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. If white South Africans don’t give up their investment in global whiteness – and an identification with what they imagine to be the inherent moral superiority of the West or the First Word, they will, while scorning the brandy and coke fascist, continue to modernise rather than root out their racism.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 08:31:02 +0000
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