Crain
Soudien’s “Realising the Dream:
Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school” is a book whose
publishing could not be more relevant to the current South African reality. He
poses a question that is not uniquely modern, but a question that has been
faced throughout the centuries: “what kind of human beings do we wish to be?”
(Soudien, 2012: 2-3). Although, a
seemingly simple question at first, when we take seriously the factors and
implications which confront it, it becomes a question pregnant with meaning.
This is because, I argue, it calls into question what we mean by being human. Soudien says and I quote at
length (2012: 2):
“What
it means to be a human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply
of one’s rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it
more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task
of gifting that right to others – is a question that arises in South Africa
with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question
is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in
elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature.”
South
Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid is familiar to us all and thus a
detailed description of our history is not necessary. However, it is pertinent
in essay to say this: for roughly 350
years ‘black’ people[1] were denied the right to be regarded as people
who matter, people of thought and reason and people deserving of a dignified
livelihood. Apartheid was a powerful tool that stripped people of their
humanity. Some argue we have come a long way since then, with the fundamental
change and obliteration of a racially-qualified constitutional order. What this
means is that civil and political rights are accorded to all citizens
irrespective of race after 1994 (Currie and de Waal, 2005: 2). The birth of democracy in South Africa held
a large amount of promise in the early 1990s. South Africa was to be a society
based on equality, freedom and human dignity. These values are pillars that are
meant to maintain an open and democratic society and are enforced by the
supreme Parliamentary legislation of the land, the Constitution of the Republic
of South Africa, 1996 (Currie and de Waal, 2005: 6-8). The way South Africa
exists nominally- in name or paper- has been highly praised as progressive and
unprecedented (Faull, 2012). Soudien (2012) says that South Africa has and
continues to get international attention, not only because of the tragedy of
our history, but also because of a
promise to realise the dream: a South Africa without racial prejudice; a
South Africa that recognises the humanity of all; a better South Africa.
In
reality, however, the lived experience of the South African people tells a
different story: the underside of South African democracy- the maintained
racialised space, access, wealth and ways of being (Pithouse, 2011). We do not
need statistics[2]
to validate this reality; we merely have to look through our windows at the
outskirts of our cities; the normalisation and perpetuation of racism in the acceptance
of racist jokes; the calling of ‘race’ when we say “hey you black man, hey you
white woman” (Soudien, 2012: 1); recent public events such as the Johannesburg
LBGTI Pride march of 2012, where Pride participants (mainly ‘white’) shouted
“go back to your lokshins (townships)” at ‘black’ LGBTI activists, who were
displeased with the apolitical nature of Pride to the struggles of the LGBTI
community in the townships (Davis, 2012). The list can, unfortunately, go on,
but my point is clear: South Africa, even today, remains a racialised country. I am not alone, because it has been widely
argued that the disparities that South Africa is facing are direct consequences
of centauries of black oppression, or rather racial oppression (Janz, 2011:
462). In other words, contemporary South Africa has inherited racist legacies
that were central to the justification of African slavery, colonialism, and
Apartheid. Therefore, the promise to realise the dream remains just that, a
dream, because our humanity is still in crisis.
This
essay seeks to engage with Soudien’s suggestion that to realise what it means
to be human, to fully become human,
we must unlearn the ‘logic of race’. Although
this suggestion has its merits, I seek to argue, through a Fanonian lens, that
Soudien’s solution is inadequate, because ‘race’ and racism are not merely
ideas and ideologies; they are also a lived experience.
There
is a wide tendency amongst positive sciences to rationally explain the
phenomena of race and racism. For instance, when it comes to racism, Charles W.
Mills (2012) argues that racism can be defined in two areas of application. On
the one hand, racism can be defined in an ideological sense- ideas, beliefs and
values- where humanity is can be divided according to one’s race and
subsequently, those races are arranged hierarchically (Mills, 2012). In other
words, some races are deemed to be biologically superior to others. On the
other hand, racism can be understood in relation to institutions, practices and
social systems. This socio-institutional understanding of racism refers to the
illicit privilege some races have at the expense of others and “where racial
membership (directly or indirectly) explains this privileging” (Mills, 2012).
Put differently, unearned benefits and advantages are accrued to certain races,
merely on the basis of being a member of that particular racial group.
Similarly, when it comes to explaining the existence of
‘race (s)’ or lack thereof, there is an emphasis on how it is a social
construct. Social scientists, biological scientists, epidemiologists and alike,
generally agree that biology-as-race is a fallacy, and that the 0.01% of the
genetic variation between people of designated groups has no social
significance or determinacy. Soudien himself says that the discussion of
genetics is important, because it illustrates how we have reached an age where
we can prove that as human beings we are more genetically alike than not and
that, in fact, there is more genetic variation within the designated ‘races’
than between them. He further goes on to
say, “We have the empirical evidence for it. The significance of the human
genome is that it has shown how genes have travelled and how population groups
everywhere in the world can be linked. We are all related” (Soudien, 2012: 8). The
small proportion that does vary is heritable, in other words, people who have
more recent common ancestor will have similar genes than those whose common
ancestors are distant. The physical basis of race is based on social relations
when social or geographical barriers prevent people from intermarriages across
generations, allowing for physical distinctions between people. It therefore
follows, in their belief, that physical differences also cause cultural
differences. Race becomes a social
construct when the grouping people are based on those physical or cultural
distinctions. They further argue that these groups and subsequent
categorisations are not natural, but rather are created by political boundaries
and pressures- where there is a tendency to downplay
the reality of mixed ancestry. The political contestations over categories,
with regards to who qualifies as part of a group and what the name of that
group will be (‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Asian’, etc), is also a means to
justify domination as is evident with the displacements of American Indians,
African slavery, European colonialism, etc (Baum, 2006).
Their
general position is that for race not to matter, there must be an engagement
with ideological justifications, which, in misanthropy, normalise the belief
that there is a ‘natural’ hierarchy between races (scientific racism of 19th
century). It is this ideology that makes racism possible in its various
manifestations be it through essentialism, oppression, exclusion,
subjectification or all of the above at the same time. This latter approach is
a position generally adopted by anti-racist movements (Soudien, 2012).
As ‘objectively’
true as it may be that racism is an ideology driven by misanthropic ends and
that it has had, and continues to have, structural implications; and that ‘race
(s)’ is a socially constructed idea that has no biological determinism on our
identities- such objective knowledge and reasoning take for granted, to the
point of neglect, that ‘race’ and racism have bodily experience: they are lived. My critique is not so much that
positive scientists theorise on what is
instead of what ought to be, but
rather the kind of knowledge they choose to privilege from what is: the intellectual and objective view of race and racism
over subjective experience (Manhendran, 2007: 193-194). Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin White Masks, makes visible
the ‘truth’ of this subjective experience of the ‘black’ body in an anti-black
world when he says (1991 [1952]: 110; my emphasis):
“I have talked about the black problem with
friends, or, more rarely with American Negroes...But I was satisfied with an
intellectual understanding of these differences. It was not really
dramatic...And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes.
An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims.”
What
Fanon seeks to reveal here is that he is conscious of himself, but only through
the white gaze which not only ‘others’ him, but also forces him to come
face-to-face with his race, his ‘blackness’. In other words, Fanon makes an
existential move when he argues that the experience of racial discrimination makes
his race hyper-visible to himself: he feels
his race; at that moment he lives his
race; he becomes his race. A detailed
exploration of what Fanon is alluding to here will be discussed in the second
section of this essay. I mention this now so as to show how Soudien’s stance of
‘unlearning the logic of race’ interestingly recognises subjective experience,
but then soon after, simply reverts to an intellectual or cognitive
understanding of race and racism.
‘Unlearning
the logic of race’
Looking
at the South African context, Soudien (2012) argues that race has become a
‘master signifier’. It is what we see in each other, first and foremost. Our
‘races’ have become our default identities. Regardless of the genetic evidence
that our genetic variations are insignificant, people continue to be
prejudicial based on outward attributes and racial perceptions. At this point,
Soudien recognises and emphasises that our ‘appearance’- the shape of noses,
lips, hair and, most crucially, our colour- has real effects on how we know, exist and share the
world. He says as South Africans we have dominated and subjugated one another;
space has been segregated; rights have been denied; racial superiorities and
inferiorities have left us divided and unforgiving; and as a consequence of the
above, a South African prospect of being human
is in constant negation (Soudien, 2012: 5).
We read the world and each other through the lens of ‘race’, prejudices,
false certainties which limit of our consciousness from being fully awake;
fully open (Soudien, 2012: 8). Therefore on the question on ‘what kind of human
beings do we wish to be?’ he explains that he is confronted with two puzzles.
The first puzzle is that the South African reality is infested with complex and
interrelated structured layers of oppression: race, class, gender, etc. He asks how
can South Africans hold on to and
cultivate “a sense of one’s humanity” in the face of its constant denial. He
turns to Michel Foucault in Technologies
of the Self who interrogated the Delphic moral principle of ‘know yourself’
and its dominance, to the neglect of questions and reflections about ‘taking
care of the self’. He says the problem comes in when people, particularly the
middle class, believe that their survival and personal self can exist without
the ‘other’. He therefore asks how (2012: 2) “does one come to understand the
full complexity of one’s personal and social history” when one isolates
themselves from the designated ‘other’? He ties this question to the second
puzzle which has to do with how we make visible that the capacity to ‘care for
oneself’ is inextricable premised on an “unqualified appreciation of the
humanness of all those ‘other’ to oneself”, i.e. the nature of our human
interdependence (Soudein, 2012: 2). Note, here, that Soudien takes seriously
how racial discrimination is an experience lived by the ‘raced’ bodies.
Soudien then takes a curious and sudden turn, one which I
will attempt to explain, shortly hereafter. Soudien proposes that a way in
which we can solve these puzzles is to unlearn
the logic of race. For Soudien, ‘race’ is something that we have learnt; it
is an ‘idea’ that has captured our imagination and has influenced how we relate
to one another (Soudien, 2012: 7). He says that the idea of race, and the
subsequent ideological hold of racism, inhibits us from actualising the South African dream (Soudien, 2012: 7). In his own
words, he says (2012: 9; my emphasis):
“If we recognise this, and the enormity of it as a cognitive event in our heads is great,
we come to the realisation that it is the ‘thing’ behind the oppression or the
exploitation which we need to be getting at. That ‘thing’ is racism. What
activates it, what material or psychological interest it feeds off and
promotes, is what we desperately need to come to terms with. If we fail to do
this, we then actually declare race itself a real thing.”
He,
thus, finds that education is the tool in unlearning the logic of race. For
Soudien (2012: 7), education should be understood the “deliberative act of
working”, of negotiating and as the tool deployed in struggle. He says that
education holds the capacity to awaken our imagination to create afresh the
desire for a better South Africa, a better world where the “promise is that
within us, as reasoning subjects, resides the capacity to engage with
obfuscation, with ideology and with mystery in all their wiles ” (Soudien,
2012: 8). One could argue that Soudien suggestion is idealist, but such an
argument would be shallow, if not borderline condescending. There is nothing
wrong with idealism. In fact many years ago, it was merely a distant dream for
women to have the right vote and attend university. I and many like me are
living proof that dreams can come true as a result of struggle. What is
‘normal’ and practical now was once upon a time labelled idealistic. No, the
problem with Soudien’s suggestion is not his idealism; rather, I argue, that in
asking ‘what kind of human beings we wish to be’, Soudien is posing an
ontological question, and where the suggestion of ‘unlearning the logic of
race’ is of an epistemological approach. It is not merely the fact that his
question and suggestion depart fundamentally from different positions that is
in error, but also how in doing so he takes granted what Fanon argues in his
existential phenomenology that “ideas of race as abstracted representations of
lived experience miss the gravity of
the phenomena of showing up as a ‘negre’ and the formation of the
self-consciousness of the person who appears to others this way” (Manhendran,
2007:193).
The
humanity of the black exists as ‘non-being’
Soudien says (2012: 2) that what is central and of
significance to South Africa is how “it poses the question of being, of ontology, the capacity to
feel, to know and to be aware of oneself, with an intensity not easily matched
elsewhere in the world”. However, Fanon rightly questions the work of ontology.
In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon
writes (1952: 116; my emphasis) that “I
am over-determined from without. I am the slave not of the ‘idea’ that the others have of me but of my own appearance.” As mentioned above, Soudien notes that race
is ‘master signifier’ in South Africa and therefore creates and determines the
criteria who and how we become. A close
reading of Fanon shows how for him, racial perception is a prerequisite when
asking questions of human ontology, because it is those perceptions that shape
our understanding of what it means to be human. He explains that the
‘condition’ of being black in an anti-black world is filled with ambiguity,
paradoxes and tragedy, because black people only exist in the form of negation
based on their appearance. Fanon would say we exist so as not to exist by being
too much and simultaneously being not enough (Gordon, 1995: 6). The problem
with human sciences, and Soudien makes note of this, is that they depart with a
presupposition or an a priori knowledge
of what it means to be human. Put
differently, there is an invasive normative standard that has been
universalised on how to be-in-the-world. People of colour tick the relevant
criteria on what on it means to be human, except for the one that counts: being
white. And what it means to be white is to be the judge,
preacher, peace-maker, martyr, authority of moral goodness, rationality and
ultimately, being human (Frye, 1992). This is why Gordon (1995: 6) says that
Fanon was “not white enough, which means he is not human enough”. Humanistic
disciplines, ironically, pride themselves as being an adversary of natural
sciences, which failed to take into account human agency and the varying ways
in which knowledge is produced, when they themselves (practitioners of human
sciences) perpetuate the disease of
exclusion; of being critical of other sciences but not of themselves; and of
“identifying the symptoms, but shrink cowardly from the task involved in
indentifying the disease” (Gordon, 1995: 7).
What is puzzling is that Soudien makes this
very point when he says “our theories will always fall short of the realities
they seek to encompass”, because of their quick dismissal of lived experience
(Soudien, 2012: viii). Even to this very day, black South Africans suffer under
the whims of ‘Black Tax’. ‘Black Tax’
refers to the idea that people of colour have to work twice as hard as white
people so as to be taken seriously and the need to perform tasks just as well
as white people, if not better (Duane, 2007).
‘Black Tax’ is everywhere- in the workplace, schools, in conversation,
etc. White people have the privilege of being assumed to be competent candidates for whatever they choose
to do, be it a teacher, a manager or waitress, until proven otherwise
(MaKaiser, 2011: 454). It is the inverse
for black people in a white supremacist society, which says: ‘s/he must not
have a heavy accent; is eloquent; must not, God forbid have a politics, let
alone one rooted in activism (we cannot have strikes!); and whose
qualifications must be tenfold. We cannot assume, you see, that they are like
this, they have to prove it to us.’ This, Fanon says, is the “the fact of
blackness”, where racist reasoning not only denies me a place to belong, a
place to be happy, but denies me being,
full stop. As he puts it, “reason... [has] made a fool of me. As the other put
it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer. [We]
played cat and mouse” (1952: 118-120). It is no wonder that in light of this
reality, this degradation of humanity and the indignity in how we see and treat
each other, that Fanon rejects ontology- it is fundamentally racist in its
misunderstanding of what makes us human and therefore, it is anti-Human
(Gordon, 1995: 10-12).
Soudien
(2012: 243) says we should look to our Constitution, because it provides an
inclusive ontological framework in where we can begin to unlearn the logic of
race. Again, he neglects the reality of the contradictory relation that exists
between South African lived experience and the Constitution. The South African
legal system makes an interesting case-study in this regard considering that it
is a hybrid legal system that has inherited a common law system from the Dutch,
the Roman-Dutch and British; it also includes customary law from traditional
Africans; and as from 1996, we have the final Constitution which is the supreme
law of the land-where values that underpin it, such as fairness, justice and
reasonability, are based on Christianised normativity. Often South Africa is
considered to be a dual-system, since customary is not regarded as part of
South African common law. But how accurate is the use of the term ‘dual’? It
has been argued, particularly by African legal scholars, that the legal system
recognises both traditions, but only when they are consistent with the
Constitution, which is a product of a Westernised, global human rights
discourse. In fact, one would not callous in noting that what is considered to
be South African common law is in effect English customary law- an alien
Westminster system and order (Ramose, 2003; Cornell, 2009). It is therefore not
a stretch to argue that Fanon (1952:10) was insightful in saying, “For the
black man there is only one destiny. And it is white”.
With
the above in mind, it becomes clearer as to why Soudien’s suggestion on
unlearning the logic of race falls short. In essence what he is suggesting is
since race and racism are merely ideas and ideologies we can simple rethink our
way out of the problem (Mahendran, 2012: 194). However, the thinking and
rethinking of race and racism has been occurring for centuries and that is why
the area of race has its scholarship. Could it not be then, as Fanon suggests,
that racial perception is deeply engrained and implicated, at a more
fundamental level, in how we experience the world and how that experience makes
us who we are: raced bodies? It is no wonder that Fanon, at the end of chapter
of the “The Fact of Blackness”, begins to weep (1952: 108). This undoubtedly
paints a very dark picture of Fanonian thought and to leave it such would not
be a true reflection of Fanon the man and his thinking about the human
condition. In fact, Fanon say in the
same chapter (1952: 108):
“Nevertheless
with all my strength I refuse to accept that amputation. I feel in myself soul
as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest rivers, my chest
has the power to expand without limit”.
Fanon
remain hopeful and trusting in the human potential to free themselves from
being determined by others. Barney Pityana, one of the founders of the Black
Consciousness Movement, makes a similar revolutionary declaration when he says
(Gibson, 2011: 50):
“I am
not a potentiality of something; I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look
for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My black
consciousness does not hold itself as a lack. It is. It is its own follower”.
For
both Fanon and Pityana it is in this assertion of being and not merely being a copy,
that we find freedom. In other words, in rejecting the politics of recognition,
we must remain open and free in the world, but at the same time we must
committed to change it so it can heal.
Fidelity
to Human Potential through action
Perhaps
a way of showing fidelity to Fanon and his existential phenomenology[3] is through an
interrogation of the conception of existentialism. Jean-Paul Sartre explains
that existentialism, at the very least, can be defined as a doctrine that
believes that existence precedes essence. In other words, we exist first,
before we have any idea of who we are or who we ought to be. It is through our
experiences and actions that we are able to define ourselves. Prior that
projection, or the act of creating and becoming, we do not exist. Put simply,
we are what we make ourselves. Sartre therefore agrees with Husserlian
phenomenology in so far as the starting point in investigating human reality
should depart from our subjectivity. Gordon (1995: 16 [sic]) argues that for
Sartre “all investigating involves a form of self-reflection”. Is it not so
that human beings need to personalise issues, first, before we can find ways to
address those issues? This might be a grand generalisation, but it still has
its merit. We tend to reflect on the suffering of others with regards to what we
would do and how we would feel. John Holloway (2012) shares a similar
sentiment in his idea of ‘the scream’, presumably inspired by a painting titled
‘The Scream’ by Norwegian artists Edvard Munch. He says that ‘the scream’, the
condition of its possibility being the agony and despair we see in the world
and eventually embody, is and must be the starting point of scientific and
theoretical thinking.
Sartre,
however, is critical of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in studying
consciousness or the appearance of ‘things’ in isolation and in our case which
would translate to the bracketing of individual subjectivity from the presence
of others. In other words, the subjectivity of the individual is constituted by
the subjectivities of others. Sartre says and I quote at length (1945: 45):
“I
cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation
of another. The other is indispensible to my existence, and equally so to any
knowledge I have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of
myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which
confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or
against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say,
that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what
he is and what others are”.
Fanonian
thought undoubtedly faces a peculiar problem, when it is quite clear that there
is a need to suspend the ontology that grounds human sciences and its normative
conception of the human condition, but at the same time recognises that human
existence is contingent on human relationality (Gordon, 1995: 34). Contingency becomes a problem when what makes
part of my subjectivity is the denial of my existence, “[f]or not only must the
black man be black; he must be black in
relation to the white man” (Fanon, 1952: 109-110). As a way out of this
peculiarity, Fanon calls for a radical phenomenology that is critical,
self-reflective, a meta-stable methodology, if you like, in the study of human
being. To put is simply, what Fanon is proposing is for the philosophy of human
science to take seriously “the open door of every consciousness” (Fanon. 1952:
181). Fanon’s existential phenomenology is a Humanism, a critical Humanism that
recognises that with the study of humans, there is always an ‘incompleteness’
and the possibility of human
subjectivity, of becoming truly human lies in having taken thought from our
experiences and being actional (Gordon,
1995: 12; 69-70).
Being
actional is a collective experience
Unlike,
Black Skins, White Masks, Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism can be read as
dedication or an investigation to the potential of individuals to band together
under a common cause. Of course, one can be critical as to the romanticism
surrounding the idea of ‘a people’, but Fanon, here, is attempting to make
visible the possibility of the impossible.
Fanon
illustrates how the Algerian Revolution was a struggle by and for everyone. The
possibility of this mass collective action was the realisation that when
humanity is at stake and in question, even if it is of a particular social
group (s), it becomes everyone’s responsibility to safeguard it. In the
introduction, Adolfo Gilly eloquently states (1959: 5):
“To
describe a revolution one doesn’t have to describe armed actions. There are
inevitable, but what defines and decides any revolution is the social struggles
of the masses, supported by armed actions Fanon shows that this was the
Algerian way. The guerrillas in the mountains, the army of liberation, did not
defeat the French army militarily: it was a whole population supported by the
guerrilla army which defeated and destroyed the imperialist enemy as a social
force. For each Algerian solider who died, says Fanon, ten civilians died”.
This is
a powerful statement, because it illustrates the interconnectedness of a
people: the centrality of human relations above entities. As a tool of
transformation, people put themselves and their relations to one another at the
centre of all operations of life and thus the transformation of social
relations was inescapable at that moment in time. The struggle was living, immediate, all encompassing and
taken seriously. What Fanon crystillises so well in A Dying Colonialism is that when our humanity is in question, then
life itself is at risk.
In many
ways the Algerian Revolution can be likened to the Paris Commune. The Paris
commune of 1871 was caused by an insurrection of the working class against the
elite, after the French were defeated in a war against the Prussians. During
this war, at the face of defeat, the elites and the state had armed workers
with weapons to partake in the war as part of the National Guard. It was after
the war when the working class refused to accept the system of state oppression
and democracy that did not represent the demos
that workers refused to put down their weapons, and fought instead, against the
oppressive elites. This insurrection can be seen as a monumental moment in
history that marks the beginning of the struggles within societies in terms of
class. The workers were representing the
idea of equality within society. For two months ordinary people took over the
city of Paris, this was an example of ordinary people, who are not experts in
politics or philosophy, showing the capability to think and govern rule
themselves. That was their version of a politics, of a philosophy (Badiou,
2006).
the Paris
Commune was in no way a nationalist movement. It was more of a political
movement, based on the belief that everyone is equal and that all have the
right to assert themselves political subjects. In fact a significant amount of
people in Commune were in Polish (Badiou, 2006). This suggests that the modes
of operation and of thinking in the commune were not based on national
principles, but rather on mass political will and agenda. Paris was for all who
lived in it regardless nationality. Similarly, Fanon points out how the
Algerian Revolutions was supported by people who were not Algerian. Again to
quote Gilly (p.11):
“These
men were not only Frenchmen or Arabs; they were also Spaniards, Italians,
Greeks- the entire Mediterranean supported an Algeria in arms. And from beyond
came Englishmen, Dutchmen, Belgians, Germans, Latin Americans. Like every great
revolution, the Algerian revolution attracted men from all over the world, and
received them as its own”.
What is
clear is that in the Algerian Revolution, just as in the Paris Commune,
non-Algerians participated in the struggle and risked their lives as though it
was their own humanity at stake. And what we realise from A Dying Colonialism is that an assault on the humanity of others,
in an assault on all us and therefore it is the responsibility of all to take
action and defend our humanity. Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth, “Each
generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or
betray it” (1963: 205).
Conclusion:
Reflection on Soudien’s Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of Race
In many
ways Soudien is in agreement with Fanonian thought. Soudien is grappling, in
the way Fanon did, with hegemonic presence of race in lived reality. Race, like
death and taxes, has become a certainty. Both Fanon and Soudien are critically
thinking of ways and possibilities to work outside the limitations of race.
Soudien, in fact, says that and I quote at length (2012: 5; my emphasis):
“South Africa is a country which is simultaneously about
integration and segregation, tradition and modernity, being safe and unsafe,
being well and unwell, and which brings these all together into an ensemble of
inexpressible tragedy and beauty, a country which is almost unique as a space
in which people are called upon to be human. The intensity of being fully alive
– awake – in the deepest human sense is
an experience that South Africa [should] make important.”
Fanon
says (1952: 181) as much in Black Skin
White Mask, “I want the world to recognise, with me, the open door of every
consciousness”. However limited Soudien’s suggestion of ‘unlearning the logic
of race’ is, he still makes a Fanonian move when he says that we need to create
and recreate ourselves, first and foremost, as human beings (Soudien,
2012). For Soudien, education is a
collective effort and tool that can assist us in “locating oneself in one’s
environment and coming to the real sense of one’ dependence on those around
oneself and the dependence of others on oneself” (Soudien, 2012: 244). Perhaps,
I judged Soudien ontological approach to the question ‘what kind of human
beings do we wish to be’ and his epistemological suggestion of unlearning the
logic of race a bit too harshly, considering that he, like myself, is grappling
in thought an action with the experiences of ‘incompleteness’ in how we
understand ourselves, others and the world we live in. I nevertheless stand by
critique, because the enduring effects of race and racism, through a Fanonian
lens, takes seriously and calls into question the meanings we attribute to
being human, or rather, to human existence. It is the experience and not solely
the ‘idea’ of race (racialised bodies) and racism that continually places our
humanity at stake. It is in our
experiences with one another that we grow, learn and essentially become human. In similar fashion to
Fanon’s final prayer in Black Skin White
Masks, I pray (1952: 181; my emphasis):
“O my body, make me always a (wo)man who
questions!”
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[1] Note that throughout the essay I use the term ‘black’ loosely, so
as to also include all people of colour in South Africa such as people of Indian
and Coloured descent.
[2] For statistics see: De le Hey, M.,
2012, A better life for all”: The case for a youth
wage subsidy, http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/mandelarhodesscholars/2012/05/25/a-better-life-for-all-the-case-for-a-youth-wage-subsidy/; also see: Pithouse, R.,
2012, Thought Amidst Waste: Conjunctural
Notes on the Democratic Project in South Africa, Paper for the Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar
in the Humanities, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, 28 May 2012.
[3] Phenomenology is the study of consciousness and how it experiences
phenomena from a subjective point of view.
