The Big Read: The unbearable whiteness of being

I have been looking out for the white grin.A few months back I wrote something suggesting that white South Africans complain a lot, mostly to each other, and in ways that aren't always helpful or necessary.

I received several messages from white people, explaining that I'm incorrect and they don't really complain a lot, it just seems like a lot because everything is so awful.

I also received a message from Don Makatile drawing my attention to the "white grin". What's the white grin? I wondered guiltily. I have, through unsparing consciousness-raising, already uncovered in myself traces of the white man's overbite while on the dancefloor, a condition involving the unconscious placement of the exposed upper teeth over the lower lip in an attempt to simulate grooviness and rhythm, very often accompanied by a facial grimace and loose side-to-side lolling of the head, as though it were but a sock with its footpiece stuffed with sand, and the entirely unconnected oscillation of the hips and shoulders and whatever's going on down there with the knees.

The white grin, Don replied, is "the fleeting 'smile' that disappears as soon as the mlungu turns his or her face away from the darkie favoured with this pretended show of emotion". Now this seemed unfamiliar. I replied suggesting that he might be racialising what is in fact an innocent example of standard Anglo-Saxon social dissembling. "We do that to each other too," I protested. Don was not convinced.

A week or so ago I found myself at the traffic department, queuing to renew my driver's licence. It wasn't especially arduous: I foolishly went at lunch time yet still the queue wasn't longer than 15 minutes or so, which meant the white folk in the line were compelled to sigh and check their phones and throw back their heads in the agony of waiting only 60 or 70 times each. At our department there's a kind of convoluted hot-seat arrangement, where instead of standing in the line you are provided with fixed rows of chairs. As each new person goes to a window, everyone shuffles sideways to the next seat. Oh, the enigmatic body warmth of a stranger: so appealing in a bar after the fourth drink; so strangely less so through the seat of your trousers in a municipal traffic department on a Monday afternoon.

I joined the end of the line and noticed the fearful stiffness of the woman in the row ahead. The licensing department is one of those places that terrify some people because it brings them in random contact with the rest of society. It's probably less a fear of other races than a fear of the unknown. In other public spaces - airports, say, or supermarkets - there is sufficient class filtering: they are well-lit places where you understand what's happening and there are enough other people like you. In a licensing department you could be sitting next to anyone. Anyone at all!

The woman up ahead sat in frozen whiteness, trying to take up as little space as possible, travelling in her head to a happy place with DStv and Tim Noakes. She was like a soft-spined baby hedgehog lost in a rainforest, trembling at the rustles and twig-snappings on either side, and whether or not her uptightness actually was racist, it couldn't possibly avoid looking that way.

As I watched with my usual mixture of sympathy and the deep desire to avoid looking like her, someone sat beside me. It was a black person, and so I smiled, to show that I am not like that woman in front. No, not me! Behold, I am friendly to black people! Are you even black? I didn't notice! Welcome! Please, sit, I've even warmed the seat for you! And as I smiled, I suddenly remembered the words of Don Makatile: the white grin! It's me! I'm a white grinner!

But no - it's not too late. If I can prevent this grin fleeting or fading when I look away, then by Don's law I can surely still redeem it from its whiteness.

So I froze my face in place mid-fade, like a still photograph of one of the Twin Towers crumbling. I scanned the room with that desperate crazed grin as though I was Tony Blair or one of Batman's archenemies.

With luck everyone would think I'm palsied, or insane, or I'd been making faces as a child and the wind had changed. If I could just hold that face till I made eye contact with someone white, I could let it fade with a clear conscience.

I looked round wildly - if only a white person would come in. O come, white nation, rally to my aid!

But that's the thing with white people - there's never one around when you need them.