Can coloured people be racist?

A few months ago I listened to an online version of Andile Mngxitama’s speech at a Steve Biko memorial service. His words were thoughtful and well-calculated, weaving his analysis of Biko’s legacy around a multifaceted argument based on the nuanced intersections of class and race. I am less impressed by his piece Blacks can’t be racist in the fiery new publication ‘New Frank Talk’. Mngxitama’s argument is based on the premise that because racism is an ideological phenomenon- and all black people are systematically oppressed by the ideology of racism- this makes all black people exempt from being perpetrators of racism.

Let’s think about this for a moment…So then, when I hear a coloured person say that this country is fucked because the “apes and monkeys running it are ignorant, uneducated and spend all of their time trying to get laid”, does that mean that this sentiment is not racist? Or are we to say that coloured people are not black people and hence to conclude that coloured people can be racist, but black people cannot? We would then have to devise something like the old apartheid classificatory system and work out which of the different racial categories are able to be racist and which are not. What of African Americans then, can they be racist? An African American speaking of “poverty stricken, AIDS infested, people on the African continent running around in only leopard skins”, is this not a racist attitude? Can Asian people be racist? Maybe Japanese people can be racist but Chinese people cannot…

This is not simply a sneaky use of semantics. The point is that race is a socially constructed phenomenon: it is not a biologically determined thing but something which varies from place to place, given meaning by a particular social context. What it means to be ‘coloured’, for example, in South Africa, is very different to what it means to be coloured in the United States. ‘Blackness’, like whiteness, is not something that is fixed or set in stone; its meaning varies according to social context. Now that does not mean that race isn’t ‘real’. Race is real, but only because of the manner in which it has been used historically, politically and economically, for certain groups to systematically oppress others. Mngxitama’s point about ideology. But racism is not only an ideological phenomenon. It has an attitudinal component, a psychological component, in short it can also be something practiced by individuals.

I think that Mngxitama’s Blacks can’t be racist piece does have a lot of relevance to the South Africa in which we find ourselves living. My suspicion is that Mngxitama’s argument emanates from a well-founded feeling- amongst young black South Africans- that white South Africans haven’t acknowledged the true impact of apartheid, that they have been let off the hook for very deep harm caused by ideological racism and that, in certain circles, feelings of entitlement based on racial designation, still exist. How many white South Africans have ever been into a township and seen first hand what real poverty is like? How many white South Africans give back to local communities after having received huge benefits in terms of state subsidised, first class educations? How many white South Africans truly understood the humiliation of having to endure the pencil test, or having to carry a pass book or having one’s mother serve white people while living like a domestic animal?

This country has a long way to go in terms of fully digesting the weight of its history. Many people have been let off quite easily for the sins of their fathers. While we may not all have been the perpetrators, we white people have, as a group, undeniably benefitted from the ideological systems upon which apartheid was implemented. This is evident from our education, the areas we grew up in and skills we currently possess. But let’s not confuse issues. People of any colour can be prejudiced and prejudice and hatred can never produce something positive. Surely we must strive both to understand and eradicate bigotry, but also to come to terms with our past in a way which does not sweep it under the carpet. I suspect that these two tasks are not separate and that only their combined achievement will result in us ensuring that the sins of our parents are not repeated in new guises, causing more unpleasantness.