Because racism is constantly adapting, we must identify ways to bring change that does not lead into its own dynamics of injustice, writes Crispin Hemson.
An HSRC dialogue on racism in Durban brought into sharp focus the difficulties in getting to action against racism. On one hand, there was obvious consensus. On the other, the dialogue was shot through with patterns of interaction that illustrated what we are up against.
First, the good news. Listening carefully to the diverse five speakers who started the dialogue - academics, commentators - I was struck by the degree of consensus on key issues.
Everyone on the panel acknowledged that racism operates in terms of one’s sense of self and at an interpersonal level. Racism is also embedded within institutional cultures. It permeates societies across the world, helping to determine the life experiences of people. It is directly connected to poverty; even if not all poor people are black and not all rich are white, the links between race and class are obvious.
Racism also adapts and shifts, recreating itself in new and problematic ways. People constantly find new ways to position some people as privileged and others as subordinated. Racism permeates language, naturalising a sense of superiority - take for example the assumptions that underlie the term “the calibre of blacks”, as if our role as whites is to categorise and patrol the quality of others.
Racism connects with other forms of oppression - it can be more intense for women, for the poor, for lesbians and gays.
Everyone was acknowledging also the violence of racism, at all levels - from what we would call structural violence, the lack of access to what you need, to direct, physical or sexual attack, to cultural exclusion. No one offered any argument to challenge this understanding.
There was also a sense from all the speakers that, whatever the gains of the last 20 years, there is a troubling growth in inequality, of new forms of domination and exclusion.
So far, so good. Where then did dialogue break down?
First, large sections of those present could not hear these areas of agreement. They insisted that three of the five speakers were misrepresenting the nature of racism and portraying it purely in terms of personal prejudice. No one provided evidence for this judgement; I had the sense that it was based on whether the speakers used certain coded ways of speaking.
So there was an insistence that we were divided on these issues in areas where we were not.
Secondly, people talk in confusing ways about what we call social structure, such as the ways in which racism operates in society. You get the impression that these are virtually set in stone and need dramatic ways to change them. In reality, they were created by humans and are constantly being recreated, otherwise they would end. If they were put there by people, they can by removed by people.
If you remember and read what Steve Biko wrote and said, you have an emphatic sense of people’s agency, their ability to change their thinking and actions and finally society, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Biko was instead being used as the justification for violent change; the one speaker who articulated the need to build in the young their sense of self-love, of their capacity to bring change, was derided as irrelevant. As an educationist I see our educational system as founded on and reproducing racism. If those who run it were all committed to a sense of all children as having immense value and the potential for the fullest intellectual achievement, it would instead be a powerful force against racism.
That is the kind of commitment that changes structures. It would not be easy to get to this, but this is the kind of action against racism that tends to be ignored.
Third was the constant assertion of violence without a compelling argument. The only rationale given was that because racism is violent, only violence will remove it. No one explained why this should be the case. It is not self-evident that, if the subjugation of women is founded on violence, women should be using violence to end it, or that violence is the correct response to the violence of Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.
Racism generates anger, and anger has the potential to spur change. Anger without a sense of one’s capacity to bring change leads into violence, and violence creates long-lasting divisions, not least among those who are meant to be on the same side.
We have not yet dealt with the aftermath of the political violence of this province, for example.
Fanon was being quoted approvingly for his idea that violence could be liberating, but he also knew well the capacity of violence to feed into further injustice: “The militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realises that while he is breaking down colonial oppression he is building up yet another system of exploitation. This discovery is unpleasant, bitter, and sickening: and yet everything seemed so simple before.”
As so often with Fanon, these words have a remarkable relevance more than 50 years later.
We need to identify the many ways in which we do have the capacity to bring change that is hopeful and does not lead into its own dynamics of injustice. To enable this, we need dialogue, but we have not yet found the ways of doing this right.
* Hemson is the director of the International Centre of Nonviolence at Durban University of Technology.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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