The burden of whiteness

White guilt helps no one - but is there a place for shame, asks Vanessa Barolsky

The black people are by far no angels.

—Judge Mabel Jansen

We don’t need white liberals to speak for us.

— Bongani Madondo

Recent comments by high court Judge Mabel Jansen and the actions of author Lauren Beukes in asking Eugene de Kock to leave a Franschhoek Literary Festival event on behalf of a black colleague are two incidents that make explicit the treacherous terrain of “whiteness” in South Africa today. What does it mean to be white in contemporary South Africa?

Jansen and Beukes epitomise a tension at the heart of the way in which “whites” imagine themselves and the way they are imagined by black South Africans.

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For Bongani Madondo, writing in the Sunday Times last week about the incident in Franschhoek, De Kock is the face of whiteness that whites like Beukes (and probably myself) literally cannot face. He is our double, our reflection, the ugly face of apartheid that we have not acknowledged our full complicity in.

Being white is a deeply morally ambiguous location in South Africa right now. Adhered to our pale skins are a host of ideological and historical markers that define us, irrevocably, as part of the oppressive class.

This is not to say there is no room for agency, for distancing whiteness from this disturbing moral history.

This is also a story of voice. “Black South Africans do not need you to do anything for us — even if it is well intended,” writes Madondo. Whites such as Jansen have a voice, they give voice to their banal yet devastating stereotypes in the echo chamber that is Facebook.

We make a mistake if we think these are isolated articulations; they are the daily bread of selfdefinition for many, but not all, whites. Endless calls to radio stations repeat the call for amnesia, to “forget the past” and forget our complicity. Has the past ever been forgotten anywhere, by anyone? How can we have either a present or future without a past? What is being called for is an obliteration of consciousness, a whiting out. These calls for a forgetting of the past are a denial of self.

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“We don’t need your guilt,” Madondo writes. But is there a place for shame? “Shame suggests the sense of disrupting one’s ethical ‘certainty’ or business as usual,” argues philosopher George Yancy.

How can the current ethical certainties of whiteness be disrupted? The quiet superiority, the assumed knowledge of the incompetent, violent, sexually and morally threatening black?

This is a discursive war whose symptomatic violence we see everywhere, in the calls for Fanonian transformation, the burning of paintings, the calls to throw out, incinerate and destroy the old, to create a symbolic rising from the ashes. Words can and do kill.

It is also a game of smoke and mirrors. Can we really ever see the “other”? What distortions do we project onto biological surfaces? Can we ever be free of them? Frantz Fanon spoke of black skin and white masks, the acculturation of black identity into Western whiteness. Can the masks be reversed? Or is what is required a dissolution of masks, an unmasking?

The history of Western humanism is notorious for its imagery of the white male as what is essentially most human. How then is it possible to recover a different image of the human, one that disputes the pathological non-reason of Jansen and others like her?

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How do the white saviours save themselves? Where can whiteness be located in the cartography of separateness, of predatory governance, of inequality and hardship that is South Africa today?

I don’t have any easy answers. I only know that a start can be made through an acknowledgement by whites of whiteness, of the complicity of whiteness in terror and suffering.

A start can be made through a willingness to embrace and grapple with the messy complexity of the “whiteness” that history has delivered us and we have shaped. We need the courage to stare down its ugly face and reclaim that which is honourable and beautiful in order to find a new moral imagination that does not need to be constituted against the black other.

- Barolsky is a research specialist in the democracy, governance and service delivery programme at the Human Sciences Research Council. She writes in her personal capacity.