Our 'fatal' attraction

11 April 2013 - 02:36 By Jonathan Jansen
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Twisting an already troublesome story, the online version of a major black newspaper carried the screaming headline: "Controversial UCT survey says black people are unattractive."

Problem is that just above this headline appeared an advertisement showing a young, slim, black-suited, handsome white dude advertising fancy shoes. Small wonder, some might argue, that a majority of black university students in an informal survey found white people more attractive for dating purposes. Yawn. This being South Africa, the racial opportunists jumped into overdrive, as they always do at the scent of a morsel of racially flavoured meat.

A black student political group reported the matter to the omnipotent Human Rights Commission which, if the self-important body takes on this ridiculous story, will make itself the laughing stock of the Chapter 9 institutions.

White editors of the offending student newspaper, Varsity, quickly apologised; for what, heaven alone knows. The SRC at the targeted university, in a wasteful rush of adrenaline, questioned the scientific merits of "the study".

Just another day in the not-so-new South Africa. Qamran Tabo, a typical student journalist, did something that is common on campuses around the world, especially those with histories of racial separation.

She asked students about their preferences by race. The UCT student did not claim this was a scientific study; she conducted an informal survey with 60 students.

She did some silly things. She started with a clumsy question: "Which race is more attractive?"

Then she targeted students through a laughable categorisation of their identities - white, coloured, biracial, East Asian (truly) and Indian - with the data represented in tidy pie diagrams.

This, by the way, is what happens when your university assigns (or used to assign) admission points to medical school on the basis of these kinds of racially inspired categories. But Tabo's mortal sin was to discover that a majority of black people in her survey find "Caucasians" more attractive. Yawn again.

Would our reaction have been different if whites found white people attractive, coloureds found their own kind attractive, and so-called Africans loved only people with darker skins?

That kind of outcome, in my view, could be interpreted as the perfect plan of apartheid - and that would truly scare me.

On the other hand, whatever the glaring weaknesses of Tabo's study design might be, surely these crude results are cause for introspection?

To call the student journalist a racist is the kind of intellectual laziness far too common in our country. To make this an issue of freedom of expression is not worth debating; of course a student can say anything she wishes in a campus outlet.

But if we insist people find "their own kind" attractive, let's ask why that might not be the case, starting with the white dude advertising coloured shoes at the top of a lead page in a black newspaper. Let us ask why public images - from school textbooks to cinema productions - glorify white authority, even when the story is about blacks. Ask why the major academic texts in our country about the black experience is written by whites; nothing wrong with that, but show me how many black authors write about the white experience.

I can tell you with some authority that many black people on the Cape Flats to this day boast about their German or Dutch ancestry but go into violent spasms when reminded of their Tswana or Khoi forebears.

White people, through centuries of white supremacy thinking, have deeply ingrained prejudice - if you doubt that, read the average blogger's responses to columnists such as Max du Preez , Phylicia Oppelt or Justice Malala. I can also tell you that the most liberal, respectable white South Africans would choke the day a precious daughter showed up with a lover named Sipho.

Like all South Africans, I raise my two children to be attracted to other people because of their character and commitments, not their colour or cultures. My daily work with more than 33000 students is to prepare them for a world that values our common humanity, not our divided history.

But we have a long way to go. The 360 years of institutionalised prejudice is not going to yield quickly.

In the meantime, the problem with Tabo's troubled survey that we really fear is: what if she's right?

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