Race into the New Year

by Dr Raymond Perrier · January 25, 2016

This month marks six years since I arrived in South Africa so I wonder if I am now allowed to write about race.

Maryknoll Father Mike Bassano, South Sudan. (CNS photo/Paul Jeffrey)

An American student of mine once remarked a few days into his exchange visit to Pretoria: South Africans are obsessed about race and thats why they talk about it all the time. Americans are obsessed about race and thats why they dont talk about it.

As a brown-skinned Brit who has lived in both countries, I hope that I have learnt to talk about it when it is relevant and keep silent when it isnt.

Race is not real. There is a true natural biological dividing line between primates and fish; and between apes and monkeys; and between humans and gorillas. But there is no biological or genetic dividing line between blacks and whites, or between coloureds and Indians.

I realise that for some South Africans that is like learning that Santa Claus is actually your uncle in a red suit. But I hate to break it to you: race is made up.

Of course there are physiological differences between individuals, and sometimes we put together groups of individuals with certain physical characteristics and differentiate them from others without those characteristics. And that is what we have come to call race.

But you see that we do that: politicians, community leaders, teachers, ordinary people. Biology didnt do it and God certainly didnt.

That is why under the old regime such bizarre methods had to be invented to draw lines since those lines didnt actually exist: pencil tests in the hair, the colour of skin that never saw the sun, width of nose, whiteness of teeth. And it worked people believed it and many South Africans still do. They treat race as if it was a real thing and something that cuts across time and place.

That is why an African priest born and brought up in Soweto, an activist campaigning for the rights of black people was horrified when he went to South Sudan to discover that for them he was a bit brown.

In Sudanese culture where the prized skin colour is so black its blue the lines are drawn between different shades of blackness with their contingent hierarchy. And anyone who is not really dark black is simply classified as muzungu (ghosts). Thus, my Sudanese neighbours thought that in our group the brown-skinned Indian, the olive-skinned Mexican and the pearl-skinned Pole all looked alike.

But, after at least 400 years of race-based politics, it is hard for South Africans not to fall into the trap of believing that race is a real thing and that as soon as you know someones race you can make a whole heap of assumptions about them.

They may be positive: good at maths, chilled, very organised, life of the party; but more often than not they are negative: mean in business, lazy, cold and calculating, drunkard. And admit it: you immediately linked those adjectives to people of a certain race.

But since race is not something hard and reliable, we need to be very careful when we build other assumptions on top of this. A good test is to apply race language to some other physical characteristic. He is corrupt like all people who wear size 7 shoes; she is promiscuous like all women with small hands; that child behaves like a monkey because all children with small eyes are like that. Absurd, isnt it?

So why do we do we feel justified to say things like this about people because they have black skin or white skin or any other kind of skin. (Though, Sudanese and Poles aside, I am not sure that anyone really has black or white skin we are in fact mostly 50 shades of brown!).

This brings me to the recent issue about the behaviour on Durban beachfront and intemperate comments about it.

I live on that very beachfront. And indeed, after New Years Day it was a mess. It was a mess because any large group of people in a confined space, with limited places to put litter and other things on their mind, will cause a mess. I have seen similar messes after rock concerts and political rallies and even papal Masses.

Unfortunately, a human weakness is that when in a crowd everyones behaviour drops to the lowest standard of the group whether in terms of tidiness, noisiness or timeliness. But it is not the colour of peoples skin that accounts for this, any more than it is the size of their feet, the length of their earlobes or the colour of their hair.

But in South Africa, some people say and a lot more people think but dont say such things because they believe that race is real and that race explains peoples behaviour. And for as long as most of us only ever socialise with people who are the same race, we will get away with these absurd generalisations.

The problem with the Rainbow Nation is that the colours never mix. As in a rainbow there is sometimes a bit of blurring at the edges but 22 years after liberation the vast majority of South Africans do not spend leisure time with people whom they regard as being of a different race. And the most shocking thing is that most South Africans do not notice this and are not perturbed by it when it is pointed out.

Durban beachfront is usually a mixing pot where South Africans of different colours do come together to enjoy the delights of the ocean: a white dude in surfer shorts, next to a black gogo with a plastic bag to protect her hair, next to a Muslim lady in hijab, next to a Hindu family who have brought half their kitchen with them. We all share the space and live alongside each other.

I walked out along the beachfront just after midnight at the start of New Years Day, joining the many families taking a stroll, and enjoying the revelries. In a country where people are anxious about safety it was lovely to see literally thousands of people, young and old, walking safely along the beachfront.

But in the one hour that I walked I did not see a single white person. Not one! None of the white people who live along the beachfront, or who walk or jog or ride there every day, who frequent the bars and the restaurants, or who call Durban home, thought to be there in the heart of the city on New Years Eve.

If we genuinely mixed with people who are different to us, perhaps we will let go of these artificial, anti-Christian, offensive prejudices about race and remember that God created all of us to be members of the one human race.