TO EVERY SCHOOL-GOING CHILD
2.3 RACE AND IDENTITY
Various explanations exist about the construct of race. The explanations are rooted in efforts to legitimate the role of race in determining social organisation from the historical past into the historical present. Challenges to such legitimation have produced their own notions of how race needs to be understood. In this section the construct from the perspective of an ideological race to race as an objective condition and then to race as performance is reviewed. The challenges that have resulted in the notions of race as a Black phenomenon and the development of the notion of
dominant Whiteness and dominant Blackness are raised. How Indian race as a dominant construct operates at my school is also discussed.
Race as an ideological concept was a liberal understanding meant to challenge the long-standing biologically based ideas of race that supported and sustained exclusionary practices - in the early part of the twentieth century (Winant, 2000). This conceptualisation considers race as a mere illusion and gives anti-affirmative-action advocates reason to dismiss race in awarding benefits to individuals. Ideological race also assumes that the ways people think about and identify with race categories are a matter of choice and ignores the powerful discursive practices that position some persons as authoritative and privileged; it also fails to account for forms of resistance that produce further marginalization of already marginalized individuals (Duesterberg, 1999).
Another concept of race sees race as an objective condition with clearly definable boundaries that determined group membership (Duesterberg, 1999, p 757). Here the meaning of race is fixed into something objective and quantifiable - as occurred with the social scientific discourse of the nineteenth century. As explained by Gould (1981) scientists of that time often held'an a priori conviction about racial ranking so powerful thatitdirected [their] tabulations [about the innate intelligence ofdifferent racial groups] along preestablished lines '(p74).
Race is still a significant category of social organization today. Race does matter because it serves as an organizing principle of social relations (Thompson, 1997, p14; Duesterberg, 1999, p 759).
Viewing race as an objective condition allows for the emergence of a homogenous race identity that assumes that all people of a race group are alike regardless of class, gender, sexual orientation, place of origin, religion, language etc. Giroux (1988) has recognized that the assertion of a homogenous community has also been used to promote racist practices of dominant groups.
In apartheid South Africa race was that identity used to legalise social categorisation. Race was organised on the basis of origin together with the physical appearance of persons. Persons of European origin including the British were classified as White. The Japanese and Chinese occupied the position of 'Honorary' Whites. Those who were the result of relationships between Whites and any other race group were categorised as Coloured. Persons of Malaysian, Javanese and Batavian origin were 'Other' Coloured persons. Persons ofIndian origin became Indians. All persons of indigenous African origin were classified as Black. Blacks were further categorised on the basis of ethnicity into at least fifteen other groups such as Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho etc. Physically the White had light skins, straight hair, aquiline noses and narrow lips. If at any time the identity of a White person was in doubt the person ran the risk of being re-classified as a Coloured. Reclassification was on the basis of the pencil-test, skin colour and or nose-width (as explained earlier). Adherence to legalised social categorisation was strictly enforced and did lead to persons being reclassified from White. In South Africa race then was not a fixed construct. Its fluidity was located in the classification of the 'Honorary', the 'Other' and the re-classification of White to Coloured. The social categorisations of persons as White, Coloured, Indian and Black, a legacy of apartheid, is still used as a valid set of social categories in the present democratic South Africa.
Duesterberg (1999) proposes a concept ofrace as performance. For her performance emphasizes the power of discourses about race to determine social positioning and action and, at the same time, considers meanings about race as enacted or performed in particular social and historical contexts.
Race as performance allows for individuals to accept responsibility for the meanings they make and the performances they undertake, and for the destabilizing of the discourses that fix identity and support unequal and unjust social and institutional practices (Duesterberg, 1999).
In constructing race as a Black phenomenon, Whites create a protective invisibility around themselves (Brieschke, 1998; McLaren and Torres, 1999; Proweller, 1999; Carter, 2000). The invisibility is partly due to the historical delinking of White from the notion of colour in contrast to the conventional identification of Black as a colour. Proweller recognises (1999) that'Whiteness is easy to ignore because the conditions are in place for those at/in the centre to forget what has been
manufactured and secured through its own invisibility and omission' (p 783). This has happened because the focus of inquiry in race discourse has been mainly on the racial 'other' at the expense of those living their lives at/in the racial centre as White (Proweller, 1999); a focus on the victim of racism than the recognition and inclusion of perpetrators of racism (Carter, 2000). Analysis of race identity and discourse has, in schools, continued to pay attention to students of colour in the main while consistently ignoring any examination of how Whiteness is embodied in school policy practice. This was true also for the school where I was located. Here, people ofIndian origin were the dominant, privileged and powerful group. This group occupied the position of 'Whiteness' in their relationship with persons of Black African origin at the school. For Proweller (1999) Whiteness refers to a set ofmeanings and practices that provide White people with a perspective through which they experience the world. This lived standpoint [being] discursively constructed in relation to ideologies ofprivilege and domination (p777).
Race continues to be a critical element in the institutional and organisational life including that of schools. In this instance of identity production Whiteness, like all colours continues to be through institutional arrangements. Institutions have and continue to be designed as if hierarchy,
stratification and scarcity were and are inevitable. Schools do not manage race; what they do is they create and enforce racial meanings through which Whiteness grows as a seemingly natural proxy for quality, merit, and advantage, and colour disintegrates to embody deficit. Inthis way the
institutional design of Whiteness, like the production of colours, creates an organisational discourse on race and a personal embodiment of race. This then affects the perceptions of self and others and is what produces the individual's sense of the various race identities and collective experiences of racial tension and even coalitions. Once this process is sufficiently institutionalised and embodied it then escapes notice and is for this reason easily missed within the institutional choreography. What remains clear is the White quality that rises to the top where it appears to remains fixed. Itis for these reasons that the focus should become how Whiteness is 'invisibly' created and maintained (Carter, 2000).
Whiteness has been effective in the formation of coalitions that have united people across cultural differences, across class and gender relations and against their best interests in places such as the United States of America where White persons make up the majority group in the country. Itwould not be possible to write the history of economic, political, legal, health, educational, indeed all institutions, without centring the politics of Whiteness either consciously or unconsciously as a core dynamic. Critical theorists have documented that racial forms and identities are the constitutive
building blocks of the structures of daily lives, imagined and real communities, and cultural processes and products (Apple, 2001; McLaren and Torres, 1999).
Looking at the situation closely reveals that race as a category is applied to non-White peoples.
White people are usually not seen and named. They are centred as the human norm. Others are raced; Whites are just people. The challenge then becomes one of seeing Whiteness for the purpose of dislodging it from its position of power, with all of the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train and in this way dislodging Whites by undercutting the authority with which they speak and act in this world (Apple, 2001). Whiteness' efforts on tolerance and respect for difference and diversity occurs from a position of patemal ism that serves only to (re)centre race privilege leaving Others at the margin - an outcome of the negligence of such projects never questioning how Whiteness has advantaged and at whose expense (Proweller, 1999).
Apartheid South Africa also allowed for coalitions of White persons across the South African spectrum. Whiteness was advantaged and dominated all spheres of daily life even though Whites were a minority group. The shift from apartheid to democracy has meant a shift from the dominance of Whiteness in most spheres. Politically, legally and in most aspects of socio-cultural structural and organisational life Blackness now dominates since it is Black persons who make up the majority of persons in South Africa. Whiteness continues to retain its hold and determines the agenda in the economic sphere including who becomes advantaged through Black economic empowerment projects. This raises questions and challenges about where advantage and dominance truly reside and needs to be elucidated through studies that focus specifically on the advantage and dominance of Blackness in a terrain of White economic power.
The negligence of advantaging Whiteness is what ensures that race is silenced in schools and in education; a negligence that derives from silent social pressures not to name those aspects of education related to race and racism (Carter, 2000). This negligence serves to ensure the absence of conflict that could erupt around difference and in this way also works to domesticate race.
'Tolerance' is useful to Whiteness in that it prevents any challenge and disruption of inequalities based on race. Tolerance's discourse of 'harmony in diversity/unity in diversity' persists in reproducing the systemic inequities in schools and society. In such situations Black students often voluntarily silence themselves by refusing to respond to teachers and students on issues ofrace. In this way they redirect race discourse away from themselves and then work at managing it on their terms either silently or within their own race groups (Proweller, 1999). Disrupting tolerance and the
unsilencing the silenced will require that for those privileged by race, including both students and teachers, to develop a critical reflective consciousness of privileged race positionality and an understanding of the 'commonsense' ideologies that mask the benefits of occupying positions of race privilege (Proweller, 1999).
The school where I taught had originally been established as a school for Indians only in 1960 - as was in keeping with requirements of apartheid. The school opened its doors to students of the different races in 1984 as part of its and its wider Indian community's resistance to apartheid. In
1994 the opening of the school to all races shifted from resistance to a legislated act - as South Africa moved outside of the apartheid era. Students of mixed origin, Coloureds, although few then enrolled at the school. White students never sought enrolment at the school. This perhaps is grounded in the notion that only those schools formerly designated for White persons offered the 'best' education, had the 'best' standards and did have the most physical resources for both the formal and the sports curriculum and also provided the normative 'Whiteness' required for global success. The teaching and administrative staff at the school were all of Indian origin. The only Black staff were the cleaners.
At the school the Indians based on their historical relationship with the school, their dominance in number, their facility with English as the favoured language with status and on their relative wealth assumed the mantle of invisibility as the privileged, powerful and dominant race group. As a group their invisibility gave them the position of being 'just people' who through just being determined the normative. Anybody that was not Indian was viewed as the inadequate Other that then also became the downtrodden.Itwas this invisible dominance that silenced and domesticated race at the school and made it possible to 'tolerate' that which was not Indian.
Since the understanding of race continually changes and is constantly challenged, interrupted and reconstructed in and through the actual practices in which people engage and in the discourses that they employ Scheurich and Young (1997) recognise race as a mobile social construct. Race for them thus is located in'historically and socially situated race-based cultures that are tied both positively (i.e. cultural pride) and negatively (i.e. racism) to skin colour' (p 12) They also make clear that both skin colour and'one' race exhibit great variations and that the experiences within the race-based group varies also amongst members of the 'homogenised' race group.
Given the present prominence of race in society Carter (2000) believes that it is 'reasonable to conclude that it is very difficult to be socialized in this society without internalising, consciously or unconsciously, negative beliefs about People ofColour and positive beliefs about Whites' (p 874) or the dominant race group. I now turn to how negative beliefs and emergant oppressions on the basis of race has led to that called racism.