Olivia Exstrum
Penny Sparrow likened black people revelling on public beaches to “monkeys”. Matthew Theunissen, in reaction to the ban on South African sports associations from hosting major international events, took to Facebook to call the government “a bunch of k****rs” and “black f***ing c***s”.
In a Facebook message released this month, high court Judge Mabel Jansen called rape a part of “black culture”.
As a white American who has only been in South Africa for about a month and a half, I can’t begin to speak on the complex racial dynamic that exists in this country or what that means for black South Africans in particular.
But I can say that during my time here, I have been continually shocked, provoked, confused and fascinated by this beautiful country: South Africa faces difficult issues of racism, sexism, classism and other “isms” head-on and unapologetically in a way I wouldn’t dream of happening in the US. I imagine that in part this has to do with the sheer newness of the democracy – there’s a responsibility to get it right – but also the admirable willingness of the people to hold themselves and others accountable to anti-racism and justice.
This accountability can be clearly seen in the cases of Sparrow, Theunissen and Judge Jansen. Public condemnation was swift: Theunissen is being probed by the South African Human Rights Commission, and Jansen was placed on leave from her post amid calls to investigate her conduct in rape cases she presided over. I can’t imagine the same happening in the US.
Mthobeli Ngcongo, a communications professor at the University of Johannesburg, says the newness of democracy in South Africa means discussions of race on social media are more salient than in other places.
“It’s a fairly young democracy and hence people are only beginning now to find a voice, find an avenue to voice certain things,” says Ngcongo.
“Now what we have with social media is a tool, a medium which breaks down those geographical boundaries and gives people access.”
Growing up in a rural Republican state, seeing casually racist Facebook posts and tweets from my classmates was an everyday occurrence. In the wake of the shooting of unarmed black teen Michael Brown by a white police officer (who was later cleared of wrongdoing), for instance, several of my peers – mainly white males – proclaimed amid pleas for black lives to matter that #BlueLives Matter too.
President Barack Obama’s citizenship status (legal) and religion (Christian) are regularly called into question: he’s black, therefore he’s a terrorist/communist/foreigner, goes the narrative.
It’s not just racism, either. In a tweet, a former classmate recently likened a sports team’s poor performance to “sleeping harder than Bill Cosby’s dates”.
In my experience, these posts usually elicit nothing more than a heated debate that doesn’t extend past the comment section. Explicit symbols of racism like the N-word don’t need to be present in these posts for them to be racist, and they often aren’t.
Racism takes its form in coded language: innocuous on the surface, but that take on a different meaning in the context of America’s legacy of slavery and its present police brutality crisis.
Take Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America great again”, harmless enough on the surface, roughly translates to, “make America great again for white men”, which roughly translates to, “make it great again by eliminating those who threaten it, particularly women and people of colour”. Compared to South Africa, the response to these posts is deathly silent.
South Africa’s swell in social media use is due in large part to a refusal by white South Africans to engage in deep conversations about race, South African media experts say. The rise of social media allows black South Africans to face racists head-on, says Ngcongo.
“The interaction is often of an unhealthy nature, because there’s still denial in terms of a superiority complex, talks of colour-blindness, talks of the ‘Rainbow Nation',” he says.
“We have a refusal to have a dialogue from those in a position of privilege and a continuation of a supremacist mindset. You have on this other side, people beginning to feel they should respond and not keep quiet.”
South Africa made the transition to democracy in 1994 – I was born in 1995. South Africa as it is today and I grew up in tandem, 16 000km apart. My initial suspicion was that the bulk of the outrage came from black South Africans: after all, they are usually the targets of such vitriolic posts.
But Nicky Falkof, a lecturer in media studies at Wits University, says she believes the loudest voices are often the whitest. Like Ngcongo, she referenced the fallacy of the Rainbow Nation. White people will be outraged, even when they don’t engage in any anti-racism work or as Falkof bluntly puts it, when they “don’t really give a sh**”.
“White South Africans more than white people anywhere else are really, really interested in repudiating racism,” Falkof says. “It’s a way of deferring white anxiety and white guilt. We do these amazing public acts of shaming that comfort white people… But black people are used to this sh**. They deal with it every day.”
It’s not difficult to see parallels between South Africa and the US and the racist institutions that built them: America’s capitalist model was literally built off the backs of black Africans over the course of hundreds of years of slavery.
Similarly, decades of apartheid left in its wake extreme racial and income inequality that persists. And although slavery in the US was legally outlawed in 1865, it was soon replaced by segregation and Jim Crow laws, which were then replaced by a mass incarceration epidemic, police brutality against black and brown bodies and other subtle, but just as dangerous, systems. Obviously, outrage to racist social media posts in the US exists. Justine Sacco comes to mind. In 2013, the director of communications for a New York media company (an irony gleefully pointed out by her critics), tweeted en route to South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!”
Predictably, the tweet blew up, and Sacco was promptly fired. Ironically, soon after the incident, she took a job doing PR in Ethiopia.
She maintains that her tweet was taken out of context, and was not the words of an ignorant racist, but commentary on Americans’ proclivity to live in a bubble, where things like Aids don’t exist. I’m unsure if I buy her story, but either way, it was a lesson on the power of social media.
“(In the US), particularly around race, a lot of dialogue was under the surface,” says Jeremy Birnholtz, a professor at the Social Media Lab at Northwestern University in Illinois. “It’s very socially unacceptable to be overtly racist, so it’s a lot more subtle.”
Audience also matters. For instance, on my fairly liberal university campus, where students regularly protest against anti-black racism and for divestment from corporations allegedly violating human rights in Palestine, I suspect most racist comments would not get very far.
“If you’re in a society that’s very vigilant about these things, (racist posts are) just going to be more likely to get flagged,” Birnholtz says. “On a college campus, for example, a lot of diverse people are being brought together.”
Still, there’s a general unwillingness to discuss race openly in the US that I haven’t seen in South Africa. Michael Dawson, director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago, says this could be due to the false sense of security that comes with living in a “post-racial society”: we elected a black president, so racism is over.
“People in the US talk about race all the time, but they talk about it in private,” Dawson says. “It’s with your Facebook friends or in my barbershop… It’s almost impolite, if you’re talking about race in terms of racism. The difference is there is not public debate about race.”
However, although the racism of regular people like Theunissen may go relatively undetected in the US, Dawson argues that American celebrities are subject to backlash – if only in the form of losing corporate sponsors.
“You might be under-emphasising the accountability aspect,” he says. “I think the sanctions are more commercial and social rather than political and judicial in the US.”
Even if it is true that white South Africans’ intentions when decrying racism are more self-serving than subversive, as Falkof says, I don’t think it would hurt for the US to take a page out of South Africa’s book.
Increased accountability, plus a real commitment to on-the-ground anti-racist work, would only bring the US closer to its promise of ”liberty and justice for all”.
@OliviaExstrum