Abstract
Over the past decade, South African philosophers have begun to pay particular attention to whiteness, ‘whiteliness’ and the role of white South Africans in political processes and transformation in South Africa. This work has sparked much debate within the South African philosophical community and in public discourse more broadly, but often leaves white South Africans confused about how they should experience their white South African identity. Confusion about one’s identity, however, is not particular to white South Africans. In a recent conversation, a young black South African remarked that he often looks in the mirror and questions whether he is black enough. In order to clarify his statement, he explained that he grew up in rural Kwa-Zulu Natal and during this time never doubted his racial identity, but that his education and experiences of studying at a former ‘white’ university have left an imprint on his racial identity in such a fundamental way that on returning home he began to question his previously taken for granted ‘blackness’ and his sense of belonging where he previously felt truly at home. Further, he remarked that he doubts that white South Africans have ever had this same experience. While this observation might initially strike us as true, insofar as we do not question whether we are white enough, we, as two young white South Africans, have however experienced a similar kind of doubt—questioning not whether we are white enough but whether we are African enough, questioning, that is, our previously taken for granted ‘Africanness’, our sense of belonging to this African place.
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- 1.
Vice, “How Do I Live in This Strange Place, p. 323.
- 2.
Vice draws on Paul Taylor’s understanding of whiteliness saying:’it is by now standard, for instance, to think of whiteness as consisting in the occupation of “a social location of structural privilege in the right kind of racialized society,” as well as the occupation of the epistemic position of seeing the world “whitely” (Vice, p. 324, our emphasis). Further, drawing on Marilyn Frye and, again, Taylor, Matthews claims that whiteliness involves
‘deeply ingrained ways of being in the world’ which while being common to many white people, are only contingently related to having white skin (1992, p. 151). Having white skin makes it more likely that one behaves in a whitely manner, but people with white skin are not essentially whitely nor are whitely characteristics only and always held by white people (1992, pp. 149–52). (Matthews, 2012, p. 174)
Some examples she cites include not seeing oneself as privileged in virtue of one’s whiteness, seeing whiteness as the norm and the concomitant invisibility of whiteness, an assumption of responsibility and authority, and what has come to be called ‘ontological expansiveness’.
- 3.
Ibid., p. 324.
- 4.
Ibid., p. 335.
- 5.
Matthews, “White Anti-Racism in Post-Apartheid South Africa”, pp. 185–186.
- 6.
Vice, “How Do I Live in This Strange Place”, p. 326.
- 7.
Matthews, “Becoming African”, pp. 1–17.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 10.
- 9.
Mbeki, “I am an African”.
- 10.
Mbeki, “The African Renaissance Statement of the Deputy President”.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
Ibid.
- 13.
Makgoba, Shope and Mazwai, “Introduction”, p. x.
- 14.
Elucidating the various (and perhaps innumerable social, political, economic, and, at times, even personal) reasons underpinning this failure is beyond the scope or aims of this chapter.
- 15.
While numerous sceptics challenge the very notion of unity in diversity, we think that Mbeki’s concept of Africanness can be plausibly understood, and that the project of the African Renaissance—and the journey of self-discovery required to make sense of this project—is still worth undertaking. We believe that this is the case because diversely situated people all feel that Africa is in fact their home, that they belong here, recognise themselves as African and have a stake in the future of our continent. Although the concept of Africanness is fraught with difficulty and tension, we still recognise that it is not an empty notion, and so need to make sense of it in a way that does not make it arbitrary—that does not make our belonging reducible to a passport or racial grouping. For these reasons, we believe that Mbeki’s suggestion that we need to forge a renewed and unified African identity makes sense.
- 16.
L’ange, The White Africans, p. 458.
- 17.
Schlink, The Reader, p. 167 [our emphasis].
- 18.
We are not here talking about the current German youth, who are faced with numerous socio-economic challenges that make their context vastly dissimilar to the post-Apartheid South African context, but rather to those German youth who lived in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust.
- 19.
We should note that this difficulty will vary either in kind or by degree according to the intersecting lines of one’s identity. That is, it will make a qualitative difference to this experience and to the difficulty of facing up to the ambiguity in one’s identity if one’s parents and forefathers were actively involved—that is, perpetrators of the apartheid regime—or if they were bystanders who were not actively involved but who also did not stand up against what was happening. The difficulty may also vary according to one’s generation. That is, it seems plausible to imagine that as the generational gap between myself and my forefathers (who lived during apartheid) increases, my sense of connectedness to these forefathers decreases. Indeed, Vice hints at the potential importance of this distance when she says: ‘The problem in white South Africa is not just being white but being white South African…we have lived here for generations; we identify as South African at least because we “fit” the landscape and have a history here. The fact that some feel the need to assert that they are “African” is an indication of their uncomfortable position, although perhaps younger generations will (appropriately) escape the kind of perplexity I am exploring here’ (Vice, “How Do I Live in This Strange Place”, pp. 331–332). This may also vary given the different language and situation of Afrikaans- and English-speaking white South Africans. We thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding us to include mention of this distinction; however, we believe that in order to do justice to the distinction we would be pulled too far away from the central aims of this chapter.
- 20.
L’ange, The White Africans, p. 502.
- 21.
Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness”; Hountondji, African Philosophy, and perhaps most notably in Fanon, Toward the African Revolution.
- 22.
Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 115.
- 23.
All of these comments can be found in Matthews, “Becoming African”, pp. 1–17.
- 24.
Although it is beyond the scope of the chapter to do justice to these fine distinctions, we should bear in mind that to conflate being black with being African immediately undermines the idea of a renewed and unified African identity.
- 25.
Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, p. 117.
- 26.
Biko, “White Racism and Black Consciousness”, p. 66.
- 27.
Matthews, “Becoming African”, p. 12.
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Paphitis, S., Kelland, LA. (2016). The ‘Africanness’ of White South Africans?. In: Winkler, R. (eds) Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40427-1_10
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