On power dynamics and "F*** white people"

10 February 2016 - 13:10 By Bruce Gorton
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Image: Witsfeesmustfall

If I was to call president Jacob Zuma a racial slur – I would be rightly called a racist.

I am just some random writer on the internet; Jacob Zuma is our head of state. He has social, economic and political power that by far outweighs mine.

I say this not out of some deep seated wish to use that insult, but to illustrate a point.

Recently a group of #feesmustfall protesters at Wits started spraying graffiti and wearing shirts essentially saying “F*** white people”.

In order to counter the claim that what they were doing was racist, they said the following:

“To be racist‚ you need to possess two traits‚ which are power and privilege. The privilege that was gained by over 500 years of slavery and subjugation of black people to colonialism & oppression. The privilege is in the form of a structural‚ institutional‚ & social advantage”.

There are a few problems with this idea.

The first problem is that if you look at the history of racial violence – it is not always the privileged race that is the perpetrator.

In Rwanda the Tutsis had historically been privileged over the Hutus – that didn’t make the resulting massacre any less of a racist genocide.

In Germany prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, the Jewish population was economically powerful. That did not make the Holocaust any less racist.

Power comes in a lot of forms and frequently changes hands, and a big chunk of what we want from our current university students is for them to be the ones who take power in future. That they will one day be the privileged class is the point to their education.

And that power comes with responsibility – which power dynamics tries to take away.

Except that does’t work, because power and responsibility are the same thing; if I am responsible for affecting social or economic change, that means you have given me the power to do that.

There is an essential double standard when you say it is okay for you to do something, but not okay for your opponent – and holding double standards automatically put you in a subordinate position because of the nature of power.

If you hold others to a higher standard than you hold yourself, you say that they matter more than you do.

If the utterances of a random white person are taken as super important national concerns, while the far more extreme utterances of entire movements and political parties are considered “okay” because they’re ‘black’ – then what you’ve done is made that one random white person matter more than your movement.

If you want to undermine white racism, you have to be willing to treat black voices as mattering in much the same way as you treat white voices as mattering – and that includes giving the same negative attention.

This is why my guiding principle in general is “judge others, sentence yourself”. If you see somebody doing something bad, do not do it yourself. If you see somebody being an idiot, learn from their mistakes.

Otherwise you’re making bad people and idiots your superiors. You hold them to a higher standard, because you believe them to be higher than you.

Power dynamics are useful for examining the system – but when it comes time to deal with the system; you have to deal with it with singular standards.

Otherwise you end up with a situation where instead of undermining the system, you reinforce it.

And this is true whatever your standards are.

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