4.3 Impact of institutional factors on students
4.3.3 Intersections of race and class: “… led to me feeling black”
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better, were exacerbated by the fact that they could not receive funding from the NSFAS.
Thus, they experienced a difficult transition from school to higher education. Ben’s situation illustrates the fact that being admitted to university may not necessarily translate to access to higher education for students from socio-economically deprived sections of society.
According to Masutha (2020), economic capital is passed down from one generation to the next, and Ben, in his situation, could not access wealth that is not there. As such, he began to question the possibility of a better future, if he cannot pay off his historical debt. However, his academic performance and the cultural resources, through the intervention by his uncle allowed him to access institutional resources in the form of a scholarship. Waterfield et al.
(2019) have pointed out that successful black students, who come from poor backgrounds, may not have sufficient economic capital immediately when they enter university, but may gradually build this as they become recipients of bursaries and scholarship because of their academic achievements. This suggests that universities and governments must make bursary and scholarship opportunities available for this category of students.
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sad to witness such things because I only heard about that kind of behavior from other people never once have, I thought I would see it happening to me or people close to me”.
Luhman: “I felt those differences, it did have an impact to see other students who were the same age as you driving cars and others wearing nice clothes are more privileged than Black students. Those who are driving nice cars are students from better backgrounds especially the Indians and White students. While I was wearing very bad clothes it something that was very painful in my heart. I like wearing nice clothes and be more presentable because we as black we have challenges by trying to cover our backgrounds and looking like you coming from better affording families”.
Sandile: “Indians they're just tolerating us blacks you could see that they have a problem with us. Here at this institution, I did experience that. Well, last semester we were actually racially divided into groups, when it comes to the science practical’s that we did and I had five Indians in my group. I was the only black person in the room but at some point, Indians would be with themselves.
For example, during practical’s I felt left out and to some degree excluded because these Indian students got along with each other led to me feeling black”.
Luhman and Summer’s words suggest that they might have felt that a sense of otherness, when comparing themselves to individual from other race groups who, they believed, were more privileged compared to them. What they saw, they suggest, was not possible for them, because their class and racial was nurtured by its deep historical roots. For them, because of apartheid, they continued to be subjected to inequality and lack of access to the forms of capital required to become a better person (Khunou, 2015).
Summer and Sandile speak to another important issue of “feel[ing] black”. This was experienced even when things were distributed to students, but black students were excluded. This sense of feeling black was not something they had thought that they would experience at university. The experience left Summer feeling “sad” as she never imagined that this would happen to her. Sandile’s first encounter with the Indian students, during the lecture on the practical component for his subject left him uneasy and feeling excluded. For
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Sandile and Summer, “feeling black” was a negative experience society’s way of foregrounding and elevating their displacement in their own lives (Kessi & Cornell, 2015).
The awareness of “being black” led to them feeling that, even whilst their difference may also have been class-related, being black was even more salient (Kessi & Cornell, 2015). For them, this was compounded by the fact that their schooling experiences had not exposed them to other races (Boonzaier & Mkhize, 2018; Vincent & Hlatshwayo, 2018). These participants’ experiences are similar to what Lehmann (2014, p. 7) has pointed out about the experiences of students from low socio-economic backgrounds, that when entering an unfamiliar field, such as a university, they may feel like “fish out of water”, with no safety or chance of survival.
For Luhman, the experience could be regarded as an illustration of the impact of class-based inequality, in which the privileged white and Indian students are used as a standard of a good life and a template of self-critique. This finding is similar to that of Steyn’s (2016), which posits that inequality based on class may be more pronounced in the lives of students at university. For Luhman, his clothes are a symbolic representation of who he is in terms of his class and racial background, which he described as “painful in my heart”. This induces a sense of wanting to be somewhere, not in his body and life, a place where he can wear “nice clothes and be more presentable”. However, his reality reminds him of the hard-to-break ties that he has with his current situation.
Ben: “I like to wear a clothing brand call Lacoste and here in South Africa student don’t like to wear that brand. Other times you can just see it your choice of clothing is different and Yeah obviously I would buy some SA brands that student wear”.
Ben, who was an international student, however, seemed to have already adapted to wearing the famous brands, such Lacoste, which suggests his middle-class background but in South Africa he is poor. However, whilst this may have signalled a new habitus from his home country, he had realised that this brand did not symbolise any real access to economic power here, as most “South African students don’t like to wear that brand”. To this end, he had to begin a process of adapting to suit middle-class standards in South Africa, buying “SA brands that student wear”. Whilst Luhman did not have the financial resources to do this, he
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was aware that wearing the right kind of clothes or the accoutrements of wealth was one way to feel a sense of belonging. This adaptive process is explained by Lehman (2014), where he points out that black students often have to shift their habitus to acquire cultural capital through developing new dispositions and tastes regarding food, cars, clothes, and their outlook on life. This form of cultural capital is often reflected in the way students talk, dress, and entertain themselves, as evidenced in the case of Ben (Bourdieu, 1986). The narrative of the participants, for this study, suggests a complex mixture of experiences of race and class, often leading to toxicity and dizziness, a sort of cultural divide, in the lives of students from disadvantaged sections of society (Torres, 2009).