In the 1960s, anti-apartheid activism focused on the material dispossession of black people. It took Steve Biko to articulate a crucial truth: material dispossession was inescapably intertwined with psychological alienation.
Black people had been alienated from themselves, internalizing a sense of inferiority and of dependency on white people. Only through healing this alienation could liberation be fully achieved.
As Biko famously wrote in I Write What I Like, “…the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” Biko’s promotion of black pride and self-reliance was revolutionary, and arguably essential, in the context of apartheid South Africa. But in South Africa today, is Black Consciousness relevant and necessary? Should we promote forms of racial consciousness as uplifting? Can we continue to view ourselves through the prism of race, without straying into racism?
This is a difficult, fraught question. As a white South African, born in the 1990s, I can only proceed from my own perspective. After all, how we talk about racial consciousness depends on whose it is. As such, let me share my personal perspective, and the questions it has led to.
Personal Perspective
I don’t recall a strong awareness of race in my early years. At primary school, the “Rainbow Nation” was proudly celebrated. My parents encouraged non-racialism, though their sentiments were not always shared by extended family members, whose criticism of the new regime was sometimes racially tinted. Gradually, as I got older, I became more aware of apartheid and of the significance attributed to race. Relatives’ idle comments, experiences at school, and friends of various colours shaped my perception of race. But most important was the media I consumed – much of it, ironically, American.
Around 2008, I began to internalise a view that while being black was “cool” and trendy, being white was an embarrassing impediment to one’s street cred. As I grew older, I came to feel that being white was not just “cringe”, but a kind of moral impairment. It was something you apologised for. It was something you expressed shame over. At the same time, I intuitively understood that I must never admit to feeling shamed by anything or anyone except my own conscience. Society, I was to regularly confess, celebrated my whiteness. To deny that perceptions of white people were universally favourable was to risk being classed with white supremacist conspiracy theorists. It was also to detract from anti-black racism.
Even now, suggesting that strains of popular culture disdain “whiteness” makes me feel uncomfortably vulnerable. Was it good for a teenage girl to carry such shame – and the fear of discussing it? Was it good for me to feel that my existence, as a white person, was illegitimate, regrettable and fundamentally entwined with violence? I would certainly have been happier without it. Such shame is a heavy burden. On the other hand, what was the alternative to white shame? Should I have been free to instead embrace “white pride”?
White Pride?
Over the years, I have met people who do embrace “white pride.” They are invariably people whose viewpoints I find to be racist, narrow, and morally repugnant. I have never met someone who openly labels themselves a white supremacist. But I have met people who romanticise apartheid and who long for a return to racial segregation. Never have I heard “white pride” expressed except in racist contexts. Is it possible to push for a positive white racial consciousness, without attracting the company of white supremacists, and without appealing to apartheid-era notions of white superiority?
Many people argue that the very construct of “whiteness” arose to justify oppression. In other words, there was never a time when white racial consciousness was separate from the racial oppression of “non-whites.” The baggage attached to being “white” is hence inherent – there is no way to frame being “white” as something positive.
Assuming we accept this argument, where does that leave us? If pride in whiteness is inevitably dangerous, there are two options: we can erase the construct of whiteness, or we can assert the necessity of white shame.
Erasing the construct of whiteness implies erasing the construct of blackness. Whiteness can only be erased through discarding the entire concept of race (at least as it currently exists). In other words, ironically enough, no black racial consciousness is possible without a corresponding white racial consciousness (and vice versa). Personally, while I admire Steve Biko, I find the abolition of racial consciousness desirable. In fact, I think that unless we construct a national identity as South Africans – one which transcends our narrow racial identities – we cannot fix our country.
Still, some might indignantly reply: who am I to tell black people they should discard their racial consciousness? Is this not arrogant and, frankly, racist? This leads to the second option: maintaining our current racial categories, while asserting the necessity of white shame. After all, if we want to preserve racial categories and racial consciousness, but we deem the category of “white” to be inherently dangerous, then shaming or in some way stigmatising it becomes crucial to keeping it in check. And there are many people who advocate exactly this.
The pitfalls of shame
Yet, precisely by shaming white identity, it is possible to achieve the opposite of what is hoped for. In other words: there may be an inevitable progression from white shame to white supremacy. Shame is effective for social control, but it is also exhausting and causes resentment.
As a humanities student in the mid- to late-2010s, I often heard other white students express their racial shame. In part, this was performative. Students understood that, in certain circles, there was social cachet attached to denouncing “whiteness.” It was, in effect, a way of saying, “Look how nice and progressive I am, please like me.”
Reihan Salam, president of the Manhattan Institute, describes such performative denouncements as a form of “intra-white status jockeying”. He notes, “We’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be ‘upper’ or ‘lower’ isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.”
This definitely accords with my own observation: mocking “whiteness” was a way to assert a certain status.
But such denunciations were also often sincere and attached to a good deal of pain, even anger. On occasions, I would glimpse this emotion. It alarmed me.
When young white men (and other “lower-whites”) describe feeling “demonised”, it tends to be dismissed as aggrieved entitlement. But this very knee-jerk dismissal of white male concerns can make white supremacist ideology seem comparatively welcoming. Such ideology provides white men a space in which to be the hero. If we ignore young men’s need for such a space, insisting they embrace a consciousness of themselves as history’s grand villain, we are alienating them in dangerous ways. The rise in the far right should be instructive.
As Rod Dreher notes, “For so long now I’ve addressed progressives in my writing, telling them that by abandoning Martin Luther King-style liberalism on race in favor of identity politics, they were inevitably going to provoke a resurgence in racial consciousness among whites.”
One Chase Davis describes his perception thus, “Once I realised that what the left was demanding of me, just personally, was basically a repudiation of everyone that came before me [in my family line]…to just disavow them completely…I don’t think I can [do that]. I was willing to play the game when it was like, we just wanna be empathetic and caring and inclusive and that kind of thing…but once it became very personal…it was like, Oh, wow, they’re tearing down everything, it’s not just these statues on one end…everyone that came before me, that looks like me, they hate. And I was like, I’m done.”
Accountability
There are other, troubling consequences to promoting racial shame. As I wrote in a blog post in 2023, “When we assert that being white (or Japanese, or male, or straight) is inherently morally tainted, we are untethering moral culpability from individual choice. And if your choices make no difference to the moral significance of your existence, they cease to have value. A world in which we no longer uphold choice – rather than skin colour – as the arbiter of our moral status, is a world in which we have effectively denied responsibility for the legacy of our own lives.”
In other words, identity politics undermine personal accountability. There are ugly consequences to making moral status something acquired by association, rather than something acquired through one’s own, individual actions. The same applies to other markers of status and value.
So, where does this leave us? Essentially, I argue that we can either choose to embrace positive racial consciousness across all race groups or discard racial consciousness altogether. What we dare not do is celebrate racial consciousness in some groups while demonising it in others, as this will only lead to a surge in racism. I leave readers to consider those options, and to ponder their own, internalised beliefs about the racial category they occupy.
[Image: Khusen Rustamov from Pixabay]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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