Realising the Dream pptx

Abbreviations and acronyms xvIntroduction ‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’ 1 1 Social difference and its history 31 2 The obdurate nature of race 54 3 Creolisatio

the dreamrealising

Unlearning the logic of race

Unlearning the logic of race

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Abbreviations and acronyms xv

Introduction ‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’ 1

1 Social difference and its history 31

2 The obdurate nature of race 54

3 Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity 81

4 The racial nature of South African schooling 96

5 Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools 126

6 The asymmetries of contact in the South African school 158

7 Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools 175

8 The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa 193

9 Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against

Table 5.1 Extent of changes in selected schools in five provinces

(per cent) 139Table 5.2 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in formerly race-based

schools (per cent) 139Table 5.3 Gauteng learners by ‘race’ groups in public and independent

schools (per cent) 140Table 5.4 Learner demographic profiles 140

Table 5.5 African learners in selected KZN schools (per cent) 141

Table 9.1 High schools by performance in Senior Certificate

(Grade 12) mathematics 228Table 9.2 UCT graduation rates, for cohort commencing studies in

2006 and graduating in 2009 (per cent) 229

No one could have foreseen the many and complex ways in which racial

integration in schools would unfold in the wake of the long period of

colonialism and apartheid from which South Africa emerged in the 1990s

Those who studied schools quickly recognised the difference between

desegregation and integration Researchers discovered ways in which social

class recast race and the racial experience inside schools A few found that

the walls of schools were highly permeable, as powerful experiences gained in

cities, townships, homes, churches, peer groups, youth political organisations

and other forming influences carried seamlessly into the ways race took on

meaning inside institutions formally established for learning Others found

dominant cultures subduing incoming cultures and, at times, not without

the ready participation of the newcomers seeking mobility in a country and a

world that privileged particular languages, customs and ways of thinking For

those who studied schools, the many faces of school integration required new

and courageous theorising that went beyond the application or borrowing of

well-trodden concepts and methods from other settings

Enter Realising the Dream and it will not surprise the reader that Crain

Soudien is regarded as South Africa’s foremost theorist of school education

Trained in the sociology of education and with an impressive exposure to

leading thinkers in comparative and international education, Soudien brings

into conversation some of his, and others’, most important writings on race,

class and education since the early 1990s to track the ways in which race,

especially, takes its meanings in the experiences of post-apartheid schooling

The versatility of the author in drawing on a vast range of conceptual frames

from post-colonialism through new race theories of school and society is

breathtaking That said, Realising the Dream does not make for easy reading,

for it requires deep reflection and the revisiting of common sense in our

understanding of race, education and society

This is tricky terrain How, for example, does one talk about race without

assigning to it an essentialist and enduring meaning after apartheid? The book

takes on this dilemma squarely, and here the interaction between Soudien and

Paul Gilroy is especially illuminating in the recognition and deconstruction

of race To take another example, how does the eloquence of theory and its

brutally honest: ‘our theories will always fall short of the realities they seek to

encompass’ And how does one account for what appear to be progressive laws

and policies only to find them working against system-wide change to benefit

the poor and the disadvantaged? In response the author takes us through a

stunning array of cases of schools grappling with policy ‘on the ground’ and

gives an almost ethnographic sense of how things change, and stay the same

In some ways the cases constitute the centre of the book, and anyone initiate

into schools research in this country who is looking for a ready collection and

bibliography of the major writings on race and education since the early 1990s

would find it neatly contained in this outstanding volume

There is no voluntarism here, but a nuanced account of the choices we make

as politicians, policy-makers, parents and students This sounds harsh, but

Soudien is right: ‘African parents, educators and learners were complicit’ in

what he calls the ‘structured exclusion’ of black children from the broader

social and academic achievements of the school The question is, why? One

cannot dismiss the choices of black parents in favour of English, for example,

as simply a false consciousness; that would not only assume the researcher

has true consciousness, it is also just sloppy analysis In a world that privileges

English as the language of access, opportunity and status, I find it patronising

for the black middle classes to insist that the poor honour mother-tongue

education while the well-off happily ensconce their own children inside the

cotton-woolled and polite English-medium schools

But Soudien takes another brave step in this regard by not simply accounting

for black-into-white school integration but also throwing a critical eye

over that other difficult conversation: the ways in which African students

experience and appropriate education in former coloured and Indian schools,

and how all black students are included and excluded in former white

schools The politics and economics are different depending on which cases

of integration you choose to focus on, and this is where even more research

needs to be undertaken

This book is also a timely contribution since at the time of writing this

foreword High Court Judge Boissie Mbha decided that a former white school

in Johannesburg must admit a single black student on grounds that the school

cannot use its admission policy to exclude black students The capacity of the

school, ruled the judge, rests with the government even though the admissions

policy might rest with the school governing body However, on closer

inspection the issue is much more complex First, the school has an enrolment

of nearly 50 per cent black students already, so the exclusion argument is thin

Second, the governing body has power over admissions – subject, of course,

to constitutional values – and this must be respected Third, admissions serve

in part to determine how many – not only which – students to admit given a

set of educational goals (e.g., smaller, more manageable classes) The

counter-argument is raised in some detail in the Times of 15 December 2011.

My point is this: as schools become more integrated, at what point does

exclusion shift from numbers admitted to cultures recognised, from parent

control to government interference, from access to quality, from race to

cosmopolitanism? More importantly, how does human integration happen

inside schools in ways that embrace children, their histories, traditions, beliefs

and commitments, behind a powerful model of democratic education? This

surely must be the central question in deciding what the common project

should be around which we rebuild schools and society

Soudien’s corresponding research programme demands lengthy

descriptive-analytical accounts of daily life in schools – of the Philip W Jackson variety

on the hidden curriculum – but this book at least pushes us in that direction

with a guarded optimism revealed in the title, Realising the Dream, and, in a

memorable turn of phrase, a personal stinger: ‘Ways of being are not in our

blood’

Here one of the challenges, recognised briefly by the author, is to trouble

whiteness a little more, and certainly beyond the dismissal of race-thinking

in schools as white supremacy, a charge so common in angry writing What

about white woundedness, anxiety, fear and retreat? The white evil versus

black good narrative of history has run its course, and we need to ask new

questions about serious issues such as white guilt and what Chabani Manganyi

calls the ‘politics of the defeated’

Take, for example, what has happened in many schools where integration

became resegregation, such as the case of an all-white school, nervously

embracing the project of open access, becoming an all-black school with low

education standards and brutal modes of discipline against pseudo-gangsters

on the playground The most prominent media example of such a school is the

former J.G Strydom High School, renamed Diversity High by the progressive

Afrikaner principal The now black principal in a black school was caught

brutalising a black student, beating and kicking the child on the floor of his

Diversity High?

The related challenge offered by Soudien’s work is to explain how the ‘logic

of race’ manifests itself in white progressive politics compared to white

conservative politics and everything in between And in this pursuit, the

comparison cannot be reduced to English versus Afrikaans school cultures

Finally, in this regard what gives the logic of race such continued currency,

with all shades of the epidermis? The answers to these questions are not

all found in this book, but Realising the Dream is without doubt a reliable

launching pad for deeper inquiry along these lines

The author will no doubt brace himself for a familiar criticism that in focusing

on integration the attention is limited to a small number of schools; sheer

race demographics imply that the vast majority of South African schools will

remain black That is true, but some of us choose this focus because it is such

a powerful barometer of the state of race and race relations in our country, and

such a convenient place – replete with children – to try to foretell the future

But here is an interesting challenge for the next generation of race research,

and a subject on which the author has advised in the anti-xenophobia film

on youth, Where Do I Stand? That is, how are children integrated – or not –

with respect to national origins, and with respect to various ethnicities

within the black community? We cannot ignore such studies because of

the obvious divide-and-rule ideology of apartheid that made many of us as

social and educational researchers not pay attention to what were then called

the inevitabilities of tribal conflict Here too the conceptual table is laid by

Soudien for productive inquiry in these directions by focusing on how racial

identities are formed and deformed, and can in fact be reformed in school

In the end, schools are about learning and the democratic project about

‘unlearning’, as Soudien puts it, the received logics of race This is the task set

in this intriguing new book which every student teacher and teacher educator

alike must read

Professor Jonathan Jansen

This book comes out of an ongoing engagement with the issues of equality

and education It was conceived as a text in the closing months of 2008, after

a conference in Adelaide, Australia, on the state of race and education I used

the occasion of the meeting to develop an argument for why ‘race’ as an idea is

so ubiquitous, why it is so dangerous and why we have to discard it altogether

While I had allies at the meeting, there was also resistance and puzzlement

The resistance came from two sources First was a response from a young

person who found the thought of having to give up her whiteness and the

standing that it represented completely nonsensical Why did she have to give

up what clearly was so good for her? Why couldn’t others become like her? The

second response was different and was perhaps not even resistance It came

from a group of people who were about to have their own global gathering of

indigenous peoples and who, understandably, thought they would find in us

and in our meeting a group of people who were sympathetic with and kindred

in their view of the world They asserted a powerful sense of their own separate

identity In an implicit rebuttal of what I was suggesting, the strategic point

they sought to make was that they could not sacrifice their own identities

at the very moment that a sense of their full historic dignity was possible

They couldn’t and wouldn’t sacrifice their distinct identities – even for the

cause of dismantling white privilege A version of this politics also produced

the puzzlement that circulated in the gathering How was it possible to live

without race? The realities of ‘us’ and ‘them’ were too deep

I learnt a great deal from this meeting in Adelaide False as race is as an idea, it is

viscerally inscribed in our heads and in our bodies I learnt how disorientating

the idea of ‘racelessness’ is, and that this disorientation disempowers people I

came away from this experience sobered and want to thank all my colleagues

and friends who shared those few days with me They may never know how

much I came to understand the importance of living in community and of

our dependence on one another I want to insist, however, that a sense of

our community cannot be constructed simply on the basis of what we look

like If it were, if we automatically and instinctively see ‘connection’ based on

similarities of our appearances, we would be crafting our world in the most

arbitrary of terms It would be a world of whim, caprice and thoughtlessness

deliberately Values and conscious commitments must be the basis on which

we give our allegiances to one another And, in many ways, it wasn’t race that

my colleagues in Adelaide were defending They were defending a world of

meaning – another world And it is this that we need to make clear as we think

of how we describe each other I thank my colleagues for this stimulus

More directly, many friends and members of my family have been extremely

helpful in getting this work ready for publication It has been read in part or in

whole and commented on by Alan Wieder, Nita Hanmer, Mokubung Nkomo,

Zimitri Erasmus and Jonathan Jansen I am grateful for all the help they have

provided Alan was the first to see the text As long ago as early 2009, I told

him that I had put the manuscript together and, as is his wont, he said, ‘Let

me see it’ And so I sent it off to him in Portland, Oregon, and month after

month he methodically sent me very helpful comments Nita, my sister-in-law

in Sydney, Australia, read the next draft of the manuscript and was ruthless,

as a good editor should be She cut through my verbiage, demanding clarity

and felicity of expression She would sit at her desk surrounded by all the latest

dictionaries she could find and would say that ‘the Collins dictionary doesn’t

have this word Please use another.’ I have tried hard to meet her exacting

standards I know that my writing can be difficult and I appreciate how much

her editorial skill has improved the text

To Mokubung, Zimitri and Jonathan, I extend my deepest thanks You all have

been great comrades I have appreciated having you just a phone call away It

is a source of great comfort to know that we can just talk – about the difficult

things our country is going through but also about the endlessly wonderful

things that make this such an extraordinary place and time in which to live

The intellectual affinity we have is very important to me Indeed, I have come

to depend on it

I also wish to thank the staff at the HSRC – Roshan Cader, Fiona Wakelin and

especially Inga Norenius Roshan began the publication process with me and

then handed it over to Fiona and Inga Out of this came an understanding of

what many who are experienced authors know but perhaps don’t talk about

sufficiently loudly: you cannot write a book by yourself The HSRC appointed

a number of peer reviewers for the manuscript These reviewers were

enormously helpful, providing an intellectual view of the text and sharp and

insightful comments that allowed me to refine and improve the presentation

Inga then handed the manuscript over to an editor who subjected it to a

by-line copy-edit, which further benefited the text I would also like to thank

the designer for all her wonderful skill in producing the cover for the book

Speaking of the cover, my daughter Carla worked with the initial thoughts I

had and came up with a great design concept Thank you, Carla The text used

on the cover comes from contacts all over the world and has come to generate

a series of minor linguistic debates I asked friends and colleagues around the

globe to translate the title Realising the Dream into languages with which they

were familiar My request stimulated a flurry of questions and responses, often

with people asking to see the manuscript so that they could render an accurate

translation of the title My great thanks to you all for the effort and kindness

you put into this

And, of course, it needs to be emphasised that notwithstanding all of this help,

any problems that remain with the text are mine alone

Finally, a few people make my life many times more manageable than it would

be without them Ingrid, Jenny, Amie, Carla and Lyn, I am grateful for your

love and support

Some of the chapters in this book are revisions of previously published

journal articles The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the

following publishers for permission to include them here

• Southern African Comparative and History of Education for Chapter 3,

which is a revision of ‘Creolisation, education and identity’ in the Southern

African Review of Education 2 (2002), pp 5–17.

• Faculty of Education, University of the Free State for Chapters 4 and 8,

which draw on an article co-authored with Yusuf Sayed, ‘A new racial

state: Exclusion and inclusion in education policy and practice in South

Africa’ in Perspectives in Education 22 (4) (2004), pp 101–115.

• Taylor & Francis for Chapter 6, which is a revised version of ‘The

asymmetries of contact: An assessment of 30 years of school integration in

South Africa’ in Race, Ethnicity and Education 10 (4) (2007), pp 439–456.

• John Wiley & Sons for Chapter 7, which is a revision of ‘The

reconstitution of privilege: Integration in former white schools in South

Africa’ in Journal of Social Issues 66 (2) (2010), pp 352–366.

Chapter 5 is a revision of ‘ “Constituting the class” An analysis of the

process of “integration” in South African schools’, which was published in

L Chisholm (2004) Changing class: Education and social change in

post-apartheid South Africa, Cape Town: HSRC Press.

Abbreviations and acronyms

ANC African National Congress

DET Department of Education and Training

HIV/AIDS human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency

syndrome HOA House of Assembly

HOD House of Delegates

HOR House of Representatives

NED Natal Education Department

SASA South African Schools Act (No 84 of 1996)

SGB school governing body

Free

Introduction

‘Hey you black man, hey you white woman’: Calling ‘race’

For a long time South Africans believed that South Africa was the most

important country in the world Colonial rule followed by apartheid embodied

incomprehensible evil On the South African people lay a special burden – that

of exemplifying for the world what it meant to oppose the depredations of

the heart and the soul Giving this self-perception weight was the extensive

exposure the country enjoyed in the international media: Nelson Mandela’s

stoic composure in the face of his relentless humiliation, its people’s willingness

to forgive South Africans were a chosen people

Looking back at this attitude, one cannot help but remark on its nạveté

and its narcissism As nạveté it betokened a simple lack of awareness of the

complexity of world politics As narcissism it came down to a conceit that the

South African question deserved political and moral eminence over all other

human rights indignities anywhere else in the world With South Africa’s

readmission into the international community after 1994, it quickly became

clear that while apartheid and racism were reprehensible (they remain so),

they were by no means of greater (or lesser) scale than that of many other

conflicts and cases of inhumanity taking place in other parts of the world

For somewhat different reasons, almost two decades after becoming a

democracy, the question of South Africa’s importance for the world is back

on the agenda South Africa is once more a place of global interest Questions

have been raised about the success of the post-apartheid project and about the

country’s capacity to deal with the basic human entitlements of dignity, safety,

shelter and the right to adequate health and education In this new context it

can be argued that South Africa presents itself as an important focus of global

attention Deserved as the questions are about the success of its so-called great

miracle – the avoidance of a racial bloodbath and the achievement of a form of

reconciliation between its erstwhile enemies – there are more serious reasons

for why the country merits international attention Chief among these is that

South Africa is one of the world’s major social laboratories

What makes it such an important laboratory?

The central significance of South Africa is that it poses the question of being,

of ontology, the capacity to feel, to know and to be aware of oneself, with an

intensity not easily matched elsewhere in the world What it means to be a

human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of one’s rights

and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the

right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right

to others – is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and

complexity rarely found in modern history The question is simultaneously

philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter,

ontological and practical in its nature

With respect to the ontological nature of the question, there are two great

puzzles that living in South Africa and being a South African throw up

The first, in the maelstrom of everyday South African life, with all its racial,

gendered and classed sound and fury, is about how one holds on to and

cultivates a sense of one’s humanity How does one cultivate the capacity,

as Foucault (2001: 10) explains, not simply to know oneself, but to actually

take care of oneself? Particularly for those who find themselves in a middle

class which believes that it can do without the ‘other’ and that the ‘other’ is

a category which is not material for its own survival, how does one come

to understand the full complexity of one’s personal and social history? The

second puzzle has to do with how this capacity to care for oneself might

come to include and be premised upon an unqualified appreciation of the

humanness of all those ‘other’ to oneself How does this sense of ‘care’ come

to include the awareness that one’s well-being is completely dependent on the

well-being of others, others upon whom one will inevitably have to call when

one’s imagined self-sufficiency – materially and in terms of well-being of the

mind – is shown to be impossible? And critically, beyond the limited circles of

imagined ontological autonomy – however those who find themselves in this

situation understand their ability to live without others – how does one install

this sense into the South African psyche?

These issues are significant for a number of reasons They are significant in

so far as South Africans, like people elsewhere in the world, have the obvious

challenge of comprehending the reality of their social interdependence But

there is an intensity to these issues that sets South Africa apart I argue in this

book that this intensity is simultaneously social and individual We as South

Africans have the extraordinary privilege of our pasts, our contemporary

experiences and our futures all coming together in such a way that we cannot

evade the great question that has faced many great societies in the past: what

I N T R O D U C T I O N

kind of human beings do we wish to be? In facing this question we face our

history, tradition and culture as they take expression in ‘raced’, gendered

or classed ways and are asked how we will build a future for ourselves as

individuals and together as a society that is fair and just We have here the

wonderful challenge, not only of how we will live together as people, but also of

how we will develop our individual capacities and gifts beyond all the limiting

prohibitions that our varied histories and legacies throw in front of us It is

how we manage our freedom as individuals and, at the same time, demonstrate

the capacity to live with each other that is important This is the promise we

as a society represent We have the opportunity here of demonstrating how

we might take real joy in the endless differences which make us human and

of showing that we realise that our differences are the resource upon which

the survival of the human race depends It is in realising that we resolve our

differences, whatever they might be, and celebrate our achievements in very

similar ways that our oneness as a human race is asserted For that we should

rejoice We express sadness, relief, expectation and humility in very similar

ways How then do we sublimate secondary calls on our identity, such as the

claims that culture makes on us, to the greater ideal of our common humanity?

These questions lead logically to the question of what an inclusive ontology

premised on the idea of a common humanity might look like What is the

content of a modern self-aware ontology? To put the question in ordinary

terms, how does a human being live his or her life in a state of full awareness

of his or her individual rights and the rights of others around him or her?

Should a question such as this have limits? This book is not about ontology

Perhaps it should be That, unfortunately, has to be left for another time

But the reason for emphasising ontology is that the world finds itself in a

constrained time The general rule for how people should live – the ways

in which they should manage themselves and their relationships with one

another and to what they should look forward – is dominated by the example

provided by Europe and North America Europe and North America, through

the historical role of Europe in the colonies and the domination of the United

States on the world stage, have come to supply the world with the guidelines

for how it should be conducting itself At the individual level this comes

down to prescribing behaviour, relationships and the life-determining choices

people should be making This is the ontological example that the dominance

of the ‘north’ represents It has come to supply the central narrative of being,

of what it means to be human, especially in the way in which one engages the

relationship between subjectivity and truth The full history of this discussion

and particularly how it inflects identity is crucial I undertake an exploratory

analysis of this in Chapter 3 of this book The reason for raising this issue

here, however, is to emphasise that the European example of what it means to

be a human being is by no means the last word on the matter – the events of

just the last 100 years in Europe and particularly the horrors of the First and

Second World Wars are testimony of this – and that South Africa represents

an opportunity for rethinking the questions of ‘how-to-be’ and how human

beings can ‘be-together’ in ways that few other societies in the world are doing

To highlight the significance that South Africa represents, this book is written

in a deliberately reflective way It seeks to address whether the self-limiting

prejudices of everyday South African life can be broached and then bridged to

make it possible for South Africans to live beyond the destructive appeals of

their exclusionary pasts and whether they can imagine a future in which the

value of being human is primary The question is at one level what has been

called the national question But it is so only in a strategic and not an essentialist

sense I am not interested in a project of nationalism, but I do seek to understand

how the histories which purport to explain the discourses of self and other can

be surfaced, faced and engaged with, for the purpose of realising the dream of

our common humanness and of our simple equality that this entails, despite my

awareness of the factors which stand in the way of this realisation

I come to this question of realisation of our potential as a sociologist of

education and as a scholar interested in those things of the everyday that, on

the one hand, attract and seduce us and, on the other, repel and disgust us –

our comfort and/or discomfort in atavism, in rituals of form, including birth,

death, sexuality, the rites of passage to manhood and womanhood – and ask

what these do to our capacity to actually see and embrace the wonder of our

infinite differences I am regularly and repeatedly inspired as I come across

people who have a real sense of awe and respect for what makes human beings

so different but yet utterly and fully human I am inspired by the desire in them

to find the potential in others and the passion they have to enhance the ability

in us to expand our sense of responsibility for each other I am also dismayed

by the proclivity within many of us to tear down and to denigrate and to see

others through lenses of conceit and superiority These qualities of desire and

repulsion constitute the heart of the human condition I want to suggest that

their South African variations, the configurations that they take here, in their

concentration and breadth and depth of social difference, make the country

worthy of attention and possibly even a ‘special case’

I N T R O D U C T I O N

South Africa: another way of seeing it

Conventional accounts of South Africa present it as a long-range racial

project Most histories of the country begin with the fateful meeting between

the seafaring Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires and the indigenous

peoples of South Africa The general style in which this encounter is narrated

is that of ‘high’ civilisation encountering the ‘primitive’ periphery of the

world I approach the question differently in this book and suggest that the

binary representation of this encounter – of a homogenised, civilised white

and European identity on the one side and a childlike, simple and immature

Africa on the other side – is inadequate I shift the discussion to focus on the

common experiences of what being human is all about

The approach I take is to argue that the question of what it means to be human

in South Africa is obviously shaped by our history but that this history is about

a great deal more than race The substance of our humanity is an immense

psychosocial question and arises directly out of how we as South Africans have

conquered and subjugated each other; our migration into, out of and around

spaces we have declared to be ours and only ours; our rights and abilities to settle

and build livelihoods on the landscape and the violent removal from us of our

rights to these; our habitation of and displacement from spaces; our conceits of

superiority and inferiority in all their inflections – racial, class, gender, sexual,

culture, language, age, religion and tradition; our notions of what is valuable

about our pasts, our narratives of who we are, our yearnings for progress and a

new future; our desires to heal our divisions and, crucially, our intense desire to

be safe from the ravages of crime and violence; and finally, our confusion about

why we should be dying as young people when our whole futures are supposed

to lie ahead of us South Africa is a country which is simultaneously about

integration and segregation, tradition and modernity, being safe and unsafe,

being well and unwell, and which brings these all together into an ensemble of

inexpressible tragedy and beauty, a country which is almost unique as a space

in which people are called upon to be human The intensity of being fully alive

– awake – in the deepest human sense is an experience that South Africa makes

important The United States, in a different combination of these issues, is one

society where a similar intensity is evident, but even it has not had to deal with

the ever-present existential sense of malaise and possibility which has come to

both afflict and bless South Africa

While I begin this discussion with an appeal to complexity, I do want to

emphasise how crucial the race discussion is to the country’s future Complex

and multifaceted as South Africa is, it has had to deal with the extraordinary

social reality that one part of its story, race, has literally devoured all its

contiguous social narratives Race has come to vacuum out the salience of

the social, cultural, economic and psychological density of many people’s

life stories, both as individuals and in the solidarities and affinities they

have created for themselves, and replaced it with the single logic of their

racial identities Race has come to assume the special status in South Africa

of a master signifier A signifier is the physical form that a word or term or

concept takes on Race as a master signifier is held up and invoked explicitly

and implicitly – the often ineffable ‘elephant in the room’ – to explain the

mundane to the mysterious, from the carriage of a ‘white’ man in a social

space of diverse people to the distress of crime in the streets and suburbs of the

country Most critical about race as a signifier, even in denying its salience –

apartheid is over, it is said – is what it actually activates in conversations

between people and in their relationships with one another I suggest that it

is rehabilitated and often silently validated in the unproblematised gestures of

recognition within and among discrete groups of people The almost unique

practice of South Africans, even those presenting themselves as politically

progressive, of introducing themselves as ‘I am a white South African’ or ‘I

am a black South African’ speaks to the insidiousness of the ideological hold

of race in the country and its psychologies of desire and comfort and shame

and unease Meant as a statement of awareness of one’s privilege or, conversely,

one’s subordination, it has come to constitute a barrier to thinking beyond

the simple acknowledgement of one kind of positionality The hegemony of

racial identity has made it extremely difficult for people to imagine and build

for themselves, as they do in racial terms, identities which take their points

of departure from senses of self which begin in the endless list of differences

which actually constitute who they are Recently Helen Zille, the Premier of

the Western Cape, the country’s southernmost province, made the comment

at a conference that race had become what she called a ‘default identity’ She

asked how this could be when we held so many different identities: ‘why

should we default to race?’1 The point she made is an anti-essentialist one Our

identities are not essentially this or that As much basic sociology now routinely

explains, as human beings we have multiple identities, but we simplistically,

almost everywhere in the world, reduce all of the complexity embodied in our

multiplicity to the singular factor of race This is what essentialism is

Another reason for working with race is to emphasise to and for ourselves how

much it is a learnt value As a master signifier, race is approached by many of

I N T R O D U C T I O N

us with a sense of the sacred, even when we seek to reject it It is unspeakably

important – especially for those of us who live in South Africa and the United

States but, actually, virtually everywhere in the world In looking around us, it

is the basis on which we make sense of space and the physical environment

We read our worlds through the lens of race Its power is almost without

parallel in our relations with one another Only the caste system in India

approaches anything like the hold it has on our imaginations

And yet, as I seek to show in this book, race is something we have learnt That

one has to say this after all these years of sensitivity training and the endless

workshops we have all attended around discrimination and how it works is

an incredible testament to its seductive appeal to our senses As a sociologist

of culture, of learning, of how ideas come to settle in our imagination, I

cannot accept as real that which is patently not real in an empirical sense It

is astonishing that the intellectual world which I inhabit can make such a fuss

about proof, warrant and the evidentiary base in how we make arguments

and yet not see how the phenomenon of race is an ideological smokescreen

I stand squarely with Gilroy in saying that ‘the old, modern idea of “race”

can have no ethically defensible place’ (2000: 6) I take another step in this

text in expanding the bounds of our ethical imaginations I suggest that it

is through education that we come to an awareness of the full possibility

of what it means to be human, and that this education is only fully realised

when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race and gender and indeed

all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt

I acknowledge the awkwardness of the expression ‘unlearning the logic of

race’ that I use in the subtitle of this book, but suggest that it is central to

our becoming fully human I argue that such an unlearning will release us

from the false captivity of imposed belief and flawed logic in which we find

ourselves and will allow us to come to be that which we consciously choose to

be, to make the communities we seek to build much more conscious ones – to

be fully awake One is, therefore, only in a qualified or provisional way that

which society says one is, be it a member of this or that ‘tribe’, kin grouping or

community One is not any of those things attributed to us in the primordial

sense Ways of being are not in our blood

It is from a desire for attaining this state of awakeness that the title of this book,

Realising the Dream, comes The promise of education is fundamentally that of

bringing to sight that which ideology obscures Awakeness as the other side of

dreaming is about bringing into reality that which is in our imaginations We

dream of a better world Education has the capacity to make real, in our will

and desire, this possibility Education is the deliberative act of working with

and in our consciousness in a way that is fully open In its fullness it has to be

alert to everything It is here that the promise of education lies The promise

is that within us, as reasoning subjects, resides the capacity to engage with

obfuscation, with ideology and with mystery in all their wiles I am enough

of a materialist, however, to recognise how much this process of engagement

is also a practical process of political and economic struggle Education is

important in carrying out that struggle

Race

The obfuscation, the ideology and the mystery of race are what I focus on in

this text Race is a thing we have made up Moore, Kosek and Pandian argue

that both race and nature are what they call historical artefacts, ‘assemblages

of material, discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essence…Nature

appears to precede history, even as it wipes away the historical traces of its

own fashioning’ (2003: 2–3) The genetics discussion is important because

it has brought us to a point where the singularity of the human race and its

indivisibility is now beyond question This is real We have the empirical

evidence for it The significance of the human genome is that it has shown how

genes have travelled and how population groups everywhere in the world can

be linked We are all related

Two challenges remain to the proposition of our connectedness The first is in

the ways in which many geneticists continue to give modern sociological and

political descriptions to groups and individuals who lived during times when

these contemporary labels had no significance whatsoever (see Abu El Haj

2007) In the South African context, the description of particular groupings as

African, or more precisely as Khoisan, Indian, and so on, presents biological

histories in racialised terms There are difficulties, of course There is a

discussion among geneticists around labelling and social description, but there

is not sufficient awareness of the issues of sociology Attributing modern labels to

ancient communities is incorrect In southern Africa, for example, a significant

debate has begun about the Lemba, a group of people who live in Zambia and

Malawi whose cultural practices are very similar to those of the Jewish faith

The question, are these people a long-lost Jewish tribe? has gone out And in

deciding it, several rounds of genetic testing have been undertaken The results

have been ambiguous It is not, however, the ambiguity that is significant; it is

I N T R O D U C T I O N

the idea that biology-as-race is what ultimately counts The biological nexus

will finally state whether they are ‘of the fold’ or not In this view race and

biology are insistently conflated, and in the process the complexity of biology

itself is missed Instead, it is reduced to the visible markers of pigmentation

and physiognomy, which geneticists repeatedly emphasise constitute less than

a single percentage point of one’s genetic make-up The rest of a human being’s

biological complexity carries no social significance

The reality, however, is that the ‘insignificant’ fraction of a per cent of our

genetic variation that we have come to acknowledge – the markers of colour,

nose and lip shape, hair – has come to be of great consequence Such markers

have come to be real with real effects for many of us, and we should not for

a moment evade that truth about the value the world in which we live places

on our outward attributes When we confront the reality that African people

remain at the bottom rung of the ladder of world opportunity, the provision

of services and the recognition of ability, talent, virtue, beauty and every other

human attribute we might think of, the very particular nature of this racism

must be faced squarely The simple truth is that there is nothing inherent in

who or what the person deemed to be African is that predisposes him or her

to any kind of status at all If we recognise this, and the enormity of it as a

cognitive event in our heads is great, we come to the realisation that it is the

‘thing’ behind the oppression or the exploitation which we need to be getting

at That ‘thing’ is racism What activates it, what material or psychological

interest it feeds off and promotes, is what we desperately need to come to terms

with If we fail to do this, we then actually declare race itself a real thing

How to counter racism strategically is, of course, contentious This book argues

that education of the deep kind, one that refuses to work with symptomatic

expressions of reality – of what ‘things’ appear to be – is the most effective way

of achieving that goal The book unapologetically holds on to the promise of

what our Enlightenment inheritance has sought to teach us: that as human

beings we are all capable of analytic thought and that we have among us a

variety of cognitive routes to apprehending and making sense of reality in both

superficial and deep ways None of us, either as individuals or as members of

social groups, is automatically – because of who we supposedly are – superior

in the ways in which we live or think The potential for the most sublime, or

indeed the most ridiculous, exists among us in equal measure We can, in

these terms, become a post-racial world Such a world already exists in small

circles and cells in and around us Many of us are in it We live it The prize it

represents for the world, for taking it beyond the small circles of familiarity,

is enormous

This book is therefore offered as an intellectual and practical response to the

dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its attendant

dangers of suborning and subsuming within it virtually all other social

complexity Its objective is to engage with the situation in which some of us

see too much, where we invoke at every contretemps the so-called race card,

and others of us too little, in our complete lack of self-awareness about the

dominance and power of our whiteness and all its inflections – European,

Caucasian and Aryan, or indeed our sense of being ‘chosen’ in other parts of

the world In terms of this latter possibility, I think of a Han consciousness

in China, in which ethnocentric thinking presents itself as a reality which is

not available for deconstruction, or of a Brahmin conceit which is beyond

any form of secular interrogation Without minimising the pervasive reality

of racism, this book seeks to make a contribution to the process of retrieving

the complexity of social difference in South Africa, and indeed in the modern

world, and the possibility it presents of expanding our capacity to be better

and more generous in how we think of ourselves and of all those around us Its

focus is education but not the pedagogical It is aware of and will occasionally

address the role of pedagogy and learning and teaching in the social arena,

but it focuses on how we might learn to live together, on how we might make

community in ways which do not depend on ascribed and imposed values

Important commentaries which have sought to recover the lineaments of an

argument for working with this greater complexity need to be acknowledged

There is a tradition in the social sciences in South Africa which has sought

to make a deeper examination of the nature of the society’s fractures and

divisions (see Lekgoathi 2004; No Sizwe 1979) There is work, for example,

which argues that the divisions, alliances, conflicts and communalities in the

country, which have often been presented as manifestations of ‘race’, take their

impulse from a much more diverse set of factors In these accounts race is by

no means absent but is always contextualised and situated in close or distant

proximity to a range of other contingent factors (see Davenport & Saunders

2000; Hall 1990; Saunders 1988)

What is valuable about the analyses described above is their interest in unveiling

the articulated nature of social difference and their attempt to account for the

reality that social difference is never a single-factor phenomenon It is always

constituted in the presence of and in response to a multiplicity of factors

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Moreover, these factors depend on each other It is also important to draw

attention to the work of colleagues with whom I have collaborated Strikingly,

Erasmus and De Wet (2003), Lalu (2009), Rassool (2001, 2009) and Rassool

and Prosalendis (2001), inter alia, have attempted in their various fields of

scholarly engagement not only to separate out the questions of race from those

of culture but also to present them in their articulated nature A great deal of

this work, and other work I have not cited, is located in a searching intellectual

zeitgeist Meaning and its construction are never read, retrieved and interpreted

symptomatically Moreover, the material conditions of the world, and their

foundations in the structures and instruments of capitalism, are not outside

this analysis The power of capitalism, as a world system which makes possible

the alienation of wealth and, more complexly, the consciousness of humans

about themselves (see Marx 1967), is directly material in the making of the

real and cognitive processes surrounding the experience of racism The gloss

that I put on the recognition of capitalism, however, is to admit the possibility

that racism can take form outside the material conditions within which the

specific process of capitalist exploitation arises It is the articulated nature of

this experience that I wish to hold on to in analytic terms

Turning to the South African discussion of these matters, there is no doubt that

while there is a global consistency in how race is understood, there is a distinct

difference in the range of vocabularies and languages of description used to

deal with race in South Africa Among the registers and vocabularies are the

dominant biologically minded ones Included in these are those approaches

which say that race is real and matters; those which say that race is real but

does not matter; those which say that race is not real and should not matter;

and, finally, those which say that race is not real but has to be engaged with

as an ideological phenomenon This latter approach is taken by the anti-racist

group In the South African setting, the anti-racists have historically coalesced

around a black consciousness position At the core of this position, ground out

of intense debates in the 1970s and 1980s, is a rejection of the negative term

‘non-white’ that had come into being to describe people who were classified

as not being white (see Biko 1997; Dlamini 2009) A principled position

developed by the anti-racist movement was to promote the use of the term

‘black’ deliberately and insistently to counter the divisions that colonialism and

apartheid had sought to foster among people of colour It therefore rejected

‘coloured’, ‘Indian’ and ‘Bantu’ as the terms of a divide-and-rule mindset and

put forward the term ‘black’ to include everybody not deemed to be white

This term, moreover, was presented as a deliberate political construction, as

opposed to all the other bio-engineered terms of colonialism and apartheid

Strikingly, this explicit anti-racial register – anti-racial in the sense that social

and political movements have emerged and organised in the country around

the idea that race is a nonsense – has not found the same resonance elsewhere

in the world.2

Despite the fact that important scholarship showing how race and racism

function has been developed, particularly in the United States, this scholarship

has struggled with the idea of breaking with the imperative of racial solidarity

and unmaking its essentially divisive logic In a recent exchange with a visiting

American scholar to South Africa, I remarked how the recidivism of racial

essentialism seemed to haunt the social sciences I was describing ‘essentialism’

as that analytic approach in which a phenomenon, whether social, economic

or cultural, is understood in terms of what are thought to be its essential

properties Without these essential properties the phenomenon is not what

it is purported to be In understanding essentialism and its uses in the social

sciences, critics such as Lyotard (1984) have questioned the tendency in

descriptions of challenging social phenomena to account for social reality in

terms of the ‘essential’, particularly in ontological terms Central in the sights

of critics such as Lyotard is that social phenomena such as race and gender

cannot be explained by essentialist ideas of what supposedly lies behind them

There is no such thing, therefore, as a typical ‘black’ person Referring then

to Giyatri Spivak, a leading post-structuralist scholar, my American colleague

replied to my question about recidivism by saying that it was important to

recognise the necessity of strategic essentialisms I concede this point South

Africans have had to and still deliberately invoke the identity of ‘black’ as a way

of registering their political opposition to white racism It remains necessary

today here in South Africa and indeed in countries such as Brazil and the

United States to fight for the stronger representation of marginalised groups,

even those that are defined in racial terms, in the workplace and in institutions

of learning It is a necessary space from which to counter the edifice of

whiteness Nonetheless, the point is still controversial, on three grounds

The first reason for the controversial character of strategic essentialism is that

it precipitates the question of why a ‘black consciousness’ might be encouraged

but not a white one The answer, of course, is that white supremacy is such

a totalising experience that its infection of the body, the physical world, the

symbolic economy, requires a direct and focused response The extent to

which the world has been encoded in racial terms is extraordinary This, as

I N T R O D U C T I O N

a world development, calls for responses The way in which the ‘strategically

essentialist’ moment has developed, however, is important to understand

because it is a fundamentally self-aware essentialism in the sense that it is an

essentialism ‘not-for-itself’ The difference in the South African use of ‘black

consciousness’, such as it was developed by Biko in particular (1997), was that

‘blackness’ is not an essentialist idea The key lesson which South Africans

learnt in the process of developing the idea of ‘black consciousness’ was the

necessity and even the urgency to develop an ‘ear’ for how the idea of ‘race’ was

transacted on a daily basis They placed themselves on full alert to how it was

inflected in general discourse As a result they came to have an acute sensitivity

to naturalised glosses of race What they would remain resolutely opposed to

was being complicit in the resurrection of race as a biological idea By contrast,

the kind of black consciousness that manifests itself in many parts of the

United States remains, sadly, dependent on a biological essentialism in which

attributes of culture are inflected in biological ways – for example, the ways

that musicality and movement are represented as qualities which are inherent

The South Africans were deliberately constructing a political understanding

of what bound them together ‘Black’ was not an attribute of phenotype or

physiognomy It was a state of mind.3 The new and insightful work of Gqola

(2010) helps to emphasise the urgency of the point In explaining why she

wrote the book What is Slavery to Me? Gqola says that she was ‘concerned

with how claiming slave ancestry matters today for white communities whose

identities were predicated on disavowal of such ancestry’ (2010: 6) More

importantly, in responding to this she argues for the importance of identifying

with blackness rather than erasing it and so ‘denying the agency with which

they [black subjects] were invested with new, conflicting meanings by subjects

thus classified, and self-identifying, over 350 years’ (2010: 16)

The second reason for thinking of strategic essentialism as being controversial

is that it homogenises whiteness Cole (2009) argues that the problem with

idealist forms of Critical Race Theory which have white supremacy as their

focus is that they incorrectly conclude that all people deemed to be white are

privileged The complexity of this is important to keep in sight

The third reason for the controversial nature of strategic essentialism is that

it has given rise everywhere in the world to forms of ethnic separatism which

are questionable on a number of grounds The appeal to ethnic solidarities in

places like South Africa and the United States, such as a ‘coloured’ or isiXhosa

consciousness in South Africa or a Latino/a solidarity as distinct from other

communities in the United States, is politically dangerous, especially in the

ways that these appeals invoke racial/biological claims to difference In the

United States, this is especially puzzling when ‘Latino/a’ scholars emphasise

that their use of the label ‘Latino/a’ is not a racial one

The qualification that Latino/a scholars make is important It raises the

significance of the cultural But the explanation is often offered of how even the

idea of Latino/a is an empty one If it is empty, then the question strategically

has to be asked why the idea has to be filled in an exclusionary way Why can

it not be filled in ways that transcend the frameworks of dominance instead of

only being framed in opposition to whiteness? Why can it not be filled in ways

that are open-ended and inclusionary?

It is in these terms that we must take serious offence to any form of cultural

marginalisation The loss of the distinctive ways in which people celebrate

important events in their lives and the wholesale devaluing of people’s

traditions that white supremacy promotes has to be fiercely resisted But one

has to fight for the recognition and the legitimacy of differences that count

and which are critical for the dignity of people When difference is disguised,

and particularly when culture is robed in the clothes of skin and endowed with

physical attributes, such as a ‘Latin temperament’ or ideas of an innate African

musicality, it is then that strategic essentialism has to be used carefully

It is against this backdrop that policy initiatives such as affirmative action

need to be understood Affirmative action is of value if it redresses the effects

of the mechanisms and social structures that produce disadvantage If it is

redressing racism or sexism and so engaging the structures in society that

produce these forms of discrimination, it is crucially important In these

ways, it is valuable in so far as it provides a pathway to many for positive

self-regard The psychological strategies necessary for affirming this sense of

self-respect must not be underestimated, particularly against the complexity

of whiteness If, however, it simplistically uses the shorthand of race to make

perfunctory corrective decisions, without regard for the processes of structural

marginalisation and discrimination, it presents itself as nothing more than a

form of tokenism Much more is required It is because of this that the return

of apartheid’s racial labels and the ease and comfort with which they are

both appropriated and inhabited is a disturbing turn on the South African

landscape It is almost as if the country did not go through the searching

debates and analyses of the 1980s in which black consciousness effectively

challenged the normative language of apartheid

I N T R O D U C T I O N

It is for these reasons that strategic essentialism, and this is how affirmative

action and interventions such as employment equity need to be seen, must

be recognised for what it is It must be recognised as a politically induced

intervention to disrupt the power of racial supremacy Black consciousness,

therefore, is a powerful point of entry into disrupting a white-centred

understanding of the self and the social environment in which it finds itself

And yet, if this view of what affirmative action and strategic essentialism stand

for is accepted, their complicity and concurrence with the very logic they are

attempting to disrupt must be brought into view We need to be learning new

logics The cognitive act of doing this must be recognised for the power that

it holds It must be recognised how easily strategic essentialism – invoking

the learnt value of race, in this instance – hardens into defensive postures

that are unable to recognise the essentially constructed ways through which

they came into being It must be recognised also how this constructedness

comes to operate ideologically for many It is completely naturalised and, in

the end, presents itself in a way which is impervious to any form of critique

and deconstruction Blackness, whiteness, and their derivatives of Zuluness,

Indianness, Germanness, Britishness, and so on, are all taken on by those who

have been seduced by this logic as features of who they are and for which they

will lay down their lives Unlearning this logic opens one up to seeing the

world in entirely new ways

What this critique of affirmative action and essentialism leads to is the question

of what exactly is being affirmed when affirmative action is invoked Is it the

biology of ‘race’? Clearly it often does not begin there But the awful tragedy

and horror of this form of self-identification is that it often ends up there If

this is the case, and I venture to say that much of the concealed substrate of

thought in even careful and politically correct attempts to circumnavigate the

subject of race remains composed of a hardened biological view of life, what

does this say about our understanding of race? In emphasising the point,

important theorists such as McCarthy and Crichlow (1993), Miles (1993), Omi

and Winant (1994) and Pinar (1995) show how entangled in the United States,

and elsewhere where race is an issue, the factors of race, class and gender are

as social constructs in determining social difference and its dynamics, and

how often the imbricated nature of identity and the forms that animate it

are reduced to an essential truth This American work has been crucial, in

the sense that it supports the much earlier thinking of key South Africans;

Alexander (No Sizwe 1979) and Wolpe (1988) are central here

While the theoretical insight of McCarthy and Pinar, inter alia, is important,

it needs to be emphasised that particular South African theorists of race

have brought a political dimension to the discourse which is unmistakably

distinct; Alexander (2002) has been at the forefront of this tradition They

have insisted, in a way which has made their South African and American

colleagues uncomfortable, on carrying through in their political work, and

in how they have managed their personal identities, the personal challenge of

what it means to be anti-racial They have insisted that the politics of working

with race and racism requires a level of personal vigilance which is alert to the

wiles and seductions of race This has meant having to articulate a position

with respect to race which has placed them, problematically, in the same

political space as colour-blind liberals Predictably, this has involved being

burdened by the ‘colour-blind’, race-denialist epithet Demonstrating that

they occupy a completely different theoretical and practical space around the

politics of these developments is one of the multiple objectives of this book

The anti-racism of South Africa, I suggest, is important for the world to

take note of precisely because it speaks to how the dream of enlightenment

(beginning with the ancient wisdoms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and

Aristotle and Plato and renewed formally in the Enlightenment of modern

Europe) – a commitment to the idea that all human beings have within

them the capacity to surpass the cages of their histories and to be full human

beings – is being realised in the practice of individuals and groups Central to

this anti-racial practice in South Africa is an awareness of how racism works

and, as a result of this, a fundamental realisation that the fight against it has

to be strategic This fight cannot proceed on the assumption that racism

remains constant Racism is infinitely creative in the guises it takes and the

justifications it makes Struggle against it must be prosecuted on the basis of

an awareness of how it insidiously inserts itself into the everyday A central

task is to recognise its capacity for reinventing itself Understanding racism in

this way is recognising that it is not simply a problem of personal behaviour

but also a problem of the knowledges that authorise it In these terms it is both

ontological and epistemological

Important South African social and intellectual projects, such as the District

Six Museum in Cape Town, have as their mission the unlearning of the

logic of race Important for the Museum, as it is for me, is understanding

the modalities and practices which surround the reinvention of race In the

Museum’s work, and this book is intended to support its project, is a constant

I N T R O D U C T I O N

search to understand and fight against racial categorisation and the normative

‘truths’ that supposedly inhere in this categorisation The Museum comes

to this work against the background of the forced removal by the apartheid

government of over 60 000 people of colour from the city of Cape Town

from the 1960s to the 1980s It also understands, however, how the political

order that led to the destruction of District Six was also the product of several

hundred years of racial science and racial knowledge

In struggling against the full complexity of the racism that gave rise to the

removals, the District Six Museum is therefore cognisant of how apartheid, its

spatial ordering, its embossing on the mind from birth the category of race,

has come to poison the popular consciousness by making it believe that race

is a timeless and permanent reality People forget that a time before apartheid

existed, when life was lived differently While race as an idea was certainly

not absent, it wasn’t embodied in the way racial ghettoisation influenced

people’s self-identities and the identities of others during apartheid Against

this embodiment, the Museum has worked hard to recover older memories

of how its denizens were able to live in a much more creative relationship

with the dominant logic of race and racial apartheid It has at its disposal an

alternative history of community Its South Africa is not per se a racial South

Africa Of course race as an idea was there But it was an idea which the ruling

authorities in the state and the universities consistently had to spell out and

assert, as Dubow’s work (1995, 2006) makes clear The academy, as Dubow’s

Scientific Racism (1995) shows, was in the forefront of the campaign to

demonstrate this authority The way in which processes of self-identification

were evolving is a dense story of give and take – seduction and charm on the

one hand, but also brutal power involving crude forms of masculine force on

the other – that has yet to be written in its fullness The modern dependence

on the formalisation of the category of race constitutes for institutions such

as the District Six Museum an important affront and object of attack Crucial

in comprehending this existing alternative sociology of South Africa is its

awareness of the drift towards the objectification and neutralisation of race in

a range of fields of study and practice where it is assumed that simply making

a commitment to the equal treatment of people, irrespective of race, is the

central task and achievement of the modern struggle for equality What I do

in this work, in agreement with anti-racist colleagues in South Africa, is argue

that the invocation of race as a category is a crucial device in the process of

maintaining the kind of hierarchy which gives privilege and marginality its

modern character Race is the final frontier of racism

In taking this position, and I recognise its awkwardness for contemporary

discourse, I wish to acknowledge the important work which is being done to

help us understand the dimensions of the country’s complexity Dimensions

being opened up in this corpus include:

• the social environment, reflecting issues such as language, ‘race’, ethnicity,

social class, income levels, religion, educational status, political orientation,

gender and sexual preference (Hoad et al 2005; Seekings & Nattrass 2005);

• the historical or temporal dimension, drawing attention to the ways in

which differences between ‘traditional’ and modern and that which is of

‘apartheid’ and ‘post-apartheid’ continue to influence people’s perceptions

of the world (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 1993);

• the spatial order, referring in particular to the ways in which regional

and global differences, urban or rural status, mark people as being either

insiders or outsiders (Mamdani 2000); and

• the epidemiological character of society, referring to an individual’s age,

disability and health status in relation to diseases such as tuberculosis

and HIV/AIDS and which determine one’s degree of social acceptability

(Watermeyer et al 2006)

My own work in relation to this scholarship is to suggest that, in order for us

to pierce the opacity of the South African condition, we now need to bring

this work together to understand the multifarious nature of modern identity

and the social differences it catalyses I am suggesting the need to bring these

elements of the complexity together to show that social phenomena are not

pristine, detached and occurring in isolation As experiences they are always,

so to speak, in the ‘company of each other’; they are synchronous, recursive

and compounding They are, moreover, experiences that are personal but

always social They are experienced in embodied kinds of ways but also

in externalised spatial realities Bodies are encoded, as are spaces ‘Black

bodies’ are thus assumed to be fundamentally different from ‘white bodies’

The interrelationship of this multiple coding is itself an extremely important

feature of how meaning is made for the self and for the self in community

Taking note of these complexities, Chipkin, a leading social theorist, asks,

‘does a South African’ exist? (2007) His approach is essentially political,

but the challenge is greater than simply thinking about the political On an

ontological level it is about thinking through the problem of how the primacy

of being human can shape what it means to be a South African, as opposed to

thinking about how being South African makes one human The logic has to

be inverted It would be helpful in terms of the problems that South Africans

I N T R O D U C T I O N

face to begin with what they have in common Thinking this problem through

is difficult for many South Africans It is not enough to invoke ‘rainbowism’

in the superficial way much popular commentary does It demands intense

headwork in which both the individual and the wider community are required

to come to terms with the numerous calls on their identity

It is the headwork dimension of this challenge that makes the field of

education such an important one Schooling and, more broadly, education are

fundamentally about headwork and its management The problem, however,

is that very little work has been done in South Africa which recognises the

centrality of education as a space of constant contradiction, and especially the

contradiction of ideas of self, other and community The result is that it has

been particularly difficult for those who work in and inhabit the school and the

world of education to approach the questions of identity with clarity Instead,

the school and the space of education more generally have been overrun by

dominant ideology in relation to race and identity Thus it remains difficult

for teachers to actually understand who the people are in front of them

More disconcertingly, and this is said with respect, they seldom recognise the

difficulty in front of them, especially now in the new environments they face

which no longer have that putative cultural, social and economic homogeneity

they imagined was there in the past

School, where the headwork in relation to belonging plays itself out every day,

is thus an enormously crucial space Notions of community, of who is deemed

to belong and not belong and of responsibility for others deemed to fall

outside of one’s supposed ‘nation’, ‘tribe’, ‘race’, ‘clan’ or ethnic group are fraught

with difficulty It is a difficult space especially for students who receive little

guidance from their elders Their elders themselves have trouble interpreting

the shifting boundaries in front of them and so cannot clearly explain to them,

never mind justify, how some within their immediate group of contact belong

or not within the circle of the school In this moral climate, a key issue is that

of how South Africans might live together, accept each other’s differences, treat

each other with respect, understand and engage with the histories and myths

about themselves that individuals and groups bring to their relationships with

one another, and, critically, how this diversity can be crafted into a resource

Education’s grasp of social difference

In seeking to interpret this landscape, especially the variegated terrain of

education, scholars interested in social difference have tended to focus on

issues that one might broadly describe as the cultural Out of this has emerged

the general idea that the challenge that teachers and their students face is

one of multiculturalism and its constitutive elements of race and racism

This is not a surprise It remains a reality that the predominant form of

discrimination in the country pivots around race supremacist ideas of ‘self’

and ‘other’ It is not entirely satisfactory, however, that the discussion remains

at this level It is critical that the capacity is developed within the social science

community to take the discussion to a higher level This higher level, I suggest,

is about bringing to the surface the infinitely variegated and articulated nature

of social difference in the country and showing how much more there is to

the question of hierarchy than race and racism alone It is necessary to show

how demanding the experience of these is and how, within it, advantage and

disadvantage take nuanced forms and how these nuances are produced and

reproduced educationally

The critique with which to begin this discussion is that much of the educational

discussion on social difference has taken a classic multicultural route, has used

what many would now regard as essentialised, stereotypical and impoverished

understandings of difference, and has tended to focus on the received wisdom –

the common sense – of what culture is As scholars such as Bennett (2000) have

argued, much of the multicultural discussion has been anaemic and focused on

a fixed, often ahistorical idea of culture

The argument needs to be deepened Too much of the multicultural discussion

depends on concepts and ideas which have had leached out of them the

factors of dominance and power Prominent approaches essentially work

with difference as apolitical, ahistorical and natural phenomena Moreover,

their essential stratagem is to recruit the idea of culture to do the work of

race Culture is invoked as an embodied idea in which physiognomy, taste,

deportment and behaviour are read and interpreted through notions of a

naturalised self So, for example, as the literature around diseases such as

HIV/AIDS clearly demonstrates, concepts of ‘African sexuality’ enjoy an

extraordinary credibility Culture is, as a result, an essentially biological idea

The essential disguise being effected is, for one reason or another, glossed over

It is not apparent to most in using this strategy how much they have simply

come to substitute culture for race

This substitutionist approach takes a number of forms It subsists on the

symptomatic or what is there in front of one, the optically obvious – can’t

you see? – and is rendered in the classic and seemingly innocent question

I N T R O D U C T I O N

of ‘What is your heritage?’ or ‘Where do you come from?’ In this approach

of the symptom, the initial posture is supposedly about acknowledging and

affirming the difference of another (the other) but ultimately is unquestionably

a matter of racial biology Deleuze and Guattari (1987) talk about the

phenomenon of ‘faciality’ It is not the body, they argue, that is the sign from

which interpretations are made, but the face

Recently I was asked the question of my heritage by a class of what would be

regarded otherwise as insightful American students Seeking to bring some

of the hidden assumptions behind the question to the surface, I responded

that I was a European This caused consternation and even suspicion – is

he a fool, a poseur, a fraud? In taking on the discourse of multiculturalism,

it may be concluded that race, as a term of anxiety, has been substituted by

that which is less dangerous and seemingly more benign – culture But the

approach is well established in the two-part manoeuvre prevalent in many

multicultural presentations, where the obligatory statement is made about

the constructedness of the idea of race in a first move that is then thoroughly

undone, ignored and in fact replaced in a second in which all the biological

attributes used in racial stereotyping are rehabilitated The sad fact of the matter

is that the essential idea of race has not only remained but has come to settle in

the popular imagination as an entirely neutral concept Many are attached to

it In this respect social constructionism is used as a discursive alibi It is waved

in front of what is often actually a straightforward biologist view of difference

Awareness of how social constructionism works is declared but not actually

demonstrated In the process ‘race’ is presented as a neutral ideal

But what is racial neutrality? What is the purpose of the idea of race if it is

supposedly neutral? If it is neutral, what is it supposed to denote? What work

is it supposed to do? Is it aesthetic? If so, what are the calibrations and metrics

of this aesthetic? How does it come to hold significance, especially after one

accepts that the idea of race has no scientific validity and only represents what

particular groups think about it? If one is to take seriously the now old work of

Stephen Jay Gould (1984) and the modern work of any number of geneticists

which has shown explicitly that race has no validity and denotes nothing, what

function is the idea of race supposed to serve?

It is at this point that one needs to be aware of how ideology works Ideology

depends on the currency of particular beliefs and ideas and the necessity for

finding ways of sustaining these ideas and beliefs, even and especially when

they have been proved to be untrue Sublimated within the semiotics of race

as an idea are hidden conceits and beliefs These range from the genetic to the

aesthetic Within each lies a calibrated value schema, which goes along the

following lines: having so much of this or that (and here one can insert the

fetishes of race: straight hair, chiselled features, voice quality, body type, and

so on) means something From this emerges an effective normativising regime

which specifies what is of greater or lesser worth The ideological disguise

which gives race discourse its character is that it pretends not to be there,

feigns ignorance, eludes identification and seeks alibis when it is in fact and

pervasively present and active As a consequence, the effect is to underplay the

degree to which race discourse then determines the basic social character of

the space it occupies To this extent it plays a racist role because it belies and

obscures the ideology of superiority and inferiority and one’s location on the

hierarchy of human worth The way these semiotics work comes to depend on

that which is now no longer mentionable – the fiction that our race is in our

biologies, and its corollary, pervasive but now no longer politically correct to

acknowledge, that culture is in the blood I seek in this book to challenge the

seeming innocence of the idea of race to allow us to get at its inherent and

intrinsic racist presumptions (Derrida 1985: 291)

With this argument – an unmasking of the apparent innocence of the idea

of race – my intention is to argue that much multicultural analysis which

works in the semiotic conflation of race and culture is superficial Seen from

a particular angle it is benign and logically correct Its superficiality, however,

disguises the danger that lies within it

What does this mean for teaching and learning? There is, it needs to be noted,

great interest in discussions on how many images of black children there

might be in a teaching text or, more searchingly, how ‘othered’ people are

represented But the discussion of social difference in relation to teaching and

learning must move to the level where the social world that is dominant in our

imaginations and its modes of representation and mediation are also brought

into the teaching and learning framework In these terms, it is at the first level

a question of content, but at the second level also a question of the mediational

assumptions underlying the content, how one is taught to teach Are there

‘black’ styles of teaching, or are ‘Muslim’ children intrinsically different in the

way concepts have to be put across to them? Central to this question is how

education is used or becomes a site for the production of difference

There are larger puzzles in considering these questions, such as the validity

of concepts such as race or the relationship between race and culture debated

I N T R O D U C T I O N

in the school Can one introduce into the school curriculum the question of

how racism works in relation to the big questions of the nature of knowledge?

Can one pose the question to students about what particular approaches

to knowledge and its reproduction do for understanding the historical

relationship between different parts of the world, or how it is that particular

forms of ‘European knowledge’ have become so dominant? What is the role

schooling plays in promoting this dominance? Or, to go beyond the simple

binary, and even make the complicit move to thinking about a Europe to an

Africa as empirical realities, can one pose to young people the question of the

correctness of thinking of knowledge in the racialised way that we do – of an

actual European body of knowledge that is completely distinct and sealed off

hermetically from African or Asian knowledges? These are difficult questions

but they are by no means so difficult that they cannot form part of the school

curriculum

In relation to these issues I want to make the argument here as a sociologist

that much of the challenge lies in the nature of the academic disciplines

themselves For example, our sociology and the consciousness we invest in it is

inadequate and insufficiently aware of its epistemological and even ontological

framing Sociology is unable to locate itself historically It is to this difficulty

that I now turn

Sociology, the social sciences and their limitations

Much of our thinking in the social sciences cannot see the role that the

disciplines might play in discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion

In the South African context it has been nạve in relation to the appropriative

seductions of dominance Its most glaring weakness has been its inability

to see the role it plays in the reproduction of racial hegemony through the

unquestioning stance it takes to racial description This is a crucial flaw in

our attempts to come to terms with the nature of South Africa This problem

reflects itself most forcefully as a problem of social analysis, but it is present in

virtually every field of representation in the country It is there too in the world

of photography, painting, sculpture, music and dance

Our sociological work generally, and I am acutely aware of my own field of

speciality, is unable to grasp the challenges of what it means to make a life

for oneself in the country at the moment Extending the critique that it is not

enough that one knows something but what one does with that knowledge

that is important, the problem we confront in the area of race is that many are

able to articulate an insightful social analysis of how it works but are unable

to demonstrate in their personal lives the significance of what they know

Exceptions, of course, exist (see Alexander 2002; Erasmus 2010; No Sizwe

1979; Steyn 2001) Our sociology operates in frameworks and paradigms that

are unequal to the variegated contours and profiles of our social environment

What we have tended to do, because the nature of our knowledge-production

regimes works like this, is to demarcate social experience in South Africa

in terms of what we imagine the issues are and so, as a consequence, come

to present it in its partiality Important work has been done on inequality,

domination, social relations, social order and social cohesion But it is often

too segmented It is interested in and will often make an argument for the

priority of race, class, language, culture, occasionally gender and sexuality,

sometimes religious belief, but little of it dares to understand how these great

social questions come together and are interpolated So in the end we don’t

have enough to bring us to a point where we might begin to prise open the

incredibly diverse processes of sense-making, meaning-making, the taking of

agency, the will to act, the ways in which South Africans are coming to terms

with their individual and social and communal understandings of themselves,

and, critically, how they might, and often, begin to reimagine themselves in

and through the social spaces they inhabit

If our sociology is not getting at the fullness and multiple nature of our society,

what should it be doing? What would a sociological approach which is more

self-aware look like? I by no means have a fully worked-out answer, but there

is need for a great deal more conversation about a new critical sociology In

imagining what this critical sociology might be, there is important new work

being done in the visual arts, in the field of dance, where the nature of the

country’s social space is being explored in important new ways which suggest

the outlines of an alternative kind of sociological practice

I recently had the opportunity of opening an exhibition of the work of two key

South African artists, photographer Mikael Subotsky and artist Bernie Searle,

at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies Both artists are

interested in the questions of identity and belonging and have deliberately

focused their work on the relationship of the South African subject to his or

her immediate world

In Searle’s case the work is autobiographical and seeks to articulate her own

historicised thinking about her body and its representations I suggested at the

opening that we have to come to terms with the ways in which domination –