Othering
B. Othering
4.3 Othering: Drivers of Ingroup/Racial Homogeneity
4.3.2 Us and Them
4.3.2.2 Choices
65 resources and an inability to compromise. Another possible explanation was that the outgroups’
lack of access to transport was known and used as a socially acceptable explanation of not working with them, and part of overt and covert power differentials at play within this example.
This is what Campbell (1982) calls “clique selfishness” selfishness by the ingroup to simultaneously promote ingrouping while “hostilely” excluding outgroups (quoted in Brewer, 1997, p. 204). This links to the next Micro-theme Choices as well as the foci Resources in Chapter six.
66 Lifestyle choices
This sub-theme looks at lifestyle choices such as the clothes one wears and even cellphone wall papers. These may appear to be simplistic stereotypes, however illustrates the complexity of being human, and how such differences can be used to fuel Us/Them thoughts and divisions.
This is done through “preserving distinctions between their ingroups and outgroups” as cited by Castano et al (in Brehm et al, 2002, p. 136).
Self-presentation is the manner in which one presents oneself as noted above is the basis of this foci with clear evidence of “preserving distinctions”
Mary (W): Like with the cell phone and the wallpaper18, for example, a lot of the black girls have a picture of their faces as their wallpaper and I always laugh at them and I say, ”How can you put a picture of your face, like a big face on the wallpaper?” and none of the white girls do that, it’s just something small, but it’s a little difference that’s just the way we are, that’s like just the way our friends are and just the way who we surround ourselves with.
This discourse displays multiple examples and layers of Us/Them division as a result of choices.
The first choice is an aesthetic/decorum sense that appears to prevent Mary and her ‘white’
colleagues from having the same behaviour. The next layer is the ingroup bias, “that’s just the way we are…” and that the ingroup is homogenous. Finally the fact that Mary found the picture on the cell phone divergent from her own concept of what is right and wrong displays a sense that the ingroup has the prerogative on “normalcy.” This is further explained by Dolby’s research that found South African ‘white’ youth attaching themselves to Eurocentric values and negating blackness were able to construct a “global white identity” (in Vandeyar, 2008, p. 287).
How a person spends their free time/leisure seems to further create Us/Them dichotomies if it excludes or marginalises the outgroup and rewards ingrouping. The following examples indicate that some leisure activities are reported as exclusionary in terms of cultural dominance of the activity as well as racialised social spaces for example night clubs and cultural games such as thunee19.
18 Wallpaper- the screen of the mobile/cell phone
19 A complex card game played by Indian South Africans
67 Katherine (W): Most of the people that hang out in the caff (sic cafeteria) are the Indians, and they play thunee and they have their little social groups and it’s not very welcoming to anyone else. I mean I don’t choose to hang out at the caff.
Feelings of exclusion demonstrate how the choice of leisure pursuits could have cultural nuances or overtones which create feelings of exclusion.
Petra (W): Ja, we could go out together but if you think about going to a club, it’s majority white people and then you have like a black club or an Indian club, it’s still segregated, I mean even like Beauty who lives with us, when she turned 18 my brother and I offered to take her out and she said no she didn’t want to go, because that club had mainly white people there. So even if we all did live at res together, would we still go to the same place, would we do the same things?
Petra reports an incident (above) when her adopted ‘black’ sister was invited to go out clubbing with her ‘white’ siblings she declined as she would be in the minority. Although Petra fails to analyse this incident it draws into sharp relief the drivers that remain unidentified in our society around comfort, feelings of belonging and social ease. Has the ‘black’ sister failed to identify with her new family ingroup; has she recognised that she would feel alienated in terms of music, race and lack of inter-racial contact and dating; or needed to belong within a familiar setting?
Goals and Values
Goals and values, as the second sub-theme speak to philosophical and sometimes inherited guidelines along which people live their lives. The examples below rationalise racial clustering utilising goals and values to explain that goals are culturally (ethnicity/racially) driven while values are often family driven. These choices then allow the participants to see difference and Otherness instead of commonalities and universal humanness.
Emerald (W): Just a strange bit of insight, maybe as you were saying about common goals that in our cultural groups which are essentially our racial goals we are all working towards different goals at the end of the day. There maybe sort of broad goals but sort of life goals that are sort of culturally oriented and that is kind of what draws us together, maybe?
68 Common goals held by cultural groups are essentially racial goals is the logic applied above.
This implies that culture and race are the crux of goal formation within ingroups that have culture as their common denominator.
Aneesa (I): …as our spirituality has increased and things such as praying together have brought us closer together, whereas if we were not in a homogenous group we may tend to neglect our spirituality or other morals and values as it may not be the shared with the heterogeneous group we are in.
Tracey (W): I think it’s got a lot to do with like your values and the way you have been brought up as well, that’s going to guide who you want to spend time with, and be around. So I don’t think it’s necessarily all to do with race and that kind of thing…
Tracey, Aneesa and Emerald explain ingrouping around consistent values and goals however this becomes a rationalisation to explain racial homogenous clustering. It alludes to the perception that values and goals are racially similar within an ingroup and dissimilar across the outgroup. Although this maybe correct specifically it cannot be correct for the universality of being human, being a South African, or a university student. Hence social identity and grouping around race exclusively and no other criteria creates Us/Them dichotomies. This is perhaps reflective of the specific lifespan stage these youth are currently in coupled with familial socialisation alongside nuances from living in a highly racialised country/world. This is linked to research by Castano et al (2002, p.315) that describes self-conception as a driver of intergroup difference, which in turn supports social identity theory whereby cultural differences result in ingroup bias. This sense of exclusivity of values (in the above examples) are part and parcel of the self- concept and thus creates the Us/Them and biases one to see the ingroup favourably.
Political Representation
The micro-theme of Choices also includes political representation on campus as a sub-theme.
Sandra (W): I also find it interesting there is no white student party or anything on campus only black. I don’t even think there is an Indian one. Like it is only them fighting for their rights as blacks on campus, on a majority black campus.
‘White’ political representation in student political parties is a choice however leaves ‘white’
students marginalised from political activity as a result of perceived under-representation of
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‘white’ and outgroup/ ‘black’ domination. This comes out clearly in the use of “it’s only them fighting for their rights” pointing to the Us/Them divides that such choices predict, as it is assumed that only ‘white representation’ or minority representation would allow for one’s rights to be upheld or protected. The South African political landscape is narrow in the amount of political parties that represent the people and then further divided along racial lines, which forms superordinate ingroups, hence creating alienation if one is not felt politically represented by
“Them” (Moodley & Adam, 2000, p. 54).