Our Lecturer today Dr. Foster brought up many questions in my mind the biggest was the idea that race is an idea. I whole heartedly agree with this and have tried to live it in my own life with varying degrees of success. However he also brought up the point that although we must do away with race it still has to be used at least for the present otherwise we would not be able to make the society equal. See the ridiculous of that statement? South Africa wants to do away with race so it must use race to even the playing field. The other lecturer we had today Dr. Thaver brought this up as well.
To change gears slightly here is a startling statistic only 16% of students in South Africa’s Universities graduate, in the U.S.A. it is almost treble that. So to even out society we need to change education that was what Dr. Thaver spoke to us about. She mentioned that there are good things occurring however there is still massive disparity and the solutions are far off. Dr. Foster brought up a very similar set of points when he spoke to us. The level of contact which is part of doing away with the “Race” question is dismally low. Almost everyone in the surveys he and others conducted said “no I do not want increased contact with others races”. But surely on a University campus people intermingle.
That is so far from the truth it is hard to write about. Neither CU nor UCT students readily congregate in mixed groups the only example I neither institution I can think of is the international coffee hour at CU but that does not mean people are crossing lines in there every day life. I saw this at UCT on the steps to Jameson Hall, Dr. Foster had research to the same effect, students of different races did not mix and they congregated into easily distinguishable groups. This apparently happens everywhere in South Africa which is startling worrisome and interesting in that order. Startling as everything we had heard so far lead me to believe the opposite. Worrisome because if this continues we will see a system not unlike apartheid’s in its brutality arise in South Africa. Interesting because knowing this means that we have another piece of the puzzle which leads to a truly unified South Africa.
I am not a scare monger so please excuse the above however it is quite true. Zimbabwe had the same thing happen to it after its “liberation”. The inequalities eventually led to open violence that is shocking in its telling. South Africa is younger than Zimbabwe yet she is almost as blind to her problems. I hope that the world cup brings more than fans to this nation. Perhaps the U.S.A. can take a lesson and look to resolve our own issues about race. The first step will be in actually having a discussion about race and how we can move past it.
Hamba Kahle! Until we meet again Ryan E. Hardman
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One interesting difference between South Africa and the US is the way people are categorized by race. In the US you're Black if you have just some small percentage of African ancestry, whereas in SA you are Coloured, or Indian, or Zulu, or Xhosa - in the past this was a ploy on the part of the Apartheid, Nationalist party to count White people as a majority by dividing up the rest of the population. Do South Africans still make these distinctions? How do they categorize by race today?
ReplyDeletethe beginning point reminds me about the system of affirmative action that was created in the States following the civil rights movement in the 60s. Or even more recently, the US census asked simply if one was white, hispanic, or "other." For as much as we claim to have "moved past race" it still plays an enormous role in public society and in American government. We just never openly acknowledge that it does.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible to use race to get rid of race? It would seem to me that the answer is no, but I cannot think of an alternative.