Encountering Race

February 20, 2018

            There is always the discomfort in another country, amidst a different culture, of knowing or fearing I might be strange, act ridiculous, do something funny, or behaving in ways that contribute to stereotypes about the country and culture I represent. But when I come also as a White man to a place of Black people--and there is the additional layer of race and separation, race and power, race and hostility--this discomfort and desire to represent well and lastingly are tensely pronounced. At the Isilimela School, I have the advantage of an HFB program that has laid groundwork since 2002. But still the curious eyes on us here in the school as here on the streets of all-all Black Langa township make me nervous, give back to me my whiteness, my American ease and wealth, my touristing presence that gets to feel ennobled, tsk the poverty, and leave.

            And yet, perhaps I hadn’t felt as White as I did the other evening, when we teacher-parents had an evening free and drove to the tourist beach on the other side of Table Mountain. It’s not that the area was strictly White, because there was some little racial, national and cultural diversity. Not much, but some. But the place felt too much like, I don’t know, an American boardwalk, lined with bars and restaurants serving expensive drinks to businessmen and others who could afford to drink them. Except men from Malawi and Zanzibar and local townships selling identical paintings and groups of Black children dancing and singing  in place off the street. This is not the point I felt the whitest—at this point I just felt like a tourist in a tourist town, with racial legacies of course. But then I turned around and there was a little girl telling me she was hungry. It’s not like I haven’t seen children begging here. But when she put her fingers insistently to her mouth, I stuffed 20 rand in her cup and fled, embarrassed, and feeling, in that moment, entirely, accusingly, nakedly, white.

            I know, from conversations in the van, that our students are on similar journeys. It’s a mark of HFB that our students are so. In part, we serve as a bridge to two groups who can discuss outsider status we all share because Americans really are from outside the tense historical knots of this land; we can get to a shared humanity as we become teachers and learners together. This program does different things for each of its member schools. For Isilimela students, HFB honors their power, culture and leadership as well as melds them with worlds to which they rarely have access. For Bellville students, the simple goal of sitting beside and eating and singing with township students they’d in many ways taught to fear is a profound act that challenges in some cases their very families. But for the American students, it’s a global and cultural awakening that makes civic activists and humble thinkers and huggers out of many of them.

            Our students this morning, in a reflection after their first two days in Bellville, reflects these differences in goals and needs for the three different schools, as well as gives shape to their own awareness of race here.

            For one thing, students were very affected by gated-ness of this community in Bellville, of the Afrikaners who seem to live in a continual state of fear and siege. Olin said he expected to feel more uncomfortable in Langa, a place so vastly different than his own world in Seattle at any level, but he felt like a total foreigner in these suburbs, where every house is barred, gated and fenced, and topped with electric wire and armed response signs, many enclosing fierce guard dogs. Jaelyn said that when she was in class, the teacher asked about the Florida school shooting and how the shooter was even able to get past the gates; when she heard there were no gates, she said, That’s insane! Jaelyn reflected that it seems like they want to close themselves off. Her host father locked the doors whenever they passed homeless people, passed the signs that said please see me, please help me; many Afrikaners, Jaelyn said, embraced the barriers they feel protect them though so clearly they divide them instead.

            Racism drives the fear, and fear drives the racism, as it does in the United States; and when people do not live elbow to elbow, they must rely on stereotypes, which is why bridging cultures is such a profound act. Elaine observed that her host family makes many assertions about Black culture, what it is and why it’s that way, but they made these assertions, Elaine said, with few lived encounters. Jack’s hosts wondered if his host-family in Langa had a gun there to keep him safe, because they believed without seeing that it’s an apocalyptically dangerous place. Quinn was shocked by a swastika on the wall of her first class and then confused when she saw her second on the desk of her next class. When she asked her Bellville buddy, the student said, Oh, I’ll draw one right now. Quinn reflected that students here simply don’t understand the full meaning of such symbols, and she connects this to the subordinate status of History, which they don’t need to take again after ninth grade. In classes I personally visited, I found myself teaching a little South African too, as when I was asked how I felt about townships and if I was afraid there, I discovered students knew nothing about things like the Group Relocations Act that seized people’s lands for Whites and forcibly relocated entire peoples by race to what an Isilimela student described as wastelands—history I believe might mitigate formulations about why Blacks live as they do. Lack of context and lack of contact spins the fears and divisions out of control. Rebecca noticed that her host family made a special point to say that they were not racist. But, she says, they made no effort to reintegrate, and they never go near the townships. I think our students’ understanding of racism is sophisticated, and practicable, and I am proud of this as the foundations for their thinking.

            As I reflect on my own helpless confusion and multidirectional angst about whiteness in the face of Black poverty in South Africa or the United States, I am in awe and hope for what our students can do, how deeply they reflect, how willing to act. The shooting in Florida is something our group has not formally discussed, but I think they know some of the buzz around this, around the students who have finished with waiting for the adults in their worlds to protect them, who are going to take to the streets and put pressure on legislature by themselves, who are shouting, and organizing, and writing, and who have declared themselves, in the case of one very strong voice, the last school that will play victim to senseless gun violence.

            Students will be our bridge.