Richard Pithouse, SACSIS
We would be more
effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t
relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid
tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be
repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it
is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came
to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and
neo-colonialism, and to take both phenomena seriously as powerful forces on the
global stage that, from Ferguson to Paris and Johannesburg, continue to shape
the present.
Apart from the occasional
buffoon like Steve Hofmeyr, and the noxious trolls that waste their lives, such
as they are, on the comments sections of the online media, very few people will
publicly defend apartheid in 2015. But as we all know racism remains a
malignant force everywhere from our universities to the streets of suburban
Cape Town. One reason for this is that it is perfectly possible to oppose
apartheid, to see it as a crude and embarrassing anachronism, and to think,
speak and act in ways that reinscribe racism.
Although racism has
retained some constant features since the seventeenth century it is also a
dynamic phenomenon. There has, for instance, been a shift in the legitimation
of the racism permissible in polite society from biology to culture. In
political terms colonial rule was largely replaced by the rule of European and
American controlled financial institutions during the second half of the last
century, backed up with an American invasion where necessary. In Western Europe
Muslims have often replaced Jews as an imagined threat to what used to be
conceived as a Christian way of life and is now frequently thought of as a
Judeo-Christian way of life.
If we are not attentive
to the ways in which racism mutates over time and we focus the bulk of our
opposition to racism on its outmoded forms then its forms that are most
dangerous, because they are authorised by contemporary forms of power, will not
be recognised and opposed with sufficient clarity and force. Racism is not just
the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. It doesn’t only come
in a white hood, a fascist uninform or khaki. It also wears a suit or Manolo
Blahniks. It speaks English, and French, as well as Afrikaans. It is abundantly
evident in The Daily Mail, Walt Disney films for children, the World Bank and,
in some cases, certain kinds of academic consensus in the most prestigious
universities in the world.
In Europe today no one in
polite society will offer their support to a teenage fascist from the
backstreets of Leipzig or deny the mass murder of European Jewry in the first
half of the 1940s. But it is acceptable to respond to the unconscionable
murders that recently rocked Paris in a manner that assumes that France is part
of a morally superior civilization and that erases France’s brutal colonial
history, the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, the day to day racism
experienced by the descendants of immigrants from North and West Africa or
enduring French support for imperialism, such as, for instance, the refusal to
allow Haitians to run their own country as they see fit.
There is a similar
situation in the United States. There are no longer laws instituting segregation,
there is a consensus that precludes the expression of certain forms of racism
and celebrates a distorted image of Martin Luther King. But none of this
precludes support for forms of de facto segregation, the murder, with impunity,
of black men, the acutely racialized nature of the criminal justice system or
imperialism wrecking devastation, with bombs and torture, around the world. In
the United States, as in France, contemporary mainstream opinion takes the view
that, as the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill put it in 1859,
"Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with
barbarians."
The Second World War was
an important moment in the evolution of racism. After the war the open
expression of racism, especially as a set of biological prejudices, lost much
of its credibility and there was a shift towards an abstract affirmation of
universal equality via the language of human rights. When India won
independence in 1947 it was clear that colonialism would not endure
indefinitely. But it was precisely at this moment, in 1948, that apartheid was
instituted in South Africa and the state of Israel was declared. Although these
two developments, both of which entrenched racism as a matter of law, went
against the grain of the way things were going, the explicit racism that
endured in English speaking settler colonies meant that the overt racism of
apartheid was not an isolated phenomenon.
Places like the Deep
South in the United States or South Africa and Australia, in which there was an
overt commitment to white supremacy, instituted in law, were seen as
peripheral, provincial and backward but they were still tolerated.
Transnational white solidarity trumped the developing sense that overt racism,
especially when inscribed into law, was illegitimate and indefensible. The
United States sustained legal segregation until 1964 and the White Australia
policy only started to be undone in 1966. The last lynching in the United
States happened in 1968.
It was the civil rights
struggle in the United States and anti-colonial movements across Africa that
began to put an end to legislated forms of segregation and colonialism in the
1960s. From this point on apartheid came to be seen, along with white supremacy
in Rhodesia, as irredeemably backward on the global stage. Metropolitan elites
began to take a greater distance from their colonial cousins. The contingencies
of the Cold War bought apartheid some time, but the game was up.
But, crucially, in the
United States, and on the global stage too, the attainment of equality in
principle in the 1960s did not translate into the attainment of equality in
practice. Some of the language of racism changed – for instance European
domination of African affairs was now a matter of ‘development’ – but
racialized domination endured. Today the sort of racism that is present in,
say, American sitcoms or philosophical discourses about the inherent ethical
nobility of Europe, is rooted in the long history of colonial racism and
functions to legitimate the enduring denial of equality in practice.
If we are to develop an
adequate understanding of how our society came to be the way that it is, we
can’t speak as if apartheid, imaged as an embarrassing provincial mistake in
the broader context of enlightened whiteness, is the only cause of our
problems. On the contrary we need to take, very seriously, the reality that
apartheid was just one iteration in a long and global history of racism that
continues to shape the present. We need to take the long history of colonial
domination before apartheid and the neo-colonial power relations that have
endured after apartheid in South Africa, and on the global stage, seriously. We
need to take seriously the different value that, in 2015 is accorded to black
life and white life in the United States, or to the lives of people in the
Congo, Gaza or Mexico and (white) people in France.
Today it is easy to
dismiss apartheid, or the Ventersdorp brandy and coke fascist, and to project
racism onto the past, or onto people that appear to caricature that past in the
present, while denying the presence of racism in ways of speaking and
exercising power that are socially authorised in the contemporary world.
Contemporary forms of racism do sometimes repeat the language and postures of
the past. But they have no legitimacy on the public stage and are easily
recognised and opposed. However contemporary racism also speaks an
international language – perhaps with a French or American accent; a language
that is not seen as provincial and backward, a language that is authorised at
Harvard and in the Daily Mail. This can enable a whole set of authorised
discourses - such as opposition to crime, support for the environment, human
rights, feminism, commitment to excellence, philosophical rigour and economic
rationality - to be misused for racist purposes. This makes the work of
opposing racism more complex than the easy work of confronting the brandy and
coke fascist.
Many white South Africans
seem to assume that the end of apartheid, imagined as a temporary anomaly consequent
to a backward form of Afrikaner nationalism, has meant the end of racism. This
is often taken to mean that white South Africans are now able to rejoin a
community of international whiteness. This space is often imagined, in an
enduring colonial trope, as a space of enlightenment that offers a unique and
precious gift to the world. When white South Africans see themselves as having
a special connection to global whiteness they often succumb to the narcissistic
fantasy that their presence in this society, in Africa, constitutes a unique
and precious gift. This makes a sociality premised on actual rather than
abstract equality impossible.
