“How weird is it that they’ve put all the black girls in rooms on the bottom floor together?”
Hesitation. Should I agree? she thinks, trying to decide whether I’m setting her up to confess her dissatisfaction with our residence’s first-year room placement policy so that I might somehow use it against her.
Seeing this mistrust, I insist on ensuring her: “Seriously. Do they think we’re stupid? Like, it’s pretty freaking obvious that all the black girls got black or coloured roommates and all the white girls got white roommates. And the fact that you guys are all down there in those dodgy sections... Who do they think they’re kidding?”
I end up getting a confused giggle and a mumble somewhere along the lines of “Ja, I know...”
I had this exact conversation with almost every black or coloured girl during my first week at university, a time during which the first years are supposed to interact with and get to know their “sisters”, the people they will be eating, studying in brushing their teeth with for at least the next year.
I didn’t make many friends during that first week of orientation. Maybe that’s because of the conversation depicted above I kept having with my “sisters”. Maybe the black and coloured girls didn’t want to be associated with me for fear of being perceived as dissatisfied with the residence they were so “privileged” to have gotten into. And the white girls... well, I guess they didn’t want to be associated with a racist. Which is what they thought I was. Because I openly pointed out that first year room allocations were clearly made on a racial basis.
I guess I could have shut up about it after the first or second time I tried to bring the issue up and got such a negative response (discomfort from the black and coloured girls, stares from the whites who overheard). But it was kind of hard to talk about anything else. “Did you enjoy yesterday’s skakel? Did you meet any nice guys? Have you been out in town?” I really couldn’t bring myself to ask such silly questions because I couldn’t pull it off. Usually I’m good at pulling off a multitude of identities. But that’s when I know I’m fooling my audience.
The thing is, these girls weren’t fooled. None of us were. There is no way any of us thought it was a random coincidence that all the black and coloured girls were allocated rooms in what the said black and coloured girls very aptly during the course of the year started calling the “dungeons”. These are rooms that are literally buried in the ground, their windows being just above the ground, so that when someone stands outside one of these windows, their feet are just about at the same height as your face when you’re standing inside. I know it sounds complicated, and I don’t hold any knowledge regarding the architectural benefits of building rooms in the ground, but just know that these rooms are shit. The corridors outside them are dark, not to mention the rooms themselves, with their fascinating views of tree trunks, grass, and, well, the feet of passers-by. (I, being white, had a room on the third floor with a view of the top branches of a beautiful acorn tree. When I stepped into the corridor, I had a third-story view of one of the town’s most renowned mountains.) To my knowledge, not a single white girl was assigned a dungeon room. Also to my knowledge, not a single white girl was assigned a coloured or black roommate. It was pretty obvious what was going on. As good as I am at adopting different personas in different social settings (apparently a middle-child phenomenon, who knew?), I could not adopt the persona of colour-blind-everything’s-fine-I’m-so-happy-to-be-here-first-year-res-girl. Not for a second was I going to pretend I hadn’t noticed, like everyone else seemed to have done. After all, as we were repeatedly told by our seniors, these girls would be our sisters for the next year, we had to use this time to really get to know them, they would be our only family down here. No way was I going to let my new sisters think I was so insensitive and ignorant that I hadn’t noticed what was undoubtedly foremost in their minds during their first few days of university: their new “home” was clearly racist, and none of their “sisters”, except those in the same boat as them, seemed to notice.
Accept that they had noticed. I know because I asked them. Naive about the extent to which this pretention of colour-blindness reached, I brought the issue up with the white girls as well. No one expressed surprise at my noticing the pattern in room allocation. Not one girl whom I confronted went, “Oh, my gosh, you’re right! I hadn’t even noticed that there were no white girls in those rooms!” or “What? No white girl was allocated a black roommate? I had no idea!” Nope, they all knew what I was talking about. What they did express surprise at, though, was the fact that I had brought it up. Like my black sisters, my white sisters too were reluctant to pursue this uncomfortable topic of conversation.
I was reminded of this, my first impression of a Stellenbosch residence, last week when Eusebius McKaiser spoke on campus about race, identity and politics. He drew attention to the discomfort South Africans experience in discussing race. He used social reaction to the Jessica Dos Santos debacle to point out how quick South Africans are to deny any racist tendencies, deeming Ms Dos Santos “alien” and “other”, raised in a closed-minded community, not here, not part of us, not someone we can identify with. We all expressed extreme shock at the fact that a 20-year-old white woman could use the k-word in this day and age. But as Mr McKaiser so aptly pointed out last Thursday, there was something very unauthentic about this supposed “shock”. Surely we had all come across the k-word somewhere before, whether it be in school or in a shop or at a social event we involuntarily ended up at.
Well, this was my experience. And yes, I was pretty disgusted with Ms Dos Santos for what she said. But I wasn’t shocked. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small Afrikaans town, which we all know are not lacking in their k-word users. Maybe it’s because I’m really observant. I don’t know. But I had heard the word before. And not just in my hometown. And not just by Afrikaans-speakers, either.
Look, I’m not trying to scratch at healing wounds here. But I don’t see why discussing race has to be seen as perpetuating racism. From that first week at university, and many other similar experiences, it just seems to me that refusing to address the issue does a lot more harm than discussing it openly. I get that people get emotional about this stuff, I get that racism is still a very raw wound. But that isn’t ever going to change if white people continue to be perceived as ignorant for pretending that they don’t see colour, and if black people continue to pretend they’re okay with obviously racist views in order to be accepted by white people in our society.
Racial thinking in South Africa has become like a line from a specific movie I think many of us are familiar with - and I can’t believe I’m going to quote from this rather horrendous film to try and illustrate quite an important point, but here goes – “You were thinking it!” followed by the response, “Yeah, but you said it!” (If it doesn’t ring a bell try saying it aloud in a really annoying American teenage girl voice).
We are all still thinking along racial lines, and that’s okay. Because (thanks for finally clearing this up for me, Eusebius) racialism is making a distinction on the basis of phenotypical characteristics. Racism is the prejudice that results from such a distinction. And, here’s the good news, you can make the distinction without subscribing to the prejudice. In fact, after centuries of disadvantaging people simply because of their race, it seems ignorant to me NOT to pay attention to race when discussing everyday phenomena. Is this perpetuating racism? No, because guess what? We’re all doing it anyway. So, my dear South Africa, instead of giving me that how-dare-you-suggest-it’s-because-they’re-black look, face up to the music. Unless you have something to hide. Which, judging by how quick you were recently to deny thinking along any sorts of racial lines even though up until only 18 years ago every single aspect of South Africans’ lives was racialised, maybe you do.
I don’t know, you tell me.
