Different faces of race

It’s almost impossible for me to have any prolonged conversation here in South Africa without unconsciously thinking of the issue of race. In such an incredibly young country – a country that only less than two decades ago began the long and difficult process of healing and reconciling after apartheid – it should not come as a surprise that almost all in-depth discussions I have with people relate either directly or indirectly to race and racism. A couple of ruminations on some of these discussions:

First, while it may seem easy for me to claim that I come from a much more racially equitable society than the one I’m encountering in South Africa, I need to remember that historically this was far from true. Apartheid, which literally means “the state of being apart”, can in many ways be compared to “separate but equal” conditions in the United States, a state of affairs that was enforced legally via Plessy v. Ferguson until as late as 1953. While the constitutional amendments that laid the foundation for black legal equality were laid in the aftermath of the Civil War a century earlier, it wasn’t until Brown v. Board of Education that the concept of separate but equal lost its legal acceptability in the United States. It then took over a half century for a black politician to rise to national prominence and eventually seek and ascend to the office of the Presidency. This is all to say that change comes slowly. In the case of the United States, it took over a century and a half to achieve some measure of racial equality. But even despite these superficial indicators of America’s racial progress, the U.S. is far from the post-racial nation that it sometimes is portrayed as.

While obvious differences exist – from the degrees of economic development and historical backgrounds to the racial and demographic breakdowns of the two nations – I’m convinced that for profound and deep-seated societal change to take root in South Africa, the same ingredient that the United States has experienced will be necessary – time. South Africa has managed to take sweeping strides in the right direction; while I’m often distressed or enervated by things that my friends say – both black and white – I can only imagine how much more fair and equitable today’s South Africa is compared to the pre-1991 society. Taking its recent past into account, it is nothing short of a social miracle that South Africa is as stable, democratic and multiracial as it is. But the older generations, many of whom lived the majority of their lives during the apartheid era, cannot simply forget the past and erase it from their collective memories. Younger generations too face obstacles in overcoming racial divide; for one, enormous wealth and education disparities persist along racial lines. These disparities serve to perpetuate de facto neighborhood segregation, causing youth to be socialized and brought up in communities mainly composed of people of like race. Drawing cross-national (and admittedly incongruous) comparisons, I still believe that only time will be enough to heal the wounds of the past, remedy persisting inequality and secure a better future for this “Rainbow Nation.”

Another observation: When I first arrived in South Africa I was shocked to hear that people of mixed race are still referred to as “coloreds”. During apartheid, it wasn’t only blacks and whites that were separated from each other – so too were “coloreds” and Asians, both of whom comprised significant percentages of the population. Asians and “coloreds” were kept apart via formal and informal neighborhood zoning, the remnants of which can still be seen widely in South Africa’s cities. I swallowed the references to the “coloreds” uncomfortably, finding the continuation of the term upsetting. But why was the appellation causing me such discomfort? I think it’s mainly because of the political incorrectness that the term carries in the U.S. But on further reflection, I’m left wondering if our own labeling tendencies in the U.S. are not perhaps even worse. Most Americans tend to call people of mixed heritage (black and white) black, even if their skin complexion is lighter than that of many so-called white people. Americans will often look to indicators such as hair texture in their attempts to define people of uncertain racial descent (growing up I can recall having countless discussions with friends about whether or not NBA point guard Jason Kidd was black or white). People of mixed race in the U.S. are oftentimes not even recognized as such, forced to adopt one single racial identity. To bring the point home on the national front – I can recall countless times hearing President Obama being referred to as a black man, the first black president, a model black leader, etc. But Obama isn’t black; he’s half black. He’s also half white. Why is it that we often ignore that fact and simply box him into the category of “black”?

In light of this problematic tendency in the U.S., I must apprehensively ask whether a term like “colored” (with its South African meaning of someone of mixed racial background) might not in fact be more just and accurate of a term. Classifying someone strictly as “colored” admittedly has its problems in South Africa – the population has always had immense difficulty being accepted by either whites or blacks, trapped in between by their racially heterogeneous make-up. But at least South Africa has a space in between where coloreds can in fact belong, whereas in the U.S. it seems that persisting notions of white purity lead Americans to classify people who aren’t 100% white as black, latino, or whatever else they may be, forgetting or excluding their other racial ethnic heritages.

I’m inclined to say that both the U.S. and South Africa have considerable ways to go in accepting and truly coming to terms with the identities of people of mixed race. Rather than feeling compelled to box people into simple and homogenous racial categories, we as a society need to accept a deeper diversity than mere superficial color, recognizing and respecting the distinct ethnic and national backgrounds of all individuals.