{"id":20395,"date":"2013-06-13T16:05:48","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T14:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/racial-divide-as-wide-as-ever\/"},"modified":"2013-06-13T16:05:48","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T14:05:48","slug":"racial-divide-as-wide-as-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/racial-divide-as-wide-as-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Racial divide as wide as ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>        \t                                <!-- Main Editorial Image --><br \/>\n                    \t\t\t      \t\t\t                                      <img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-content\/plugins\/rss-poster\/cache\/b3ae5_3815851766.jpg\" alt=\"IOL  NM_nm SA race0\" title=\"\" class=\"pics\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"captions_credit_article\">AP<\/p>\n<p class=\"captions\">Nelson Mandela congratulates Springbok captain Francios Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 rugby World Cup. Mandela realised the importance of racial integration, but today we come together for the big events, then we carry on with our own lives surrounded by people of our own race, argues the writer.<\/p>\n<p class=\"captions\">\n<p class=\"related_articles\">Related Stories<\/p>\n<ul class=\"menu_tab_lists_related\">\n<li><a class=\"related_articles\" href=\"http:\/\/www.iol.co.za:80\/the-star\/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-being-1.1529686\">The unbearable whiteness of being<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><!--PSTYLE=WT Web Text--><\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Durban &#8211; In his article \u201cThe unbearable whiteness of being\u201d (See RELATED ARTICLES above), Eusebius McKaiser made the point that while many black people have learnt what he calls the \u201cgrammar of whiteness\u201d, the reverse is not true. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">He eloquently summed up what many affluent black people know all too well, that \u201cwhite South Africans don\u2019t need to be translated to me. I get you. I still cry myself to sleep for missing the Bon Jovi concert\u201d. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">As a coconut of McKaiseresque status, even as I write these words, \u201cYou give love a bad name\u201d is ringing in my ears, reminding me of my 12-year-old self, curling my lip, wearing a frayed (on purpose) denim jacket and LA Gear sneakers. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">But what McKaiser did not address is the fact that the vast majority of South Africans simply do not interact across racial lines. Forget black children learning how to say \u201csarmie\u201d and \u201coke\u201d to fit in. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Forget the dream of white children learning the words to Khuli Chana\u2019s lyrics. The reality of today\u2019s South Africa \u2013 supported by sad, dreary statistics \u2013 is that those of us who speak to one another long enough to learn one another\u2019s grammar are but a tiny minority of the population. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">According to the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation\u2019s annual reconciliation barometer, published at the end of last year, 43.5 percent of South Africans rarely or never speak to someone of another race. I will repeat that because it\u2019s a pretty shocking statistic: almost half of South Africans rarely or never speak to someone of another race. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">The barometer also provides evidence for what many of us know at a gut level \u2013 that the higher up the economic ladder you go, the more likely it is that you will form close friendships and have social interactions with people of different races. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">In other words, Eusebius and I and our elite black peers \u201cget\u201d white people\u2019s jokes and movies and eat bread dipped in olive oil because our affluence has brought us in close contact with white people. For the vast majority of black and white South Africans, close social contact is simply not an option. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">The 43.5 percent of South Africans who do not speak to one another represent an unhappy but unsurprising statistic. But given the nature of South Africans \u2013 which is to look on the bright side \u2013 one might be tempted to argue that the 57 percent of us who do interact regularly represent progress. After all, we come from a past in which very few of us interacted at all. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">This kind of optimism would be misplaced. The sad truth is that we are no longer moving in the right direction. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">In the past two years, measures marking progress towards racial reconciliation have begun to slip. In addition, the racial distance different groups feel is intertwined with intense economic distance. Many people who live in informal settlements and in rural areas rarely see anyone who does not look like them and therefore they have little opportunity to interact across colour lines. In a country in which knowing a white person translates into social capital, the implications are significant. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Despite the fairly grim statistics, we are a nation that wants badly to believe that we are making progress. When someone suggests that we are not, or decides that a narrative of decline might be better suited to our story than one of ascendancy, we unite in outrage. (Perhaps this is progress of some kind, but I digress.) <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">My point is that things are not getting better on the racial integration front. A few months ago, a friend of a friend was passing through Joburg. A French man living in the US, he had never been to South Africa before, and was curious to see \u201cthe Mandela miracle in action\u201d, as he put it, so I agreed to show him around. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">He had already organised a tour of Soweto (of course), so I decided to take him to Parkhurst to show off our cosmopolitan caf\u00e9 culture. His reaction surprised me, and of course as a patriotic (i e often irrationally optimistic) South African, I was annoyed by his comments about how few black people there seemed to be on the street. In part I was irritated because as we walked around looking for a place to sit, I had been internally taking stock of the numbers of black people, and was feeling quietly pleased with the fact that there were more tables than usual of casually confident uber-cool black children with blonde mohawks and lip piercings munching on crostinis and sipping on lattes. His dismay upset me. I had not realised how much of a frog in the boiling water I had become. I defended us, of course, treading the well-worn path of \u201cDo you know how far we have come?\u201d But the exchange was discomfiting. The reality is that 20 years after the end of apartheid, there is unfinished business we have yet to address both on the race front and on the economic front. Our apartness remains as intractable as ever \u2013 indeed, if the IJR survey is to be believed, our apartness is growing. Today\u2019s South Africans continue to cling ferociously to people we define as being our own kind. We come together around particular events \u2013 the World Cup being one fleeting moment \u2013 but then we disband, retreating to our corners, licking our wounds \u2013 name your isolationist metaphor. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">On radio shows you can hear the ache in black people\u2019s voices as they bemoan the plight of \u201cour people\u201d. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Whites don\u2019t use this language, but are equally plaintive when talking about affirmative action and the injustice they feel has been wrought against \u201chard-working guys\u201d which is often code for \u201cwhite\u201d guys. I do not begrudge us our sentiments; I am simply noting them. South Africans still feel a strongly emotional sense of collective responsibility for people within their race group. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">This translates into a landscape that is only partially de-segregated, even within the spaces that we think have been de-racialised. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Our malls and our beaches, our gyms and our restaurants; these are all open to all races. But if you look beyond the gleaming surface of shopping malls you will notice that within the public spaces that we occupy side by side, we rarely mix. We are like oil and water sitting in the same bowl. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">The clusters of white teenagers who roam the mall wearing dark jeans and scowling faces might have a token black pal tagging along, but most of the time they are mono-toned. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Black suburban women in Range Rovers lunch with other black women. Young parents who meet at child-friendly restaurants cluster in same-race groups, watching their same-raced children play side by side, but quite apart. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">We glide past one another, but we rarely sit down to break bread as friends. Our relationships are transactional \u2013 bank-teller, shopkeeper, airtime salesman. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Each time I see a large group of racially mixed people sitting together at a restaurant I am a bit surprised. And then inevitably I overhear a comment that makes me realise that these are workmates. They are eating together and laughing and joking because they share a workplace. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">This is important. But as the race barometer tells us, these work-based relationships are not translating into real friendships, where people visit one another when babies are born, pop around to take one another\u2019s kids to the movies, or ring to say \u201cHow are you?\u201d <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">That level of intimacy continues to elude us, in large part because the purposeful project of racial reconciliation has fallen by the wayside. Like it or not, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a prominent exercise in nation building. It forced us to talk about the open wound that was race. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Madiba staked his one and only term of office as president on racial reconciliation, sublimating his own understandable anger and sense of injustice in order to give voice to \u201cthe better angels of our nature\u201d. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">He was not a saint, but he was a visionary. As our president, Mandela understood that investing in racial reconciliation would be the only way to ensure short-term stability (it is easier to tell people to be patient when you are helping them to heal their pain) as well as long-term peace. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">Today the reconciliation project has been abandoned, and it shows. I am not a fan of charismatic, populist leaders, and so I am wary of putting too much store in the idea that we need a credible champion who will mobilise us around race reconciliation. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">But if ever there was a moment to pick up the conversation in earnest, where we left it a decade ago when the final report of the TRC was signed off, it would be now. Perhaps this can be the parting gift that we give to Madiba; to keep alive the ideals of the struggle for which he lived. <\/p>\n<p><!--PSTYLE=Normal--><\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">* Sisonke Msimang is the executive director of the Open Society Foundation of SA. <\/p>\n<p><!--PSTYLE=WT Web Text--><\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\">** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers. <\/p>\n<p class=\"arcticle_text\"><strong>The Mercury<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AP Nelson Mandela congratulates Springbok captain Francios Pienaar after the Springboks won the 1995 rugby World Cup. Mandela realised the importance of racial integration, but today we come together for the big events, then we carry on with our own lives surrounded by people of our own race, argues the writer. Related Stories The unbearable [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[8275,953,2143],"class_list":{"0":"post-20395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-south-africa","7":"tag-durban","8":"tag-newspaper","9":"tag-the-mercury","10":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.myza.co.za\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}