‘You’re basically invisible unless you’re white’

Geoff Sifrin

TAKING ISSUE                                                                               

Another is that if we don’t address pervasive racism, everything Nelson Mandela’s generation fought for, will be undone.

Ordinary people have little control over the former, except every few years when they vote at the polls. But they can do something about the latter. When the organisation Gesher was formed after the 1994 democratic elections to encourage Jews to engage with post-apartheid South Africa, it held a workshop bringing together black members of a Soweto Methodist Church and Jews.

The participants were asked to express their thoughts and feelings. An old black woman told the Jewish whites: “I have been waiting for 40 years for you people to want to talk to me; what took you so long?”

It will take generations to get past the complex, ingrained attitudes of racism: superiority versus inferiority; power versus powerlessness; privilege versus poverty; and so on.

The racial firestorm on social media over the last few months, triggered by a white woman calling blacks “monkeys”, and a black person saying whites should suffer what “Hitler did to the Jews”, led some people to believe South Africa is doomed to a race war. Before apartheid came down, the world at large thought this would happen.

But contrast this with a recent survey by the Institute of Race Relations of a balanced sample of 2 245 South Africans. It found that 76 per cent of respondents thought race relations had either improved or stayed the same since 1994.The view that a race war is imminent is not shared by most South Africans.

One interesting result of the survey links the two themes mentioned above: Politicians and racism. Some 62 per cent of South Africans believe that “all this talk of racism and colonialism is an attempt by politicians to find excuses for their own failures”.

Attitudes and perceptions are not cast in stone and can change quickly. It is clear from comments of whites and blacks during recent confrontations countrywide, that most people on both sides don’t really understand each other.

Despite the survey’s positive findings, the cry of black students at universities that they are treated as inferior and patronised by white faculty and students, points back to the old black woman’s statement at the Gesher workshop: many whites still don’t try to honestly engage with them.

A quote in the Daily Maverick from a black student at the University of the Free State captures it well: “You’re basically invisible. Unless you’re white. If you’re a black student you’re made to feel different. They make you feel like, ‘Okay I’m black and don’t mean shit and they’re white and important’.”

On Sunday at the Sandton Convention Centre, former Israeli President Shimon Peres praised the SA Truth and Reconciliation Commission in which perpetrators and victims of apartheid atrocities came together in 1997, imbued with the euphoria of Nelson Mandela’s ethos of reconciliation; they told the truth about atrocities committed during apartheid, he said, and perpetrators were “forgiven”.

It sounds uplifting, but South Africans know the reality is more complicated. The IRR survey points in a positive direction, but there’s a lot of work to be done to ensure this country really does move away from a race war.

Read Geoff Sifrin’s regular columns on his blog sifrintakingissue.wordpress.com