Steve Biko, white guilt and me

*As much as I would love to write about Buffy some more, I have had this post in the works for a while and I have to get it off my chest.

In response to the post, On white maleness, one commentor contemplated whether social change is "an only black thing".  She confesses to having struggled with this particular part of Bantu Stephen Biko's ideas; the idea that in order for there to be real change (which in Biko's time meant the end of Apartheid), black people need to define their struggle and engage with that struggle seperately from the efforts of well-meaning white liberals. 

A few weeks ago, when I was really starting to understand who I was working for, and what was expected of my identity as a black woman at the place where I work, I revisited I Write What I Like, at the suggestion of my white male partner.  My relationship with this book, and with Biko is a complicated one.  I first encountered I Write What I Like four years ago, as part of a course I took on race and social identity.  We were assigned Biko, along with Frantz Fanon as part of our course work.  Funnily enough, I didn't struggle too much with Fanon.  It was Biko I had a problem with. I was especially bothered by the second chapter in I Write What I Like on white liberals.  Titled 'Black Souls in White Skins?' the chapter explores the role of white liberals in the fight against Apartheid.  Biko characterises liberal white South Africa thus:

...that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names -liberals, leftists etc. These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s “inhumanity to the black man”. These are the people who claim that they too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun. In short, these are the people who say that they have black souls wrapped up in white skins.

That palpable irony you detect is quite intentional.  Biko goes on to declare:

Nowhere is the arrogance of the liberal ideology demonstrated so well as in their insistence that the problems of the country can only be solved by a bilateral approach involving both black and white. This has, by and large, come to be taken in all seriousness as the modus operandi in South Africa by all those who claim they would like a change in the status quo.

Biko insists that these champions of change are not what they seem: in continuing to interfere and, in many cases, define and run 'the struggle' these so-called liberals are recreating Apartheid hierarchies within the heart of the struggle against Apartheid.  He suggests that the place for white people truly committed to social change, and to the end of Apartheid lies not in the black struggle but in their own community.  It's basically a case of "white person, heal thyself":

Rather, all true liberals should realise that the place for their fight for justice is within their white society. The liberals must realise that they themselves are oppressed if they are true liberals and therefore they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous “they” with whom they can hardly claim identification. The liberal must apply himself with absolute dedication to the idea of educating his white brothers that the history of the country may have to be rewritten at some stage and that we may live in “a country where colour will not serve to put a man in a box”. The.blacks have heard enough of this. In other words, the Liberal must serve as a lubricating material so that as we change gears in trying to find a better direction for South Africa, there should be no grinding noises of metal against metal but a free and easy flowing movement which will be characteristic of a well-looked -after vehicle.

When I read this, I was volunteering for a large student-run civil society organisations, and many of my fellow volunteers (who were also my best friends - nothing quite like spending all your time volunteering together to bond you to people) were white.  I believed them to be genuinely committed to addressing the injustices Apartheid and colonialism had wrought on their country.  I also struggled with Biko because I struggle, in general, with black men who I feel make pronouncements about blackness that do not take the particular struggles of black women into account.  I remember a classmate telling me the story of how Biko used to dictate passages of I Write What I Like for some woman in his life (mother, sister, lover?) to record.  What about her ideas and what she liked?  What did blackness mean for her?

I also struggled with Biko because, for all intents and purposes, he could have been speaking about me.  I am not South African, I do not speak Xhosa, Zulu or any other African South African language, I am middle class.  I do not belong in 'the struggle' by Biko's accounts, but did that mean that I was not black?  Did the fact that I worked side by side with white people mean that I was an accessory to the perpetuation of white privilege?  I never quite answered any of my questions.  I subsequently left the student-volunteering world, due to unrelated burn out.  I'm ashamed to say that I didn't confront any of my race and identity issues until I entered into my current relationship.  I'm equally ashamed to admit that I didn't think about or revisit Steve Biko until I started my current job.  

Over the last few weeks, Biko has been on my mind a great deal more.  I find that he no longer makes me uneasy.  In sharp contrast to the confusion and anger he called up in me four years ago, Biko and his writing now serve as a source of sanity and as a way for me topull together the chaos of my workplace into a coherent narrative.  In other words, I Write What I Like, which I read all those moons ago, shortly before my first encounter with burnout and depression, has helped keep a fast-approaching second episode of burnout at bay.

Reading my experiences at work - and my white colleagues - through  Biko lens has helped me make some sense of the hot emotional mess that is currently my career.  Though Biko was writing about the anti-apartheid struggle, much of what he said applies to civil society in South Africa, with one key difference.  Apartheid (and its evil stepfather, colonialism) were - excuse the pun - black and white issues.  I am fortunate enough to not have lived through any of those, but I know enough to imagine that you could see the evil during those periods.  It manifested itself in every aspect of one's life, and in every interaction one had with fellow South Africans.  It was easier back then to reject the evil, purge it from one's identity and choose a new identity that was based on opposing the evil.  I believe that is what created white liberals: they saw apartheid and the particular segment of white society it was associated with, and decided to remake whiteness that was based on resistance to that which they saw as evil.

In post-apartheid South Africa, it is less clear where the lines are, and who the enemy is.  Where apartheid allowed clear lines to be drawn between white whites and whites, post-apartheid South Africa has pulled back the curtains that the apartheid regime so violently policed to reveal what was done in the name of all whites.  Note that it is not about what was done by all whites, it is what was done in the name of  all whites, on the basis that they occupied the same place in some imaginary (biological? metaphysical?) hierarchy, no matter what their politics were.  Where there once were white liberals, who drew lines in the sand to separate themselves from evil, there are now white liberals who, having seen what was done in the name of whiteness (theirs included) draw lines in the sand to cope with their guilt.  It is no longer easy to separate whiteness from apartheid in post-apartheid South Africa.  The result of this is white guilt, which is what I believe spurs some of the white liberals I have encountered to the work they do.  Instead of the development of black agency and black solutions for black problems, as Biko advocated way back when, there has been a rush of white liberals to the spots that stand as indictments on their whiteness - spots that could have been the sites of the development of black agency, but are now into sites on which white liberals work out their existential angst and guilt.

I know how harsh that sounds, I do.  But I am not saying that the same 'evil' as during apartheid is at play here. I am not saying there is anything evil about guilt (though, I was raised Catholic and could write a book debating that).  Of course any thinking white South African experiences guilt.  Of course the natural inclination is to do something to make right what went so wrong on (effectively) your watch.  But the mistake those of us who carry our (white or middle class, private school black) guilt into our work in civil society make  is to assume that the responsibility to 'make things right' is ours.  Yes, it is the social responsibility of those of us who are privileged to do what we can to change this country, but it is not our responsibility to define change for those who are less privileged.  Going into this kind of work from a place of guilt is both admirable and dangerous.  It is admirable because it signals a willingness to face the demons in one's self.  It is dangerous because guilt is all-consuming: you can never do enough to be rid of it, and the more you do, the more you do (did Imention I was raised Catholic?).  And so you do and do and do, until all you are is a flurry of activity, and you forget to reflect on the impact of your guilt and your privilege on the work you are currently doing.

So, Biko was right, I am sorry to say.  His work has given me some sense of comfort, and a frame with which to analyse what has been a difficult emotional journey (into unemployment, amongst other things).  However, my overwhelming emotion as I write this is one of sadness.  I am depressed at the thought that 34 years after I Write What I Like was published, Biko's work is still this frighyteningly on the nose.  What does this mean for men and women like Biko who died in the hopes that  their children's children would be born into an enitirely different world? And what does this mean for my children's children? 

 

On white maleness

I have been away for a few weeks.  It's a very long story - one which I am hesitant about telling - but it needs to be told.  At the end of last year, I got a new job.  Dear reader, this was a partly maginificent ego boost for me, but mostly, it was a veritable lifeline.  Hitherto, all my work experience had been gained within the restrictive walls of the university world, and for the last part of that journey, I laboured under a fairly abusive boss.  Add to that the terrible job market (forty plus job applications submitted, three rejections (not counting the people from whom you never hear back - where do unread CVs go to die, I wonder), only three call backs) and you can see why by December, I was quite near nervous exhaustion.  The new job was an oasis in a desert of self-doubt, self-loathing and deep despair.

And so, with such promise, it began this year.  Less oasis-like than I thought.  There are several things making my work life difficult; some of which I remember claerly but cannot share for fear of reprisal if my anonymity were ever compromised, others that are minor irritations, exercises in the absurd that are easily laughed off.  But then there are those which make my skin crawl, they are so dangerous and evil.  The place where I work is a civil society organisation, aimed at addressing a key social issue facing South Africa's young, fledgling democracy.  I work with many young people who come from working class and poor communities.  I also work with many young people who come from middle class communities.  We are all united by a need to change what we see happening in this country; we are all united by our love for this country, and this continent.

Here's what I object to.  Over the last few weeks, I have noticed, and it has been confirmed in conversations with some colleagues, that there's a certain pecking order that permeates the life and the operations of the organisation.  At the proverbial 'top' of the organisation (civil society does not like to admit its hierarchies are formal, hence the quotation marks), you have mostly middle class, and, yes, mostly white people.  In the 'middle', and at the (regrettably) 'bottom', you have mostly working class, black people.  Now, I hear you: I myself am middle class.  But by virtue of my 'newness', and, my disillusion, I am not at the 'top'.  I am (regrettably) one of the many 'not at the top' middle class people recruited by the top, because they 'need' our skills and our middle class educations.  Here's the thing though.  The people who I refer to as the 'top' are not evil, and overtly racist.  They are not even subtly racist.  I believe, with much respect, that they love their country, they see injustice, they are determined to act.

But here's where true colours show for me: what kind of action is needed?  The 'top' believes in raising awareness: getting their constituents together, educating them about the problems they (constituents, mind you) are facing, and organising them into awareness-raising action, largely conceptualised by them (executed, of course, by the 'not at the top', and the 'middle' and 'bottom' folk).  The results of this are constituents who are called in to meetings to be told of their problems, and of the solutions someone else has worked out for them.  I attended an awareness-rasing meeting (in lieu of a planned action) where one of the constituents asked me to explain something she was painting on a placard to be used in the aforementioned planned action.  Neither the placard, nor the action are her idea, neither involved any substantive input from her.  So, what really are we doing?  Going into communities that have been disempowered and victimised countless times over and doing...what exactly?  Telling people what their problems are, and what has been decided for them?  How is that any different from the disempowerment and victimisation experienced during Apartheid, experienced at the hands of the new administration?

Why is this happening, though?  As I said earlier, I do not believe the intent of my bosses is malicious.  But here's the thing about white maleness (and note, dear reader, I use white maleness here as a proxy for privilege - not everyone at the 'top' is white or male): it cannot be evaded, it cannot be shrugged off.  In spaces where liberal, progressive, anti-racist white maleness takes up residence, it still operates from the assumption that it knows best.  I watch it at work, telling people what they need to care about (in the midst of a myriad of social problems), and precisely how to care about it.  It's why I got my job, even though there are many people in the organisation far more qualified to speak and research and write with authority about the problems facing their communities.  White maleness, even when it is well-meaning, is still white maleness.  It cannot recognise the value in world views that have not benefitted from the feeling of being central and normative all their lives.  How can it?  It has been central and normative for time immemorial.

I am not saying that because of white maleness, or, more broadly, privilege, the people at the 'top' and the countless other people like them cannot work in civil society, or make a difference in their country.  What I am suggesting is that in order to do the work they want to do, the work that needs to be done, it is necessary for them - for me - to stare the ugliest parts of our privilege in the face every single moment.  What are the things we take for granted in our engagements with people who are not privileged?  What are we assuming about what they understand, and what they need 'help' with?  How are we implicit in the constant - nay, daily disempowerment of people whose identities are not normative or centred?

If we go into change work thinking that we have these answers - or worse, not even asking these questions - we run the risk of not only reproducing the problems that brought us to this work, but of becoming a worse evil than that which we assume we are fighting against. 

*Gratitude and love to a friend whose insight and bravery I have borrowed heavily from to write this post.

Dreams from Obama

Finally, after four months of hand-wringing - and a detour in the form of a quick re-read of Eat, Pray, Love - I finished reading Dreams from My Father!  As excited as I am about finishing the book, I think I may have to revisit it at least once more as I journey through my own race, space and place.  The book is a rich and thick description of Obama's struggles with belonging, or the lack thereof.  And it is well-written and compelling, with just the right amount of schmultz and zero politicking.  I loved it!  And yet I trudged through this book: I sped past the 'Chicago' section, where he details his efforts as an intrepid community organiser, but I slowed to a complete stop (enter Liz Gilbert, who is also an amazing author and speaker - check her out) when I hit 'Kenya'.  In 'Kenya', Obama tells the story of his father, his father's father and what it was like going to the place from whence they came with his brothers and sisters.  He does not sugarcoat Africa.  The story is told in plain speech, and his descriptions of a country not quite recovered from the ravages of that centuries-old evil, colonialism, conjures images of my own Africa.  In short (before I begin to gush), he manages to go into details (including an episode of gastric misadventure) without sounding like a 21st century travelogue writer.

So, why did it take me four months to finish this impressive book?  Well, maybe it was that it was that good (yes, alright, that may have been slight gushing).  The honesty about Africa, and the psychosocial effects of socioeconomic, cultural imperialism was difficult to swallow.  The story contained in Dreams from My Father, and particularly in 'Kenya', is not just Obama's, but is the story of most Africans struggling to eke out a coherent identity on a continent crippled by structural racism.  In the following passage, he describes what he now understands about his father, and his father's father:

"I see my grandfather, standing before his father's hut, a wiry, grim-faced bot, almost ridculous in his oversized trousers and his buttonless shirt.  I watch his father turn away from him and hear his brothers laugh. [...] And as his figure turns, I know that for himthe path of his life is now altered irreversibly, completely.
"He will have to reinvent himself in this arid, solitary place.  Through force of will, he will create a life out of the scraps of an unknown world, and the memories of a world rendered obsolete.  And yet, as he sits alone in a freshly scrubbed hut, an old man now wiht milky eyes, I know that he still hears the clipped voice of a British captain, explaning for the third and last time the correct proportion of tonic to gin.  The nerves in the old man's neck tighten, the rage builds - he grabs his stick to hit at something, anything.  Until finally his grip weakens with the realisation that for all the power in his hands and the force of his will, the laughter, the rebukes, will outlast him.  His body goes slack in the chair.  He knows that he will not outlive a mocking fate.  He waits to die, alone.
"The picture fades, replaced by the image of a nine-year-old boy - my father.  He's hungry, tired, clinging to his sister's hand, searching for a mother he lost.  The hunger is too much for him, the exhaustion too great; until finally the slender line that holds him to his mothernsnaps, sending her image to float down, down into the emptiness.  The boy starts to cry; he shakes of his sister's hand.  He wants to go home, he shouts, back to his father's house.  He will find a new mother.  He will lose himself in games and learn the power of his mind. 
"But he won't forget the desperation of that day.  Twelve years later; at his narrow desk, he will glance up from a stack of forms toward the restless sky and feel that same panic return.  He, too, will have to invent himself.  His boss is out of the office; he sets the forms aside and from an old file cabinet pulls out a list of addresses.  He yanks the typwriter toward him and begins to type, letter after letter after letter, typing the nevelopes, sealing the letters like messages in bottles that will drop through a post office slot into a vast ocean and perhaps allow him to escape the island of his father's shame. 
"How luck he must have felt when his ship came sailing in!  He must have known, when that letter came from Hawaii, that he had been chosen after all [...] He had almost succeeded in a way his father could've never hoped for.  And then, after seeming to travel so far, to discover that he had not escaped after all!  To discover that he remained trapped on his father's island, with its fissures of anger and doubt and defeat, the emotions still visible beneath the surface, hot and molten and alive, like a wicked, yawning mouth, and his mother gone, gone, away..."

This is who we are, Africa.  Constantly running, trying to escape the fear, the humiliation, the anger of our continent's demons.  As hard as it is to read about, it is almost impossible to live it.

A note on labels (shoutout to Graeme)

I call myself 'Single Black Female' because these are the official social categories I occupy.

'Single':
I am not and do not consider myself single.  I am in a happy relationship with my best friend.  I love him more than I have ever loved Anything, Anyone, Ever.  I wear the ring he gave me for our two year anniversary on my ring finger.  We're planning on getting married and having babies.  I need him around because (1) I need help...um...conceiving and raising said babies and (2) The (aforementioned, seruously, Anything Anyone Ever) Love.  The fact that I can write these blog posts on his computer, with him beside me and that I can talk to him about the stuff I post here, that he reads the posts, is testament to the fact that I can trust him with My Stuff, and that we can hash this stuff out, together. 

This blog is me fighting.  For me, and for us.

We're not married yet, though.  So on forms, I tick single.  It is an arbitrary label in a world that only affords me two.  And I'm not married...yet.

'Black':
Where to start.  On forms, I tick that I am 'Black African'.  I am trying to figure out what this means, given that I move, live, work, learn and love in mostly white spaces.  Watch this space on this.

'Female':
Again, a favorite of mine on forms.  I identify as female, as woman, and as a feminist woman, I try to live my life in a way that negates societal definitions of womanhood.  That doesn't mean negating womanhood, though, and I hold fast to it.  Thus the label 'female', here, is a stand in for the label 'woman'. 

We clear?

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.