Lieketso 'Dee' Mohoto', Mail & Guardian
On reading Xolela
Mangcu’s article last year, “SA’s black academics are getting a raw deal”
(Business Day, November 3 2014), it occurred to me that one of the things that
keeps happening in the public discourse about black academics in historically
white universities is that the texture and detail are being stripped from the
experience of race in the academy.
What dominates is the
problem of quantity – a bean-counting exercise.
We know that
bean-counting exists for a purpose but it has the effect of quantifying
blackness for use as a currency in the transformation agenda.
I think the conversations
we need to be having alongside the quantity debate are the stories of black
scholars’ rage in these historically white universities. Particularly relevant
are the emotional, psychological and sociopolitical realities of being a
“visibly raced” scholar.
Inside these academic
communities, the “black experience” is often one of feeling undermined,
misunderstood and marginalised, as was evident in the furores at the University
of Cape Town last year.
Partly, this is because
in white academies the work of transformation has been compartmentalised. The
official bean-counting happens somewhat apart from the fullness of the person
who is the so-called “black” academic, and whose visibility is considered the
most pressing evidence of transformation.
Marginalised
Yet spaces of safety for
black academics that deal with “being black” are on the margins of these
academies in little associations or special programmes where one gets a
reprieve, a release, from the daily beating-down by colleagues who are
positioned as the natural citizens of the academy.
This normalisation leads
to social and cultural privilege – the privilege to foist one’s world view upon
others as the usual world view that remains unquestioned and non-negotiable.
In the imbizos and the
“race forums” that are tasked to hear “black testimony”, one feels constantly
mined of one’s experiences and thoughts “on transformation” and often with very
little awareness that, when we speak about it, we do so from a position of
being wounded.
When transformation is
addressed it’s the black scholar’s burden to articulate the problem fully: one
is often required to give evidence of their problem and furnish its solution.
Testifying through the
intricate mess of personal experience risks the black scholar’s testimony being
labelled “anecdotal” and therefore without substantive merit; and so we fall
back on the bean-counting exercises of numbers over people.
This is problematic in
that it doubly marginalises us, allowing the privileged institutional community
to remain stubbornly unchanged.
I’m singling this out as
a primary function of privilege hoarding by those who risk their privilege if
“transformation” were truly to happen.
Objectification
This suggests that the
university’s attempts to “understand” my position, to “let me speak my truth”
of this experience, has become one of objectification, and also (but worse) a
monologue where the black scholar speaks, but is not necessarily heard.
I attribute this to the
lack of ability on the part of these universities to see and their invulnerability
to acknow-ledging the ways in which they support and endorse (as well as often
reward) institutional behaviours that perpetuate white supremacist, capitalist
and patriarchal ways of being.
It is no wonder that
black academics are resorting to screams of rage on public platforms and in the
media.
Black academics are
finally insisting that our primary task here is not to be black, but to teach
and research, as with all other academics.
The reality is we know as
little about “transformation” as the white folk – we are just asking that our
outsideness not be made so jarring and that we be judged on the functions of
scholarship and not as functions or tools of “transformation”.
So, my white colleague,
you bring your experience and I will bring mine and we can meet and speak as
people with one another.
Yes, we know that even in
this conversation we bring to bear our social and political baggages, so it
will be difficult. It will be messy.
If we speak openly and
honestly, and can forge a way to make links between our experience and the
institutions in which we find ourselves, we can ask: How do they treat people?
How do they relate to people? What are the glaring inconsistencies?
This open and honest
debate can lead to transformative practices that may begin in staffrooms and
reach out into our classrooms and personal lives. We must all be willing to do
the work of transformation.
