Confronting whiteness

How should I live in this strange place? This deceptively poetic question
captures an existential journey on which a white South African philosopher
and colleague of mine, Samantha Vice, has recently embarked.

She thinks white South Africans should feel shame and regret for the past
and for the fact that their whiteness still benefits them unjustly. She is
grappling with what it means for her to be a white person in a country that
is still deeply racialised, deeply political and deeply unjust. Her
reflections drip with an intense honesty that is too rare in the South
African academy. Sadly, it is an honesty often culpably missing from the
lives of too many white South Africans.

You might never have heard of Vice, in part because she does not think that
whites should participate in the public political processes of this country.
She is therefore tentative about placing her work in the public space, but
has started a conversation within the academy, a space in which she feels
she has the skills to make a contribution and is less burdened by her
whiteness than she might be within the public political arena.

In a dramatic way, her reluctance to step into the public space is an active
silence that is part of her argument. But I also think our country has long
needed brilliant and honest academics, such as Vice, to place their ideas
within the public space where they could have the greatest reach. No topic
deserves such treatment more urgently than the permanent elephant in any
South African room -- race. So, allow me to rehearse Vice's reflections and
to engage them.

Vice argues that the moral selves of whites are deeply stained by the unjust
system from which they have benefited. Whiteness, for her, is implicated in
the injustices that the black majority continue to experience 17 years
later. Whites should feel shame and regret, and make amends for being unjust
beneficiaries of whiteness. They should also withdraw from the political
space and live "in humility and silence", embarking on personal journeys,
inwardly focused, aimed at repairing their damaged moral selves.

By "whiteness" Vice is referring to the fact that a white skin has resulted
in benefits for the person who is white. This just is a historical fact. The
entire system of anti-black racism and apartheid benefited those who were
white. Whiteness became the norm of society.

Being white in all sectors of society was as advantageous as being male or
being masculine in the corporate sector. It was the "norm" and anything that
deviated from the norm was non-white, a negative description capturing the
judgment that non-whites are defective. Being non-white is as defective as
being gay or bisexual in a world in which heterosexuality is the norm.

Vice acknowledges that many whites resent the fact that they did not choose
to be white or to benefit from being white. Indeed, some whites opposed
apartheid. But shame and regret are not moral emotions that you should feel
only when you did something wrong yourself.

You should also be ashamed of benefiting unjustly. Feeling shame as a white
person is a way of acknowledging that you have been living in a world filled
with an injustice rooted in your whiteness. Shame is an acknowledgement that
the world you live in is not as it should be -- just and nonracial. Regret,
too, is appropriate. Vice regrets her own whiteness, not because she chose
it (which she could not have) but because her whiteness is what keeps the
unjust system, in which blacks are still socially and economically worse off
than whites, going.


Whiteness is not a historical fact only living on in history textbooks. It
continues to benefit whites. Indeed, one of the most profound observations
Vice makes is precisely the fact that South African whites are so
unconsciously habituated into an uncritical white way of being that they
fail even to acknowledge how being white continues to represent massive
social capital.

Just as a sexist black man or a homophobic white woman might never
acknowledge how they benefit from patriarchy and hetero-normativity (after
all, we live in a liberal society now, don't we, in which men and women and
gay and straight people are equal), so many whites take little care to
acknowledge the benefits of whiteness. Some will have the audacity to
respond to this article by claiming, in fact, to be victims, to be the new
blacks of South Africa.

They will argue that "the system" has now changed, because St John's College
in Houghton has now had a black head prefect, and most new BMWs are bought
by black professionals, and victims of anti-white racism now exist. Yet the
brutal, cold facts about poverty, inequality and unemployment, when analysed
along racial lines, underscore Vice's more honest view that whiteness
continues to represent unjust benefiting in post-democratic South Africa.
Whiteness remains the norm. Whiteness remains hip. And that is why it is
praiseworthy that Vice feels shame and regret for her whiteness.

Vice's reflections should resonate with whites in general. But they will
not. Shame and regret are difficult emotions to own up to. It is easier to
focus attention on others, like pointing out how corrupt this "black
government" is or how difficult it was for Johan, the neighbour's son, to
get a job despite having an engineering degree. Confronting your own self,
and being ashamed of benefiting unjustly from your whiteness, is too painful
for many to manage.

Vice's only mistake is her decision to withdraw from the public political
sphere. It is not black South Africans' turn to be political. It is all
South Africans' duty to engage each other as equals both within the public
and private spheres. Whites need to engage their whiteness publicly.

I do not want to be shielded from whiteness. I want to be given the space to
rehearse my own full personhood as a black South African by engaging Vice
publicly; it is the only way healthy relationships between blacks and whites
can develop.

Vice should, instead, have given slightly different advice to whites. This
is what I say to whites: "You have an unqualified political and ethical
right to engage in the political and public spheres of (y)our country, but
be mindful of how your whiteness still benefits you and gives you unearned
privileges. Engage black South Africans with humility, and be mindful of not
reinforcing whiteness as normative, just as a loud, boisterous,
rugby-obsessive chief executive should take care of his unearned privileges
as an aggressive, masculine male in the boardroom."

The journey will be worth it. But it requires discomforting honesty. We owe
it to ourselves as a nation in the making.

Eusebius McKaiser is a political commentator and an associate at the Wits
Centre for Ethics