Eusebius McKaiser
My dearest mother – bless her soul – whom I love immensely and miss so much that on Mother’s Day I had to restrict my use of social media because photos of mothers still alive triggered pain and loss in me, held racist views.
My mom used to tell us as kids that if we do not draw the curtains properly, before jumping into bed, “the bantus will stare” at us while we are sleeping. And when dad and her got divorced, it was clear to me that the divorce itself, despite being a taboo for a devout Catholic family, was far less shameful for mom than the fact that dad decided to leave her for a Xhosa woman.
I knew my mom as a loving mom who opened her home to all and sundry, especially on the 15th day of the month when the soldiers get paid, and dad’s salary travelled the neighbourhood. Mom would also share our Christmas hamper with the domestic worker. My mom was loving, and I saw that love even in interactions with many black South Africans, and not just coloured folks in our coloured, working-class neighbourhood.
It is hard to be honest about the range of beliefs that mom held because we all want to think of our moms as wholly decent human beings. But none of us are exemplars of virtue. Even Mother Teresa, as Christopher Hitchens reminded us so deliciously, was more a friend of poverty than she was a friend of the poor.
It is pathetic to pretend that there is moral complexity where there is none. Judge Mabel Jansen thinks it is part of the culture of black men in this country to rape. That is racist, and no defence can change that.
Enter, of course, Rapport newspaper yesterday, carrying a story of the judge’s adopted black daughter, Luyanda Xulu, on their front page, with an editorial on the second page. The story, juxtaposed with the editorial, reduces the judge’s inherently violent racism to a soft human interest story.
Xulu is used as a prop to try to introduce us to an “impossibly complex” reality (which is probably also why her surname was butchered on the front page because her person, and identity, only matters instrumentally in this kind of media coverage). But let’s unpack this.
Does the fact that a daughter doesn’t regard her mom as racist mean that the mom isn’t racist? Does the fact that an adopted daughter is black and the mom in question is white settle the issue, or justify the assertion of moral complexity here?
Absolutely not. Nowhere in the reported remarks by Xulu does she resort to the cultural essentialism of her mother. She – Xulu that is – talks, rightly so, of the prevalence of patriarchal attitudes in our communities. That is in stark contrast to Judge Jansen asserting rape to be part of black culture.
But the worst part of this narrative is the use of a black body in the service of hiding anti-black racism from a judge who occupies such an incredibly important public position.
Why on earth are we surprised that racists are also capable of forming bonds with some members of the groups who incur their racist wrath?
Trotting out an adopted child, and dragging them on to the front page, is monumentally unfair. What else but gratitude and love might they display towards someone who has supported them while their own mother was not able to do so?
This does not show us complexity. It shows us only that racists can be particularly hard to spot when they mimic the same range of human interactions as anti-racists. And that is not new.
Racists aren’t aliens so obviously they are capable, like everyone else, of showing empathy, giving to the needy, being considerate, and loving across racial lines.
Rapists, too, are capable of loving some of the women in their otherwise misogynistic lives.
But just as Matthew Theunissen’s use of the k-word revealed plainly what lies in his heart, so too Judge Jansen’s culturally essentialist views about pathologically violent black men tells us what lurks inside hers. Do not be fooled by appeals to complexity when the facts in a given case are plain.
Judge Jansen’s racism doesn’t get to be discounted just because some black bodies she came across were treated with a bit more humanity than those she had in mind when she was peddling her vile views about rape being part of black men’s culture.
Her own adopted son was impugned by her view of black men. And the agency of her black daughter was diminished by her view that black women are complicit in raising children to view men as entitled to their bodies.
It is shameful that we try to pretend that racism is complex.
It is not. Just ask racism’s victims, and survivors.