Driver's Ed 101: Xenoracism

I recently got my driver's license.  This is a Big Deal, dear reader.  It has been 7 years, litres of rescue remedy and thousands of rands in the making, this particular milestone.  I started giving it a shot (as you do) when I was 18, and legally allowed behind the wheel.  It went...well, not fantastic.  I failed the first test I ever took within the first five minutes (not exaggerating at all).  Up until that point, I had lived a basically failure-free life.  I was an academic achiever, used to excelling at every test I'd ever taken, and to fail this life-changing one (that most of my peers were passing) was a bitter pill to swallow.  I remember a conversation I had with my little brother (who got his license before me, by the way - huge confidence boost for big sister) in which he asked me how the test went.  I paused before answering carefully, "It didn't go well".  To which my brother earnestly replied, "Don't you either fail or pass?  How can it not 'go well'?" 

I can laugh about this now, but driving has always felt like this elite club that I needed to get into (I have been told many a time, by many a lift-giver that it will change my life) but that was closed to me.  First it was because my paralysing fear of failure.  I didn't attempt to get behind the wheel again for another six years.  And when I finally did, I was out of my parent's house, and the expensive lessons and test booking processes were no longer their bill to foot.  So the second barrier was money.  This year, after a failed first attempt, I got a good job, that pays enough to give me access to the instructor I needed to get over my fears, and learn how to drive.  And so it was that I came to be standing in the office of a traffic department employee, bawling my eyes out in disbelief at my good fortune.  I passed.  I could join the life-changing club!

Well, sort of.  I forgot one minor detail.  You can take the license-ness out of the girl, but good luck with the carless-ness.  Still, not as huge a problem as the damn driver's test, I thought.  So, armed with enthusiasm and my giant (in comparison to everyone else's snazzy, credit-card format) piece of paper that proclaims me legal on the roads, I set out to hunt down a car.  And I found one too.  Reader, I have never understood 'car people': I don't understand how you can enthuse about a mere metal machine and its various parts as much as they do.  I'm not a believer.  But I believe in this car.  I drove her around for a bit, got to know the different parts, got a feel for how I could negotiate my test-fresh skills into something more solid and concrete.  I love this car.  I want this car.  (Don't need it, though.  I need a car, not this one.)  I was smitten.  Filled out the paperwork, attached all supporting documents, dotted I's, crossed T's and fingers. 

I had been told and knew that my lack of a credit rating would maybe count against me; I was prepared for this.  What I was not prepared for was for the banks (including my own, who I have been with for 11 years) to tell me that I was considered a 'high risk' client, because I am not a citizen of this country and do not own property.  So, let me get this straight: I have lived here for collectively 15 years, I've had a bank account for 11 of those, I have been a permanent resident for 7 years, I have paid rent in this country (in one city) for 5 years, I have worked and paid taxes for 3 years, I have a South African identity document, and I am a 'high risk' client.  Not only that, but three of the other banks wouldn't touch me.  Really? 

I swung from extreme frustration and helplessness to deep sadness.  Aside from all of those feelings, I once again reflected on all of the relative privileges I enjoy as a non-South African permanent resident of this country, and what my obvious privilege says about the sytematic barriers those who don't enjoy the privilege I do must face.  I have an ID document, which (although it clearly, categorically states where I was born, and that I am not a citizen of this country) which opens doors that are resolutely closed to many immigrants (to say nothing of the many South Africans who don't have IDs).  This is arguably the first instance, since I obtained my ID at age 18, that I have ever encountered a closed door.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to encounter this kind of frustration, as a matter of course.  I can't imagine what it must be like to be an African immigrant trying to create a life away from your life, and face this institutionalised, systemic xenoracism (in addition to the constant threat of blatant, often violent xenoracism). 

I am incredibly privileged: I will probably be able to write off this and future encounters with institutionalised xenoracism as administrative nuisances.  I'll escape unscathed, and will probably gain entry into the elite club I so long for.  It will feel like a hollow (albeit life-changing etc.) victory.  I can't unknow the taste of what it must be like to try to make a life in a place that officially considers you a non-person, unworthy of the life you're fighting to build.  It seems useless and futile to, when faced with brutal, violent xenoracism, appeal to people's human decency in a society where xenoracism runs like a poison through the structural and institutional lifeblood.

Single Black Foreigner

Two things happened to me recently.  A little over a week ago, I started a new job (thankfully, it is going well, there is nothing blogworthy to report - I go to work, I do worky stuff, I come home and do not sob/talk about work constantly - it's the dream).  You'll know that as part of the new job routine, you have to get set up with an e-mail account, and have your name put on the company website.  The woman who does all this at this new place is from the country of my birth, she speaks my first language, and she knows what the full version of my name is.  This might not seem too significant, but it is: I have been living in South Africa for about 18 years altogether (give or take a 4 year return to the birth country).  As a South African resident, I use the shortened version of my first name.  It's punchy (2 syllables down from 4), and pronounceable (as I said, 2 syllables down from 4), and I use it because it helps to avoid the racial-xenophobic-etc awkward conversation the full version elicits.  Anyhow, this woman knows my full name, as people from my country do.  So when it came time to set up my e-mail address, she naturally assumed that I would be using this full name.  I didn't correct her, probably because I was in awe at the fact that for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I didn't have to carefully and awkwardly spell my name ("D - for dog, M - for mother...").  So for the first time in I-don't-even-know-how-long, I am using my full name on an e-mail account.

The second thing that happened was that I read The New York Times's magazine this morning.  I do so love the Times, and I especially enjoy the essays that I find in the Sunday magazine.  They are invariably thoughtful, intelligent pieces that make me want to be a better writer (one day, New York Times, one day...) so I can be a better person.  Their cover story this week is about mob violence in South Africa.  Before you go to that link, I have to warn you: it is not an easy read.  It tells in excruciating detail (I believe there is also accompanying video footage - I'm not willing to go there, frankly) the story of a Zimbabwean man brutally beaten to death by a mob that was out to catch criminals who had done something (stolen? killed? raped? what is the scale used to determine which transgression deserves what punishment?!).  He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on his cell phone, probably speaking the wrong African language.  The story goes that the mob assumed he was a thief because that's one of the discourses out there about foreign black Africans in South Africa (we steal - jobs, women, cell phones, whatever you got, we want it!).  I think it could just as easily have been about him being a black foreigner.  You don't need to have actually physically taken anything, the fact that you're here makes you a thief.  Anyway, they meted out the punishment they had decided on, and he is dead.

These two things seem worlds apart.  I have recently started a job that affords me financial security, and an e-mail account.  I'm on the company website.  This man was working as a painter for a (by the Times piece's account) racist man, and was living far away from his home and from his wife and child, in a South African township.  I am alive, he is dead. And although I am a black foreigner, like he is, I have never considered myself as that.  Because I moved here when I was so young, much of my life, and my story is tied up with this country.  I often refer to myself as a South African, not because I am posturing but because I feel South African, often.  I grew up here, I studied here, I work here, I love here and I live here.  Nothing about my relationship with this country and its people feels temporary.  But as I say, I often feel South African; I don't always feel South African.  There will always be a part of me that will never belong here.  There are many reasons for this, one of them being that, well - I'm not from here.  My birth country (which the observant reader will note I do not call my home country) is my birth country, and as complicated as my relationship with it is, there is still a relationship I cannot easily disavow (or make sense of).  It's pretty visceral and unexplainable, and I can't put it cleverly except to say that I will probably never say that I am from Cape Town when I am asked.  I am just not from here.  When I read a story like the one I read this morning, what will jump out at me and bring me to frustrated tears is not the appalling levels of crime and poverty that are robbing people of their humanity (though there is that), but the xenophobia that can push human beings to kill another human being with their bare hands.  When I meet someone who can pronounce and spell my name without skipping a beat, I will always feel a tiny frisson of...I'm not sure - excitement? recognition? comfort?

I read that story this morning and I cried.  Because it is just so godawfully beyond-words terrible.  But also because it brought up the fear that comes from living in a place where you don't belong (not fully, anyway).  It's a fear that I meticulously bury and deny because I am kind-of South African, and because I live far away from the 'danger zones' where xenophobic attacks are rampant.  But when my new co-worker instantly recognised my name, and I felt that rush of inexplicable emotion, I realised in that moment, as I did this morning that The Fear is never far from the surface.  It sits in all of us, whether we are here because we need to keep the people we left behind in our home fed and clothed, or because we consider South Africa our home.

Dear Sir/Madam

It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that I am resigning, after only five months of service.  I must begin by telling you that I don't want to want  to leave.  I don't want to want to because I believe the world is unjust and cruel to young black South Africans, and that the beleaguered education system is one of the things that needs to change in order for any of this to change.  I don't want to want to go because I believe that the impetus for change lies not in big government, but in groups of individuals who form communities who form movements.  Oh, how I wish I didn't want to go.  But I do, and so here we are.  

Why do I want to go, though?  Well, where to start.  Maybe it is because, in my heart of hearts, I am a romantic idealist.  I believe in social change and justice, and I believed that I could make a career and save the world all at once.  When you offered me the job, you unwittingly offered me a chance to do research and make a difference: you told me, with one acceptance letter sent on a sunny Saturday morning, that I could become a save-the-worldologist!  Such glorious news! And so I gladly believed you; I took the weight of all my hopes and dreams that this fucked up racist, classist, sexist world can change and placed them in this job, my first forray into the realm of the real (read 'my first real job outside of university', or 'my first job that I wasn't doing just to make quick change').  It's possible that that's the heart of the matter.  I put too much at stake when I arrived at your doorstep five months ago, pencils sharpened, save-the-world senses tingling.  You had me at "It gives us great pleasure to inform you", but you never quite stood a chance against my blind idealism.  

No matter, my eyes were quickly opened.  I remember thinking in my first few weeks here how, as a group, the people I worked with were not entirely welcoming.  At first I put it down to my self-consciousness and my incredible neediness.  But I started to realise that maybe the reason I perceived this place as unfriendly was because it rejected me as a black woman.  I am black, but I complicate your closely-held and defended assumptions about what that means.  I can write eloquently, I can speak for myself, I can decide for myself how best to address racism when I encounter it.  I allow you into my life, but on entirely different terms than you are used to: I see you as a fellow save-the-worldologist, not as my personal saviour.  Therefore you have trouble recognising my blackness.  You also seem unable to recognise my identity as a woman.   I am a feminist, which means I subscribe to the idea that I am no less a human being than a man (in fact, I may be more so, but that's womanism), and I will not try to approximate masculinity in order to get ahead in life.  So, when the only women who are able to 'get ahead' or have their views heard are those who approximate masculinity (and its attendant patriarchy) that sends a clear message about what you think of me as a feminist woman.  This place that you created didn't like the things that make me, from the word go.  I don't foresee a future in which it will.  

On a related note, my save-the-worldology aspirations, idealistic as they may be, are fully informed by all of those things about me.  I am black, I am a woman, and I want to see social change.  This means (for me) that I want to empower people, in the same way that I have been empowered, to create their own sustainable change.  I know to impose my own ideas would be tantamount to reinscribing oppression that I have experienced in my own life.  For me, sustainable change means financial independence, job security (though, so much for that for now), freedom from racial and sexual harassment, and a world in which I can engage with fellow citizens and state structures alike about the best way forward for this world.  I have the good sense to know that my sustainable change is another woman's privilege, and that I cannot impose my definition on another human being.  I realise - and I know you do as well - that the power to define sustainable change is in itself a function of my privilege.  Unlike you, I choose to grapple with the complexities of promoting social change by empowering people with the tools to define their own change.  You see the complexities and the grey, and you choose to ignore it in favour of simple black and white solutions.  I understand you do it not because it is the easier option but because it is the popular option: one quick survey of news stories and you'll see just how black and white (literally and figuratively) the global political discourse can be.  But that's just the thing: you don't claim to be just another voice in the current discourse, you claim to be the voice. Of an entire generation? Really, guys? Isn't it dangerous to claim omnipotence when you are only representing a particular viewpoint?  Especially when that representation doesn't carry any of the nuance or complexities you know it should?

Ultimately, that's why I am leaving.  I have been party to a dangerous game that has veered me off my righteous save-the-worldology path.  In all seriousness, I know I have been using that as a joke, but I am dead serious about changing this world.  It is not nearly what it should and could be, and it is a cruel and unjust place for too many of its citizens.  I need to devote my life to changing that.  But in the last five months, I have been a part of something that looks like that's what it is, but that will ultimately do more harm than good.  You can't save the world if you are in the business of black and white, and if you cannot see it for the complex, mutli-narrative place it is.  

And, so, as much as I deeply regret it, as much as I wish I weren't too chicken-shit to tell you the truth about what I see in you, I will leave without much of a fuss.  As sad as I am about this experience, I will take from it a deeper knowledge of just how deep the damage to our world runs, and a renewed commitment to save-the-worldology.  I wish you every success in your endeavours, as I am sure you wish me in mine.  

Do your worst.  

SBF seeking...

Ok, so here we are.  Why start this blog, why now, what exactly am I looking for?  Mostly space and place.  For the last two and a half years, I've been in a relationship with a white man.  He is plenty of other things, of course, all of them complicated (oh, we'll get to that), but for that last month or so, his race, and mine, have been foremost in my thoughts.  My partner belongs to a small, loving family, who have a large network of friends who serve as a kind of extended family.  What this often means - especially right now, during the festive season - is that I find myself the only black face in a sea of white faces.  This has happened to me before.  In fact, I have kind of made a career out of being The Only Black Person At The Party.  I've never had a problem with it before.  It's not that I claim to 'not see race', or that I've never encountered racism.  I have just always had the tools - courtesy of my class identity and maybe, possibly, my identity as a black person living in a foreign country where the majority is black (more on this later, for sure!) - to be in white spaces, and make white people in those spaces entirely comfortable.  I am deeply embarrassed and pained and filled with self-loathing at the thought that I only just, at the age of almost-25, almost three years into my relationship, discovered how much I hate that I can facilitate white comfort in those ways.

It began at one of the aforementioned functions, for a daughter of a friend of my partners (it's complicated, it always it).  I felt grumpy and ill-tempered most of the afternoon.  In hindsight, I can now admit that I was grumpy even before we'd left.  The weather was crap, I was underdressed for the weather, overdressed for the function, and irritated at the prospect of not seeing my partner for another god-knows-how-long period.  All this, combined with the fact that someone unwittingly served me a foodstuff I am allergic to (I can't tell you what it is, it's too weird an allergy, people can identify me by it), which led to a scene that ended in me running to the bathroom and inducing vomiting (I kid you not), did not a happy SBF make.  So it wasn't that there was anything different about the event, or about the sea of white faces in which I found myself immersed once again.  I was in a crappy mood, and this allowed me to look at where I was, who I was with, what in the hell I was doing.

In the weeks that followed I started down two dangerous paths: I began Noticing Things and Asking Questions.  I noticed, for example, that I was always the only black person around at parties etc., regardless of whether or not my partner was involved.  I noticed that at such events, especially where older white people are present (and this one's on my partner), white people rarely talk to me in any great details about myself.  I asked why.  Why am I the only black person?  Why are white people ok with me being the only black person?  What is it about me that facilitates their complete comfort in totally white - and wealthy - spaces, where the only other black people are those serving us, cleaning, looking after the dog etc.?

Something like four months later, the questions aren't getting any smaller or easier.  In desperation, after one of those gut-wrenching sessions/fights/intense discussions with my partner (oh, people in interracial relationships, you  know the ones - I cry/scream/snap, he apologises for something that is not his fault, retreats into his guilt, we make up, forget, until the next event...all of which leaves me wondering if the future of our relationship lies in a life behind locked doors???), I turned to The Interweb.  The results have been disappointing.  To be fair, I haven't looked all that long, or all that hard.  But an initial survey reveals sites of two kinds.  Firstly, you'll find reams of heartbreaking stories from men and women whose families are repulsed at the thought of the person they love.  They detail their confusion and pain and heartbreak in the face of unrelenting, blatant racism.  Secondly, (and I got these sites, when, in tears of frustration, I Google-searched "i am disappearing into my interracial relationship") you'll find sites decrying the scourge of miscegenation and the disappearance of 'pure' races.  Neither of these kinds of sites are my story.  The latter for obvious reasons, the former because my pain is different.  I have not faced outright opposition of the racist kind.  But I worry about a different kind of racism.  The racism that refuses to recognise me, with my private school accent, my hair extensions, my social ease in a room of white people, as a black person.  The racism that refuses to allow my blackness into rooms where I am present so that after a lifetime of living, learning, playing in these rooms, I am no longer clear on what it means to be black.  And I am in search of a space to speak of that racism, if I may.  I am not offering up a full-proof meditation on blackness, or middle-classness, or interracial relationships.  I am rather seeking a place, because I cannot find one in the physical and virtual spaces I currently occupy.

So here we are.  I hope this blog connects me to people who have and are experiencing variations of what I am.  Or that it attracts halfway decent, non-offensive comments.  I'll certainly be watching this space.