We need to talk the 'white consciousness' blues

"BUT, Eusebius, we’re not all like that! Did you know that I don’t even think of myself as white?!” This plea-cum- rebuttal to my recent essay on white consciousness has been giving me food for thought. In the essay, which was carried in last weekend’s Sunday Times, I argued that white South Africans are not helped by an unhealthy dichotomy of views about white life in democratic SA.

Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.

I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.

While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.

I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.

This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.

There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?

I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.

Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.

As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?

Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.

However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.

To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215