scheme of life’s journey. It can even be useful – the prospect of embarrassment can be an incentive for you to do the right thing to avoid feeling embarrassed.

My grappling with being coloured, and my emotional reaction to the underclass of coloured people in Cape Town, is – sadly – not mere embarrassment. Embarrassment is not strong enough to capture the depth of my anxiety, my grappling, my guilt – and more. Shame feels like the label that just about gets it right.

There are two reasons I feel shame. The first is shame-as-recognition: I experience shame in the moments I recognise that I am a member of this pitiful underclass. The second is shame-as-guilt: I feel ashamed of myself, morally, for feeling ashamed of being coloured, for willfully doing nothing to change the fate of my community, and for not challenging and eradicating the basis of my shame.

 

When I see a drunken coloured guy being a nuisance along Long Street, I recognise in that moment that I could have been him if life had dealt the cards differently. It also reminds me of my own family. I grew up with many family members who struggled with alcoholism. Of course alcoholism comes in all kinds of racial packaging, and has no respect for income or class. But a white drunkard does not move me quite the way a coloured drunk does. Put bluntly, the sight of coloured drunks in Long Street is a sight that is simply all too real. I can imagine being them, and I am instantly reminded of my uncle Alfred who struggled for many years with alcoholism. I often had to endure the shame of his violence and drunkenness as he fought with my cousins when I got home from school. The shame was particularly strong when friends of mine came looking for me, and witnessed the spectacle. It is that kind of hidden memory that the coloured underclass of Cape Town instantly awakes in me when I set foot in the city. It forces me to re-live truths about my past, and my present – truths that I usually get to interact with how and when I choose. Not so in Cape Town – it is a city that takes control of my relationship with memory.

 

For me, walking around Cape Town is like paging through a photo album that contains a collection of the most painful memories of an earlier life. And because that earlier life hasn’t changed much – a trip to Eersterivier in Cape Town confirms that my relatives look and live as they did twenty years ago – I am ashamed of their poverty, their lack of mobility and their ignorant bliss. And it is of course not only my relatives’ fates that haunt me when I see a drunken coloured stranger. It is also, more painfully, the fate of my sisters and cousins in Grahamstown where I grew up. That small town, tucked away in a hole just off the N2 that connects Port Elizabeth with East London, is a town as filled with as many lies as Cape Town or Jozi. It, too, has the veneer of integration and cosmopolitanism, in the form of Rhodes University, one of the best places in the country for a liberal arts education. Yet, cross the bridge that separates town from the coloured and black townships, and you get a taste of the deep scars left by apartheid – geographically, socially, materially, and psychologically. I feel deeply ashamed of the horrid conditions in which most members of my community, including my sisters and their children, are trapped, like hapless flies in a Venus flytrap.

I am overwhelmed by the emotional burden of surviving that space, of getting away. And the only form of escape is to bury my past in the memory banks, and to assuage pangs of guilt with measly remittances home, and a flood of regular sms messages, and the occasional phone call. The rest of that journey is between me and a diary or between me and a therapist – when middle class indulgence kicks in.

But when I walk down the streets of brutally cruel Cape Town, none of these crafty coping strategies have any chance of working in the face of aggressive bergie midgets taunting me, almost as if they were sent by an existential philosopher – or the Devil himself – to make me panic as I remember my family, my community …

 

Shame, unlike embarrassment, is not an emotion that is morally neutral. Or, rather, unlike embarrassment, it often has a moral dimension. It is hard to think of morally neutral instances of shame. When you feel ashamed of yourself, for example, this means in part that you judge yourself as having fallen short of your own moral standards. You feel that you have transgressed, morally, and for that you bow your head, as the saying goes, in shame. It is a much more complex, and morally loaded, emotion than its lighter cousin, embarrassment.

I have come to the realisation that part of my shame about my coloured identity is actually self-directed moral criticism. I have fallen short of my own moral expectations. I have dropped the moral ball. I have messed up in the sense of not showing enough empathy for the plight of my family and my community. Or, perhaps a little less harsh, my empathy has not translated into action with demonstrable outcomes.

When I see Cape Town bergies, I know in that moment that I have absconded.

 

The underclass of coloured people is not just a dirty little secret of Cape Town that is well managed so as not to spoil the experience of rich visitors. It is also a community of downtrodden, forgotten left-over pawns from apartheid’s politicised racial battles. And it is a community whose history is my history. It is a community whose fate I feel personally. It is a community I have neglected. It is a community I care for, and yet a community of which I am also deeply ashamed. It is a community I wish I was disentangled from, and yet I also know that it is a community whose fate affects my emotional state.

No wonder I love to hate Cape Town …