Our public discourse has always had some tints of the racial dynamics within South Africa society, we have however in the recent past seen absolute outright racial intolerance and discrimination.
In February this year, we saw reports of Curro Foundation School in Roodeplaat where predominantly white parents did not want to have their children in the same class with blacks and the school gave into the pressure through racially diving the learners into different classrooms.
Who could forget the racist attacks last year where a domestic worker who was on her way to work was beaten up in Cape Town because she was mistaken for a prostitute by a white male?
These incidents are only but two examples of how 20 years later, South Africa is still very far from being a non-racial society and that racism is actually flourishing in South Africa today.
The public dialogue on the RhodesMustFall campaign revealed that our institutions of higher learning are far from immune to this problem and actually harbour deep seated racists views held by some.
According to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) about 45% of the equality complaints received between April 2013 and 2014 were related to the use of the K*** word in Institutions of Higher Learning.
Although our campuses are largely multi-racial, they still remain unintegrated. More often than note, one is most likely to find Africans keeping to themselves, whites keeping to themselves, coloured, Indians etc. Societies and Sporting codes still remain highly racialized with no attempts of racial integration. Students who study at historically white institutions will tell you that there are different events for different races.
The racial make-up of social spaces in our institutions are not divorced from the class orientation dominant within such spaces. The few black students who are found in predominantly white spaces are those who are from an upper middle class and affluent background while the poor black students remain socially excluded.
Although our institutions of higher learning do by and large not have racial segregationist policies, many of these institutions also do not have policies aimed at racial integration apart from the obscure housing policies of many institutions which result in racial attacks as seen in the reported incidences at the University of the Free State a few years back.
No institution of higher learning of would agree that they are in fact a racist institution. In fact, any debate on race is often shot down by Vice Chancellors by giving you a flimsy history lecture of how they fought for a non-racial South Africa during Apartheid. These Vice Chancellors, often portray themselves as progressive academics who have committed their lives to transformation but fail to put their money where their mouth is.
Our institutions of higher learning must distinctively understand that there is a major difference between multi-racialism and non-racialism and that multi-racialism does not necessarily lead to non-racialism which is what we should strive for.
SASCO has for some time called for Transformation quotas for previously white institutions of higher learning where they would be put under administration by failing to transform. This call was faced with gross rejected from these institutions in the name of institutional autonomy and all other nice concepts used to stifle transformation.
What remains clear that those at the helm of our institutions are not committed to transformation. The systematic exclusion of blacks by means of financial and academic exclusions in these institutions prove how institutionalised racism is in our higher education sector.
Rhodes University recently came under the spotlight through the University of Cape Town initiated #RhodesMustFall campaign. The #RhodesSoWhite campaign was launched by students at RU to initiate a debate of racism at Rhodes. This has raised tempers amongst black and white students. What has also became abundantly clear, as is the case with many public debates on race in South Africa, is that there remains a high level of racism denialism while black students still remain second class citizens on their campuses.
Black male students at Rhodes University are constantly harassed by the Campus Protection Unit to produce their student cards because they look like criminals. This is the kind of racial profiling which relegates black students to second class citizens on their own campuses. Students at such campuses are taught to fear the black man who does not fit the racial stereotypical prescription of how an educated black student ought to look.
The Race Caste System teaches us that Racism is a social system that has two main effects: first, to constrain people’s lives by sorting them into positions in a hierarchy of power, prestige, status, wealth, opportunity, and life chances; and second, to maintain, extend, and reproduce this hierarchy by using political, economic, patriarchal, and cultural power (Alexander, 2010).
This correlates with writing of Simmone De Beauvior where she stated “the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them; for the more the oppressed can be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated.” (1963:4)
This therefore means that it is not in the interest of our racial oppressors to liberate the mind of the previously oppressed. Instead, attempts are made to convince the previously oppressed that their experiences of racism is imagined and a result of false consciousness. This thesis should be rejected with the highest utmost contempt from all race groups. The racists’ encounters of black students on campus remain their lived experiences within a racialized society which leads to the perpetuation of their exclusion, institutionally and otherwise.
In a Business Day article on (1 April 2015), Professor Steven Friedman said “To fight racism, we must admit it exists.” In order for us to achieve this, institutions such as RU, UCT, Stellenbosch, UP, UFS etc. need to stop treating racism as a figment of the black student’s imagination and concede that we are faced with a crisis of racism on campuses. At a risk of sounding alarmist and extremist, the continual denial of the existence of institutionalised racism on our campuses will result in an all-out race war.
Nonceba Mhlauli is a member of the National Executive Committee of SASCO and the NEC Communications Cordinator
References:
- Alexander, M. (2010), The New Jim Crow: Mass incarcerations in the Age of Colour-blindness,
- De Beauvoir, S. (1963), La Pensee de Droite, Aujord’hui (Paris); ST, El Pensami- ento politico de la Derecha. Buenos Aires.
- Friedman, S. (2015). Business Day Online
- South African Human Rights Commission (2014)