I started out bored with the idea of whiteness and its
attendant studies, but after attending a short part of the “Negotiating
whiteness in 21st century South Africa” conference, I am now viscerally opposed
to them.
While the stated purpose of whiteness studies is to expose
white people to the legacies of post-colonial and post-apartheid privilege
which still take racial forms, in fact the field continues to place privileged
people at the centre of the gaze of the academy.
As I sat looking out upon a roomful of largely white faces,
I couldn’t help but think: “So it’s still all about you.”
I find the field to be one of obsessive navel-gazing that
achieves exactly the opposite of what it intends to do – it continues to
privilege the privileged and to pathologise their honestly minor issues in the
bigger scheme of things.
It is as tiresome as the goings-on of that crew called
#blacktwitter on the social media site, Twitter, who continue to believe they
are oppressed and exploited despite evidence of rapid social mobility,
autonomy, voice and power.
For me, these two groups symbolise a fetish of victimology
that underlies so much of South Africa’s lack of self-belief and our inability
to capitalise on all our opportunities.
A professor at the whiteness conference has commissioned
focus group research where people earnestly pondered their victim status
because they had had swimming pools when fellow students had none in apartheid
times.
God help me! We have academics who spend their precious days
studying this?
And we have people so seriously obsessed with their former
privilege they have turned it into a “pathology”?
Why not just share your swimming pool, sponsor a kid’s
school fees or give half your wealth away as businessman Patrice Motsepe did?
This is a better salve than self-obsession.
Imagine that woman’s excellent skills put to good use
examining why Anene Booysen and Thandeka Madonsela, two teenagers raped and
mutilated, came to such sorry ends – the gruesome symbols of a rape epidemic
which we still don’t understand well enough to vanquish.
Or to understanding our ticking time-bomb: the two to three
million young South Africans who are locked out of the shining South Africa of
privilege through an absence of education, skills and networks.
Surely, this is what universities’ sociology and humanities
studies are for?
To find insight and assist nations to understanding the
fundaments of our legacy.
If whiteness were a small specialisation, sure, but from the
conference it is clear that tens of millions of rands and much high
intellectual time is going into this intellectual folly.
The topics included a panel called “Theorising whiteness”,
“Whiteness in visual presentation”, “Whiteness in print and visual culture”.
It goes on. And on . . . For 24
papers over two days.
As a country, we have largely killed
non-racialism, and the whiteness obsession is symbol of that.
Non-racialism is under-examined, though it should not be as
the philosophy is a constitutional pillar.
It does not mean race-blindness nor is it the easy amnesia
of some latter-day adherents (“Woolworths can’t implement employment equity
because it’s against non-racialism”).
Non-racialism is the injunction to us by the founding
mothers and fathers to find ways to transcend race, not identity, and the
congealing ways in
which race has divided South Africans.
It is an injunction to see ourselves and each other as human
beings and brothers and sisters before we see ourselves as racialised
holograms.
It is the ubuntu we preach but so often fail to practise.
Today, it is almost as hard to find adherents of
non-racialism as it is to find whites who benefited from apartheid, and I fear
the whiteness movement only entrenches division instead of moving us to the
path of informed unity.
Whiteness also renders white people as lesser citizens.
Dotted through its scholarship is an injunction to think
twice before speaking out, to know your place because of your previous
privilege.
Again, this is the politics of subjugation and not an effort
to live out the constitutional principles that provide for equality and for
redress.
It enshrines equality upon all of us as citizens of South
Africa, but it also commits us to redress for the past.
I would rather our white compatriots commit fully to
employment equity and black economic empowerment than engaging their whiteness
inside their communities.
All this while maintaining a stoic silence on important
national debates from the state of our roads to that of our hospitals.
Supporting transformation would be a commitment to look
forward rather than backward.
But instead, these two policies suffer a neglect by both the
academy and the privileged in the corporate and managerial suites, all of which
are still largely white-led.
