Ruptures in the Rainbow Nation

Abstract

Racially diverse schools are often presented as places where students can learn to challenge racist discourse and practice. Yet there are a variety of processes through which such schools reproduce the very hierarchies they are meant to dismantle. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork in two racially diverse South African high schools, I add to the literature by analyzing moments that threatened to undermine harmonious race relations. First, I focus on racially charged interpersonal incidents at school. Second, I examine how teachers dealt with topics of racial inequality that emerged in the context of the formal curriculum. School personnel addressed these challenges in ways that hindered discussions of interpersonal and structural racism. A normative climate limited students’ abilities to label racially charged incidents as racist. Further, teachers managed potentially conflictual classroom dynamics by downplaying the salience of contemporary racial stratification. I discuss the implications of these findings for scholarship on racial inequality in racially diverse schools.

Keywords

race inequality history education racism affirmative action humor South Africa

Racially diverse schools are often presented as places where young people can learn to challenge racist discourse and practice (see Lewis, Diamond, and Forman 2015). Yet a growing body of scholarship documents how such spaces reproduce the very hierarchies they are meant to dismantle. Although overt racist practices continue to exist in such schools, in the contemporary era, racial boundaries and hierarchies are more often taught and reinforced through more subtle, and oftentimes apparently race-neutral, practices.

Numerous scholars have documented these processes, pointing to the role of practices such as tracking (Lewis et al. 2015; Tyson 2011), targeted interventions (Ispa-Landa 2013; Ispa-Landa and Conwell 2015), discipline (Morris 2005), and a general aversion to talking about race (Lewis 2003; Pollock 2004). Other work has identified how mismatches between the dominant cultural capital valued by schools and the nondominant cultural capital acquired by black children at home reinforce racial boundaries in schools (Carter 2005; Lewis 2003). Uniting these studies is a view that by failing to acknowledge the structural realities of racially ordered societies, schools function as institutions that reproduce, rather than dismantle, racial hierarchies.

I add to this literature by documenting moments when schools are forced to confront these realities. I draw on data from a larger project that investigates how the history of apartheid is taught in South African schools. Data collection included five months of daily observations in 17 history classrooms and 170 interviews with students (N = 160) and teachers (N = 10). I examine how teachers and students responded to interpersonal racism on school grounds and how they discussed broader structures of racial inequality within the context of the formal curriculum. Elsewhere, I document how educators taught about apartheid in ways that limit the salience of the past for young people’s understandings of the present (Teeger 2014); here, I focus on moments that threatened to destabilize this constructed boundary between past and present.

First, I focus on racially charged interpersonal incidents between teachers and students and among students themselves. On the one hand, most students were reticent to label these incidents as racist and instead often described them as jokes. On the other hand, an analysis of responses given by the few students who refused to characterize these incidents as humorous reveals a strong normative climate, reinforced by the schools’ disciplinary practices, that hindered claims of racism.

Second, I examine how schools transmitted lessons about broader structures of racialized inequality. Although teachers worked to construct a sense of rupture between the country’s apartheid past and the present, black students, in particular, sometimes inserted the contemporary racial order back into classroom conversations by commenting on enduring racial inequality. The conversations that ensued highlighted divisions between students of different races and threatened to disrupt harmonious classroom relations. Teachers restored order to their classrooms by downplaying the salience of contemporary racial inequality.

In outlining these processes, I make three interrelated contributions to literature on the reproduction of racial boundaries and hierarchies in schools. First, I point to the importance of examining moments where topics usually ignored in classroom conversations nonetheless enter schools. Second, I document how a school’s normative climate can hinder students’ willingness and ability to identify interpersonal racism, and I point specifically to the role of humor in muting conversations about racism and maintaining power relations. Third, I add to our knowledge of how schools structure unequal experiences for young people within school grounds by privileging and validating the experiences and perceptions of dominant groups.

Dealing with Racism in Schools

In analyzing racial orders (Omi and Winant 1994), scholars point to multiple dimensions of racism, often distinguishing between its interpersonal and structural (or institutional) manifestations (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009; Waters 1999). Waters (1999:153) defines structural racism as “blocked mobility for blacks … and a hierarchy in which whites have political and economic power.” Interpersonal racism, while informed by structural racism, manifests in everyday interactions (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009). These interactions include blatant and explicit acts of discrimination and prejudice, or what scholars term “old fashioned” (Waters 1999) or “Jim Crow” (Bonilla-Silva 2014) racism. More often, however, in the contemporary era, interpersonal racism is expressed in more “subtle” (Essed 1991; Waters 1999) and “covert” (Desmond and Emirbayer 2009) ways. Covert forms of racism—such as heightened surveillance of black customers in retail spaces (Pittman 2012) or employers’ failure to hire minority applicants (Pager, Western, and Bonikowski 2009)—allow “the perpetrator [to] deny any racial animosity and claim their behavior is due to other considerations” (Waters 1999:164).

Schools are often viewed as key institutions in the reproduction of structural racism. Focusing on racial inequalities in achievement and attainment (see Brint 2013; Stevens 2008), literature in the sociology of education documents the role of schooling in reproducing racially ordered societies. However, schools not only function as institutions that produce racial disparities in academic and market outcomes. Through formal and hidden curricula, they also teach young people lessons about broader structures of social inequality. In addition, for many young people, schools are the first institutions where they interact with people of different races (Lewis 2003). As such, they are key sites for examining how individuals learn to identify, confront, and respond to interpersonal racism.

Interpersonal Racism

In a review of literature on young people’s perceptions of discrimination, Brown (2008:133) notes that “remarkably little is known about how and when children perceive discrimination.” Studies suggest that many children are aware of discrimination (e.g., Fisher, Wallace, and Fenton 2000), but less attention has been paid to the “who, what, when, and where” questions that help us understand “which children are more likely to perceive a specific act to be discriminatory and which situations facilitate those perceptions” (Brown 2008:138).

Studies focusing on the maintenance of racial boundaries in schools offer insights that help answer these questions. For example, Pollock (2004) documents how educators may resist talking about race at all, especially in situations where they could be accused of being prejudiced or responsible for racial disparities in achievement. Van Ausdale and Feagin (2001) similarly demonstrate that, while children as young as three years can express racist sentiments, educators often deny that young children can engage in racist acts. When confronted with evidence to the contrary, they insist that these behaviors were not learned at school. As Lewis (2003:191) notes, teachers are often motivated by their desire to view schools as “places that are liberating and empowering” where “race [does] not matter.” However, in failing to talk about race and racism in schools, teachers do not make racial inequalities disappear. Instead, they often perpetuate these very inequalities. For instance, by failing to talk about the link between race and achievement, teachers inadvertently allow the status quo of racial disparities to remain unchallenged (Pollock 2004).

In contexts where teachers do not talk about race and racism, young people may learn to mute their perceptions of racism at school. Understanding the situational dynamics that hinder (or enable) young people from perceiving their experiences as instances of racism is important for several reasons. As other researchers argue, schools play a role in the reproduction of inequality not only in terms of achievement and attainment but also in experience. For example, when schools reward white students’ dominant cultural capital but penalize minority students for displays of nondominant cultural capital (Carter 2005, 2012), they can create a climate where students of color feel marginalized and excluded.

I add to this literature by highlighting how schools can validate some students’ perceptions of reality and invalidate the perceptions of others, thus structuring unequal experiences for young people within school grounds. My findings reveal a strong normative climate operating in schools that discouraged students from interpreting racially charged incidents as racist. Like experiences of racism, experiences of being unsure of whether an incident is or is not racially motivated can have serious emotional and physiological consequences. A normative climate that questions the very existence of interpersonal racism may create what social psychologists call “attributional ambiguity.” Research suggests that such situations may be even more deleterious for individuals than clear-cut situations of discrimination (Salvatore and Shelton 2007). Examining how schools deal with interpersonal racism is thus of fundamental importance if we are to understand not only the perpetuation of racial boundaries and hierarchies in schools but also the possible long-term consequences of such experiences for individual health and well-being.

Structural Racism

In addition to influencing young people’s experiences of interpersonal racism, schools transmit lessons about broader structures of racialized inequality. For example, researchers note how observing racialized achievement hierarchies teaches young people to link race and achievement. Research on the effects of tracking, for instance, demonstrates how students can learn to associate academic excellence with whiteness (Tyson 2011). In a recent article, Ispa-Landa and Conwell (2015) extend this analysis by showing how targeted interventions can lead to racialized coding not only of individuals but also of schools as spaces. These studies indicate how specific policies and programs can, often unintentionally, teach young people about the racial order, where whiteness is associated with achievement at both the individual and the institutional levels.

Like lessons about interpersonal racism, these ideas about the racial ordering of people and places are often transmitted through the “hidden curriculum”—norms, values, and dispositions taught informally throughout the school day and distinguished from official curricular content (see, e.g., Bowles and Gintis 1976; Giroux and Penna 1979). The official curriculum, however, can also play an important role in teaching young people about structural racism. This is true especially for courses that deal with histories of racial and ethnic conflict. Such classes can teach lessons not only about racially oppressive pasts but also about the relevance of such pasts for the contemporary social order.

A large body of scholarship analyzing textbooks touches on this issue. These studies show that histories of racial conflict are often evaded or sanitized (e.g., Banks 1989; Weiner 2014). Less is known, however, about how such material is transmitted to young people in face-to-face settings. In a unique “ethnography of the curriculum,” Willis (1996:368; see also Epstein 2009) documents how official multicultural curricula were transmitted to students in a predominantly white school in the United States. At this school, teachers improvised on the official curriculum by trying to get students to link formal lessons about slavery to contemporary racial inequality. Despite teachers’ best intentions, students failed to make these connections. Willis (1996:377) argues that formal lessons framed slavery as a moral problem rather than a political one, which led students to view slaveholders in morally negative terms and to focus on “an historically specific problem that has been solved rather than one example in a continuous history marked by racism and discrimination towards African Americans in US society.”

In contrast to the teachers in Willis’s (1996) study of a predominantly white school, teachers in my study worked to distance the racially oppressive apartheid past from present realities. As I argue elsewhere (Teeger 2014), the context of racially diverse schools created a variety of micro-interactional dilemmas for teachers who tried to avoid racial conflict in their classrooms by minimizing the salience of the past for the present. In this article, I examine what happened when such issues nonetheless entered classroom discussions.

Drawing on insights from literature on the perpetuation of racial boundaries and hierarchies in schools, I examine moments when school personnel were forced to confront issues of interpersonal and structural racism. I build on this literature by focusing on the South African case study—a country that abolished de jure racial segregation only two decades ago but that is often held up as a model of racial reconciliation (see Minow 1998).

Desegregation of South African Schools

In 1948, apartheid (literally, separateness) was introduced as official state policy in South Africa. This signaled the intensification and codification of existing racist policies. A de jure racial hierarchy divided the population into four groups: whites, Indians, coloureds, and black Africans.¹ Rights and benefits were allocated according to this hierarchy, with whites being most advantaged and black Africans being most disadvantaged. As with every aspect of social, political, and economic life under apartheid, education was racially stratified. Separate educational departments governed schools for each of the four racial groups. Children attending these racially segregated schools learned from different curricula and received unequal distributions of resources.

Internal resistance to apartheid and international sanctions led many in the apartheid regime to believe the system was economically irrational and practically unsustainable. Secret talks between the apartheid government and members of the African National Congress led to the historic announcement in Parliament in 1990 that the ban on resistance organizations was lifted and political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, would be freed. A series of negotiations followed that led to the first democratic elections of 1994, when Mandela was elected president.

During the negotiations period (1990 to 1994), apartheid’s racist laws began to be struck off the books. In 1992, the state declared that all white schools would automatically be given “Model-C” status. This referred to a desegregation model that was voluntarily taken up in 1990 by some white schools when they were given the option to officially enroll black students, so long as—among other things—at least 51 percent of their student body remained white (Carrim and Soudien 1999).²

The provision for Model-C schools was revoked by the 1996 South African Schools Act. In accordance with the constitution, the act declared that schools had to open their admissions to all. In spite of this law, school desegregation in South Africa has been uneven. While African, coloured, and Indian students have moved into formerly white schools, the reverse flow has not happened (Soudien 2012).

The act allows schools to supplement state funds by levying fees, which has meant schools in advantaged areas have been able to perpetuate their privileged position. This has resulted in lower levels of white flight from the public school sector than might have been anticipated (Fiske and Ladd 2004). In addition to upwardly mobile black families who send their children to these schools, provisions in the act that prevent schools from turning students away if their parents/guardians cannot pay fees have led to increasing socioeconomic diversity in these schools. Furthermore, because the act defines a school’s catchment area based on parents’/guardians’ place of residence or employment, children of domestic workers are entitled to enroll in public schools in wealthy residential areas. These trends have resulted in the racial and socioeconomic desegregation not of the entire school system but of a small group of top-performing former Model-C schools.

Describing these former Model-C schools, Bloch (2009:148) argues that they present “an important testing ground for new ideas in the battle for transformation” and are “sites of excellent practice where many of the goals of the South African nation can be realised.” Nonetheless, research on these schools indicates that they have adopted a predominantly “assimilationist model” (Soudien 2012) and that they lack a sense of “cultural flexibility” (Carter 2012). Like their U.S. counterparts, desegregated South African schools tend to value the dominant cultural capital that white students bring from home and often end up reinforcing, rather than dismantling, racial boundaries and hierarchies (Carter 2012; Soudien 2012).

Data and Methods

Case Selection

Data come from a larger research project that examines how South Africans are grappling with their apartheid past in the educational system. I focus on two top-performing former Model-C schools—Roxbridge and Glenville High³—because, today, these are the most racially and socioeconomically diverse schools in the country (see Dolby 2001; Soudien 2012) and are often presented as models for transformation in postapartheid South Africa (Bloch 2009). I chose to focus on two similar schools in order to identify the specific pedagogical practices that facilitated particular understandings of history among students. I sampled schools in a way that would hold constant certain salient dimensions of schooling (e.g., school type and performance on standardized tests). In spite of the fact that the state offers only vague guidelines in terms of curricular content and neither school used a textbook, both schools taught about apartheid in surprisingly similar ways (Teeger 2014).

Still, there were important differences between the schools. First, 50 percent of the students at Roxbridge were white, compared with only 5 percent of the students at Glenville. Table 1 describes the racial composition of the schools.

Table 1.

Schools by Race of Students (percentages).

School	African	Coloured	Indian	White
Glenville	60	5	30	5
Roxbridge	40	5	5	50

Second, Glenville evinced a type of internal segregation that Roxbridge did not. In particular, students at Glenville were divided into classes based on their choice of second language: Afrikaans or Zulu. The Afrikaans classes were racially diverse, but the Zulu classes were composed entirely of black African students and, as I will show, were subject to particular disciplinary practices. At Roxbridge, all students took Afrikaans as their second language.

I concentrated on the ninth grade, when students across the country learn about apartheid for the first time in a systematic way through the educational system. My study period captured a unique moment in South African history: students who were in the ninth grade (age 14 to 15) when I collected my data (2010 to 2011) were the first generation born into democracy. In South Africa, this generation is known as the “born frees.” Adding to our knowledge of racial inequality in the democratic era, I document how South Africa’s “born frees” were taught to ignore the interpersonal and structural racism that have persisted in the era of civil liberties.

Data Collection

In each school, I conducted daily observations in ninth-grade history classes for the duration of the apartheid section (approximately 400 hours of formal observations across 17 distinct classrooms). During my formal observations, I usually sat at the back of the classroom and typed notes on my laptop. In taking my notes, I tried to capture—verbatim—everything that was said by teachers and students. I also took notes on things I observed as students were entering and exiting classrooms and on my own impressions of what was occurring in classrooms. I made additional notes of informal conversations and observations that I conducted during the school day as I waited between history classes.

I conducted formal, semistructured interviews with a randomly selected sample of students, stratified by race and sex (N = 160).⁴ The response rate from students was 82.5 percent. I also conducted formal semistructured interviews with all ninth-grade history teachers in both schools (N = 10). Tables 2 and 3 describe the samples.

Table 2.

Characteristics of Teachers.

Teacher	Sex	School	Race	First language	Age
Mr. Lane	M	Glenville	White	English	53
Mr. Pretorius	M	Glenville	White	Afrikaans	26
Ms. Prescott	F	Glenville	White	English	25
Ms. Mokoena	F	Glenville	African	Sesotho	41
Ms. Ndlovu	F	Glenville	African	IsiNdebele	39
Ms. Viljoen	F	Roxbridge	White	Afrikaans	42
Ms. Green	F	Roxbridge	White	English	26
Ms. Roux	F	Roxbridge	White	Afrikaans	27
Ms. Devin	F	Roxbridge	White	English	25
Ms. Lesley	F	Roxbridge	White	English	34

Table 3.

Characteristics of Students.

Group	Glenville	Roxbridge	Total
African	28	18	46
Biracial/Mixed	5	0	5
Coloured	19	18	37
Indian	20	17	37
White	16	19	35
Total	88	72	160

My interviews with teachers addressed topics related to the history curriculum as well as their general assessment of the racial dynamics in their schools. In interviews with students, I asked questions about their friendship groups, their national and racial identities, and their experiences of race and racism inside and outside of school as well as a battery of questions related to their knowledge of South African history and their assessment of the history curriculum. Interviews all followed the same basic format, although I allowed respondents to direct the conversation when they brought up issues not directly covered in my interview protocol. Interviews lasted an average of one hour. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.

Data Analysis

I analyzed my field notes and interview transcripts using descriptive and analytic codes (see Miles and Huberman 1994). Utilizing the qualitative data analysis software program, Atlas.ti, I followed an inductive grounded theory approach in analyzing the data (see Charmaz 2006). In the first round of coding, I applied descriptive codes to the data and wrote detailed memos about emerging themes. In the second round of coding, I applied analytic codes developed from the first round of analysis. For example, in the first round of coding, I applied a code “RACE/RACISM” to descriptions of the operation of race and racism in contemporary South Africa. In the second round of coding, I applied additional codes to these data that labeled the particular forms of racism being described. Two codes emerged prominently: “RACISM_JOKES” and “RACISM_NOT.” The first refers to descriptions of racially coded incidents as having a humorous component. The second refers to instances where (1) respondents began by describing an incident as racist but then explained why their initial assessment was incorrect or (2) the incidents struck me as examples of racism but respondents explicitly described them as not being about race. These data form the core of my analysis of responses to interpersonal racism at school. A third code, “RACISM_BEE,” provides much of the data for the discussion on how schools addressed broader structural racism. This code refers to discussions of whether Black Economic Empowerment (BEE; affirmative action) policies constitute “reverse racism.”

Rainbow Nation Schools?

During the South African transition to democracy, “The Rainbow Nation”—a phrase coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu—quickly gained currency as a metaphor to describe the New South Africa. This image, of a country united in its diversity, remains powerful in the postapartheid era (Kiguwa 2006), belied as it is by the realities of persistent interpersonal and structural racism in the society. Surveys reveal, for example, that rates of socializing across racial groups remain low (Wale 2013), residential segregation remains high (Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown 2011), and whites earn, on average, six times more than black Africans (Census 2011). However, as institutions that uniquely reflect the diversity of the South African population, the former Model-C schools that I study presented themselves as ideal spaces of “Rainbow Nationalism” in the postapartheid era.

In both schools, teachers promoted the idea that their schools were spaces of diversity, often contrasting their students’ experiences to their own schooling experiences under apartheid. For example, Ms. Roux (white, Roxbridge) said, “If I look at my kids interacting with one another, sometimes I wish I had it when I was … in school. … Sometimes I actually envy them because they get to learn so many different cultures than I had the opportunity to.”

Ms. Ndlovu (African, Glenville) made a similar point about the diversity of her school in a class discussion about the Freedom Charter.⁵ Ms. Ndlovu read out one of the principles of the charter: “The doors of learning shall be opened.” After doing so, she projected a picture of a multiracial group of students at Glenville onto the screen in her classroom. She then noted, “You can see there is diversity there. There are coloureds and Indians and black and white. … We have got our white boy [Nathan Meyer], and our [Abrahams] sisters [who are coloured], and our black students [like Bongani], and our Indian boys. So multiracial. That is [Glenville].”

Students also characterized their experiences with diversity as definitive of what it means to them to be South Africans. When I asked students to tell me what being South African means to them, 63.6 percent said it meant living in a diverse society where one can interact and socialize across racial lines. Students often linked their descriptions of diversity as a national characteristic with their experiences at school. Madison (white, Glenville), for example, explained that “[being South African] makes me proud because we’ve been through so much with everything and today we can still sit together in a class, all mixed races.”

Students’ views on diversity sometimes turned to color-blindness, with respondents asserting the value of having different races at school while simultaneously arguing that race does not matter. When I asked Njabulo (African, Roxbridge) what being South African means to him, he celebrated the country’s diversity, focusing on the fact that South Africa recognizes 11 official languages. I asked him to elaborate more by telling me how he would describe the country to someone who had never been there. He responded as follows:

I think I’d say first … that we don’t look at race that much. … Race is out of the picture now.

Can you talk a bit more about this thing of race being out of the picture, what does that mean?

… For instance if you look out the window it’s not just black people playing netball or white people, it’s every race because we see everybody as one big family now. … Miss [Smith] used to say last year … “The class is not separated as black, white, coloured, Indian. We’re just all together. Because, once you walk through the door, it’s no more ‘I’m black,’ ‘I’m white,’ ‘I’m coloured,’ it’s all about ‘We’re here together as a school and we’ll be one body.’”

As these quotations illustrate, in constructing their explanations of South African identity, students and teachers often built an implicit comparison to a past where race was a salient boundary. Nonetheless, in their interviews with me, teachers spoke about what they believed to be the potentially divisive ideas that students brought from home into classroom discussions. Ms. Viljoen (white, Roxbridge), for example, began her interview by telling me that “these kids all went to nursery schools already racially mixed, so it’s just not that big a deal for them anymore,” but later she pointed to racist ideas that white children bring from home:

Most people’s racism … most of it comes from home. [They] don’t make a racist remark necessarily. … What they do is [they say things like], “I won’t be able to get a job in South Africa because I’m white.” … They don’t come saying “I hate [other races].” The things that they say, you can hear that’s the preconceived idea that comes from home.

Other teachers discussed their perceptions of the types of ideas black students brought from home. Mr. Lane (white, Glenville) described his black students as follows:

[Vuyo’s] mother is a maid, [Lebo’s] mom’s a maid. I think [Cindy’s] mom is a maid. … [Mpho’s] mother, I don’t think even works. Poverty … that’s the context that a lot of these kids are coming [from] into [school]. … A lot of them are still very, very lost and I think that might be because of the influence of their parents and their grandparents. … All those things are going to impact on these kids at a certain level and then it’s us against them, you know, it’s us against them.

In what way?

The blacks against the whites.

Teachers, as these quotations themselves illustrate, also brought their own ideas about race and redress into school. For example, Ms. Viljoen, quoted above, told me later in the interview that although BEE policies were good in theory, they were being implemented incorrectly. Mr. Pretorius (Glenville, white), on the other hand, argued that, as a white man, he was being discriminated against in the new dispensation. In so doing, he espoused the very ideas that Ms. Viljoen had characterized as racist when describing her white students.

How did the ideas that students and teachers brought with them into school affect race relations? Did these ideas undermine images that framed schools as microcosms of the Rainbow Nation? In trying to navigate these racial issues, teachers typically opted for a conservative approach. They attempted to suppress the potential for racial discord by muting discussions of interpersonal and structural racism. Because of power differentials, most of the constraints were placed on black students whose lived realities exposed them to the effects of both types of racism.

Interpersonal Racism

In my interviews with students, I was struck by the fact that they almost uniformly told me they had never experienced racism, despite the fact that many described incidents that I coded as racist. Students would tell me that there was no “real racism” at school and that racial incidents were usually “a joke.” When I asked Charlene (coloured, Glenville) whether there was racism at school, she answered, “I think there is but … when they do say like a racist remark, they mean it in a joke or something like that.” Sizwe (African, Glenville) explained that “there are a few racial jokes here and there but it’s nothing serious. It’s nothing to offend anybody.”

Students of all races understood the articulation of racial stereotypes as humorous, and they told me that every racial group at school makes racial jokes at the expense of other groups. In fact, several students presented this ability to joke racially as a positive part of what it means to live in postapartheid South Africa. Pravin (Indian, Glenville), for example, answered my question about what being South African means to him as follows:

It’s like just mixing with any race, like being open to people. Not like being like to yourself and closed.

And is that what makes South Africa different from other countries?

Yes.

How?

Because … we’re like with all our races and we can like make fun of each other but we still stick together. It’s like even us, like in class, we always tease each other about races [sic] but we’re still friends. That stuff.

It is difficult to know the intentions of students who made these jokes. In their descriptions, students presented themselves as a friendly Rainbow Nation able to make racial jokes without malice. Yet as I walked through the school grounds during recess, I saw students sitting mostly in racially segregated groups. In interviews, when I asked students to name their two or three closest friends, almost everyone nominated same-race peers. The reality of social segregation by race belied notions of a tightly knit multiracial environment.

My ethnographic observations focused primarily on what was occurring in classrooms, and I was not privy to the informal joking that happened between students outside of the formal space of classroom discussions. When racial jokes did emerge during my classroom observations, they were usually initiated by teachers. Students almost always laughed along. For example, Mr. Lane (white, Glenville) began a discussion of the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP)—which outlined South Africa’s socioeconomic policies during the Mandela presidency—by stating that RDP stood for “The Revenge of the Dark People.” All the students in his class laughed. This reflected a trend in my field notes, where I usually noted, “all students are laughing.” On occasion, however, I noted things like “everyone is laughing except for one black student.”

In my interviews, I encountered a small minority of students who did not interpret racial incidents as jokes. Like Garfinkel’s (1984) experiments that showed how norms go mostly undetected until they are violated, these students’ descriptions revealed the normative climate in schools that hindered claims about interpersonal racism. Kagiso (African, Roxbridge), for example, explained how other students’ insistence that they were only joking left him with few options but to ignore racist incidents:

I hear people … just make snappy comments about things like that, that black people this and that. For instance, like saying black people can’t swim and stuff like that.

They’ll just say things like that in class?

Ja [yes].

If you heard that, what would you do?

I used to tell them to stop it, but then, right now, I just ignore it and just carry on doing what I do.

Why?

Well it didn’t help because they’re in a crowd. They make jokes and then everyone’s laughing and you just go, [you’re] one person, and [you] say, “Don’t make jokes like that.” And they say, “We’re just trying to have a good time.” So I’m just avoiding it, staying away from those people that are making those jokes and [I] just do what I do.

Other students noted that because they had a difficult time discerning whether the speaker was serious or joking, they went along with the supposed joke. Aiden (coloured, Roxbridge) explained,

The New South Africa it’s a lot of a joke. … [But] I can’t differentiate between serious and joking. …

So what do you mean when you say that you can’t tell the difference?

Like the way people say it. Like they won’t say it like in a serious face, they’ll do it with a joke, with a smile. So it’s kind of hard to differentiate if it’s given directly as an insult or if it’s just a play, joking thing.

Okay. So you think sometimes people could be expressing racist views but they say it like in a joke?

In a jokish way like with a smile or a little laugh afterwards, ja.

Okay. And is there no way to tell? …

No, like you kind of laugh with it. It’s like it’s kind of a jokish thing. You can’t say if it’s true or not.

It is difficult to know whether the majority of black students really interpreted these incidents as jokes or whether they felt compelled to offer this interpretation. What is clear is that the norm in both schools was to frame these types of incidents as humorous. It was also clear that there were penalties for coding incidents as racist. Students at Roxbridge told me they could be “referred for racism” if they were accused—or accused others—of being racist. Students who were found to have falsely accused others of racism could face disciplinary action in the form of demerits. Taking racist incidents to teachers and administrators becomes risky in this context. Students at Glenville did not use the term “being referred for racism,” but they too told me that teachers did not like it if students “played the race card.” For black students, interpreting racially charged incidents and comments as jokes may have allowed them to avoid the risk of having their claims disregarded while still “saving face” (Goffman 1955).

In a context where both teachers and students laugh at racially charged incidents, and where the potential for disciplinary action exists for those who refuse to go along with the joke, taking things too seriously is risky. In addition to coding remarks by other students as humorous, students constructed accusations of racism in a jovial manner. Leo (white, Glenville) explained,

If [a black student] does something wrong in class and the teacher says something, one of the students in our class always says, “apartheid” and he walks out [laughs]. …

Oh okay. And do they say it to the teacher?

Ja, they say it to the teacher as well.

And what does the teacher say?

The teachers, they mainly take it as a joke.

Oh okay.

It is actually meant as a joke.

Sebastian (white, Roxbridge) explained that teachers are often racist in class—including when they make racial jokes. Black students, he said, accuse teachers of racism often, but they do so behind the teachers’ backs. When I asked him whether students would ever be believed if they formally accused a teacher of being racist, Sebastian indicated that students would need corroborating evidence. In a context where the normative framework is to avoid attributing seriousness to racial incidents, such evidence would likely be difficult to find:

Have you ever heard of teachers being accused of being racist?

Yes. … Mostly, in this school, [it’s] behind the teachers’ backs. When you’re walking in the corridor, you can hear people saying, “Yoh, that teacher is racist because she chose her over him,” and “Because he’s black.” …

And do you think the teachers ever are really racist?

Sometimes. Generally no, I don’t think so but sometimes things do get to get a bit overboard. …

So like what kinds of things would a teacher do that would be really racist?

Like they’d rather pick the white child instead of the black. If there was a racist joke [they’d] laugh at it and then would like continue with the joke onwards, and … [that can] make the child uncomfortable. I’ve heard of one case where the teacher was picking on a black child because of being black to a point where the child dropped the subject. …

Would a learner⁶ be believed if they were accusing a teacher of being racist do you think?

It all depends if they have like people with them to back them up and say, “Yes, this did happen.” Like if a child was accusing a teacher then I think that there would be a few more learners pulled in to talk about the situation and see if it’s true.

Only one teacher—Ms. Viljoen (white, Roxbridge)—directly addressed the issue of racial jokes in her class. Like other teachers in her school, she began the apartheid section with a discussion of stereotypes. At the conclusion of her lesson she noted, “Here’s an easy way to start changing the world one person at a time: Don’t tell a racist joke—and, if people around you do, don’t laugh. … You don’t have to fight against it and make a big scene. Just don’t laugh and don’t repeat it.”

Ms. Viljoen problematized the telling of racist jokes, but she also told her students that they “don’t have to fight against it and make a big scene.” She continued with her lesson about the small but important changes her students could make by telling them that “when someone in your class plays the race card and you think it’s not fair, say it. Say: ‘that teacher shouts at all of us’ or ‘you did do something wrong.’” Although she challenged her students about racial jokes, she also reinforced a normative climate that made it difficult for students to challenge racially charged incidents themselves.

In addition to racial jokes, black students were confronted by more explicit forms of racism. This was especially true at Glenville, where students told me of incidents where teachers told them not to “bring their ghetto behavior to school.” These comments were directed specifically at students in the Zulu classes. Zinhle recounted,

The Zulu classes were always blamed for things that the Afrikaans classes were also doing. … So it was a situation whereby you feel that “Why is it us?” … And they’re always complaining and saying like we’re bringing our ghetto behavior into the school. … [The African students doing Afrikaans] do get into trouble now and then but not as much as the Zulu—it’s always Zulu classes. Because our grade head … every assembly that we had she would shout at the Zulu classes. “Zulu classes, you’re bringing your ghetto behavior, you must go to the University of Soweto and learn hijacking” and stuff like that. So what is she trying to say about us Zulu people? That we most of the time hijack and stuff? So I took that as an offence and I got angry. But I just left her because I was like, “I can’t just stand up now when everybody’s here.”

It seemed to me that Zinhle was coding these incidents as racist. Yet earlier in the interview, when I asked her whether she had ever experienced racism or discrimination at school, she responded resolutely that she had not. I was confused about this and, toward the end of the interview, I returned to this incident and asked her whether she thought of it as a form of discrimination. She responded as follows:

I actually do think of that as discrimination against the people that do Zulu. … In the beginning I saw it as a racist issue because it’s only Africans that are doing Zulu. … But then as time went by I thought about it and I was like, “No, but there’s some people who do Afrikaans that are Africans but don’t get as much punishment as we got as Zulu people.”

Students in my interviews often did a lot of work to explain to me why apparently racist incidents were not really about race. Like Zinhle, they often explained that this was because not all black students received the same treatment. Racially loaded terms like “ghetto” and “the University of Soweto,” as well as the association of blackness with criminality, were not sufficient to define these utterances as racist. Like Zinhle, students often began noting racist incidents but then quickly told me these were not actually racist.

I wondered whether my position as a white woman, roughly the same age as most of their teachers, played a role in eliciting a social desirability bias in these responses. If it did, then these data demonstrate not necessarily what black students thought about these incidents but rather how they thought they ought to explain them to white authority figures in multiracial contexts. My data suggest that black students learned not to code incidents as racist at school.

In recounting how teachers told students in the Zulu classes not to “bring their ghetto behavior to school,” Zinhle explained that she and other black students were initially upset by their treatment and viewed it as racist. The school’s response was to bring a psychologist in to talk with these students. I do not know what the psychologist discussed with them, but the very act of bringing in a mental health specialist implied that the problem lay with the students, not the institutional culture. In being sent to a psychologist when they described perceiving incidents as racist, students were taught that their perceptions were mistaken and were a reflection of a psychological and individual-level problem.

Like students who did not find racial jokes funny, students who objected to more explicit forms of racism were confronted with institutional responses that positioned them as the problem. Ignoring the realities of interpersonal racism between students and teachers, and among students themselves, does not make these incidents disappear. Instead, it creates additional burdens for black students, who not only confront racism in their daily lives but also are taught that they should not code these incidents as racist.

Structural Racism

In addition to teaching students not to take racially charged incidents too seriously, teachers also conveyed lessons that encouraged students not to think too deeply about racial inequality more broadly. The very structure of the apartheid history curriculum constructed a divide between “then” and “now,” thus limiting students’ ability to contemplate continued, but evolving, structures of racialized inequality in South Africa. A core focus of the curriculum, for example, revolved around apartheid laws. Both schools presented students with a list of laws, which students had to learn by heart. Focusing on laws that have since been repealed, teachers could construct a story of change between past and present. The economic aspects of apartheid, which undoubtedly continue to exert force on contemporary South Africa, remained muted. Furthermore, as I detail elsewhere (Teeger 2014), teachers focused on victims and perpetrators but sidelined discussions of beneficiaries. This hindered students’ ability to make claims about the continued effects of apartheid.

Nonetheless, issues of contemporary racial inequality sometimes entered classroom discussions. The debates that ensued often threatened to become heated. Educators quickly asserted their authority and sidestepped a thorough discussion of institutionalized racism. Instead, they reinforced the notion that societal racism is a thing of the past.

In Ms. Lesley’s (white, Roxbridge) class one day, a student asked whether only white men could vote during apartheid. Ms. Lesley incorrectly told her students that white women did not have the right to vote⁷ and explained that it was also a sexist society. She then asked her students, “What does sexist mean?” Joyce (African) responded, “I think it’s being unfair to the other gender.” After a brief discussion about sexism, a student interjected, saying, “I think First for Women is sexist.” Ms. Lesley explained, “Okay, does everyone know what that is? It’s an insurance company that insures only women ’cause it says they are better drivers.” Thinking about her student’s question, she continued, “Yes. That is a good argument.” Continuing with her student’s logic, she asked, “So if we say First for Women is sexist, can we not say BEE is racist?” The tone of the conversation changed when Themba (African) responded, “I don’t think it is racist ’cause we were not privileged under apartheid.” Other students were visibly upset by Themba’s comment. Ms. Lesley tried to calm the situation down by saying, “Just listen [to his comments]. Everyone has a right to an opinion.” While she did not discredit Themba’s view directly, her comment did nothing to affirm it or give it credence. Instead, she took control of the conversation and authoritatively explained the purpose of BEE to her students:

So, the government’s intention in 1994 was to aid previously disadvantaged people. It included women from all races, it included Indian and coloured and black people. And they said in each company you should try [to] have a certain percentage of each race, and especially races that were not privileged before. BEE was supposed to last for 10 years ’cause they said after that it should have adjusted itself naturally. The problem is it has gone on for longer than those 10 years and there is now a lot of resistance from people going into workplaces from all races [emphasis by Ms. Lesley].

When a black student suggested the continued relevance of structural racism for contemporary South Africa, Ms. Lesley handled the potentially volatile situation by telling her students that there is resistance from “all races” to these policies. In restoring order to her classroom, she acknowledged that apartheid created disadvantages that needed to be rectified. At the same time, she minimized the enduring legacies of the past by arguing that these disparities could be addressed within 10 years. Her intervention effectively shut down the conversation and returned calm to her classroom, as she moved back to her official lesson plan.

The divisive nature of conversations about redress policies was evident in other classrooms. An interchange in Ms. Devin’s class exemplifies how quickly such discussions can open a space for white students to express racist sentiments. It also demonstrates how black students’ attempts to challenge this racism were dismissed by teachers. The burden of maintaining a sense of harmony in these multiracial schools falls on black students who, as argued before, must learn to ignore such incidents:

WHITE FEMALE:

Why does the government keep blaming the new generation for apartheid?

MS. DEVIN:

What do you mean?

WHITE FEMALE:

Say there’s a white male and he’s got eight degrees or something and here comes a whatever—

AFRICAN STUDENTS (indignantly):

A whatever?

MS. DEVIN:

You know what she means—okay, a nonwhite.

WHITE FEMALE:

—and he has no degrees and they choose him.

MS. DEVIN:

We’ve spoken of BEE before. The purpose of it is to uplift those who are disadvantaged. … [But] it will die out. I don’t know when. But you guys, you see you have opportunities. It is up to the individual. But you have to understand that for black people, it’s the first time that someone has had schooling, whereas white people have had schooling for generations. And remember, if your parents had an education that will help you. So, with your generation it will die out more and even more so with your kids.

STUDENT:

When will that first generation with educated parents be?

MS. DEVIN:

The first generation would probably be someone who is a few years younger than you.

AFRICAN MALE:

Well, it depends—

MS. DEVIN:

I don’t know how to say this so that it’s PC [politically correct], but a lot of people who are educated won’t have a child until they finish [high school] or go to university, ’cause they will prioritize education. So, if I had a child when I finished [university], it would be two now, so it wouldn’t be through the education system. But maybe when my child has gone through school it will be more fair. …

WHITE MALE:

I’m not being racist, but how did black people come along ’cause Adam and Eve were white?

MS. DEVIN:

How do you know that?

WHITE MALE:

I saw a picture.

MS. DEVIN:

Who drew that?

AFRICAN STUDENTS:

A white person.

WHITE MALE:

When Cain killed his brother, God cursed him with black skin.

MS. DEVIN:

I don’t know about that, but don’t tell anyone that story. [laughs]

WHITE MALE:

But that’s what happened.

In this classroom interchange, Ms. Devin kept order by dismissing African students’ claims that referring to blacks as “a whatever” was racist. Instead, she told her students that they knew what the white speaker meant. While sidelining the black students’ objections, Ms. Devin took the white student’s question seriously and embarked on a discussion of BEE. She noted that the policy should end within a generation, although she did acknowledge the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Her comment about educated people waiting to have children contains an implicit race and class bias. This may have allowed a white student to feel comfortable enough to take the conversation on a tangent by asking where black people came from, if Adam and Eve were white. Ms. Devin challenged her student by asking where he got that information, but the incident was dismissed with laughter as she told him not to repeat such comments. Although this laughter seemed to emanate from discomfort rather than humor, it too functioned to squash a thorough—and potentially divisive— conversation about racism.

At Glenville, Ms. Ndlovu (African) seemed unsure of how to respond to a student’s question about why, after apartheid, they are constantly being asked to note their race on official forms. Instead of answering the question, Ms. Ndlovu redirected it at me and asked for my opinion on the matter. I felt put on the spot and responded that I thought the government wanted schools, for example, to ask students about their race so they could see if things had changed in the New South Africa—to make sure, for instance, that “white schools” during apartheid were not still only white. I said the government could not know if things had changed if they did not keep this kind of information. My explanation seemed to resonate with African students in the class who immediately jumped into the conversation with comments like “to fix the past” and “for BEE.” Other students immediately disagreed, with comments such as “but now it is all equal” and “it’s going back to apartheid.” Ms. Ndlovu interjected that “it’s not going back ’cause whites are given an opportunity to go to school,” but she did not encourage her students to talk and think through their comments. Instead, she hastily brought the conversation back to her lesson plan and effectively shut down the conversation.

My response to the question, which Ms. Ndlovu unexpectedly directed my way, opened a space for African students to voice their opinions about the relevance of the past for the present. It also highlighted the potentially divisive nature of such conversations. Indeed, in analyzing my data, I wondered whether Ms. Ndlovu had tried to sidestep the controversial topic brought up by her student by asking me to address the question. Like teachers in other classrooms, she did not offer a deep interrogation of continued structures of racialized inequality. Instead, when classroom dynamics threatened to become divisive, she reasserted her authority and closed the conversation by returning to her lesson plan.

These moments—when issues of contemporary racial inequality entered classroom conversations —highlight the potentially divisive nature of discussions of enduring structures of racial stratification after apartheid. Teachers restored order in their classrooms by sidestepping and minimizing discussions of structural racism in contemporary South Africa. In doing so, they reinforced formal lessons that taught about apartheid in ways that distanced this past from young people’s lived realities. Students were taught not to think too deeply about structural and interpersonal racism.

Discussion and Conclusions

In this article, I demonstrated how students in racially diverse South African high schools were taught to ignore both interpersonal and structural racism. A normative climate operating in schools hindered students’ ability to identify, and respond to, interpersonal racism. Furthermore, the content of the formal curriculum brought up issues of broader structures of racialized inequality in contemporary South Africa. Teachers managed the potentially divisive nature of these classroom conversations by minimizing the realities of structural racism.

In documenting the processes through which young South Africans are taught to ignore both interpersonal and structural racism, I contribute to scholarship on the face-to-face enactment of racial boundaries and the perpetuation of racial hierarchies. Black students who perceived interpersonal racism were confronted with a normative climate that penalized them for labeling their experiences as such, and students who wanted to talk about structural racism found their perspectives muted in classroom discussions. In sidelining and ignoring racism inside and outside of school, educators validated some students’ perceptions of reality and invalidated the perceptions of others, thus structuring unequal experiences for young people within school grounds. Ironically, in silencing black students’ perspectives and experiences of racism, teachers could present their schools as models of diversity that transcend the racial divisions and animosities of the past. When issues of structural racism did enter classroom discussions, the ensuing conversations threatened to become heated and divisive. As managers of classroom dynamics and interactions, teachers sidestepped these conversations by downplaying the salience of racism. In this way, they maintained the myth of the Rainbow Nation, positioning racial conflict as a thing of the past.

Writing about the United States, Bonilla-Silva (2014:1) notes that racial ideology in the era of civil liberties can be characterized by a belief “that if blacks (and other minorities) would stop thinking about the past, work hard, and complain less (particularly about racial discrimination), then Americans of all hues could ‘all get along.’” Focusing on the South African case, I show how the burden of “getting along” falls on black students who learn not to speak about the interpersonal racism they experience at school or the structural racism they witness on a daily basis.

The findings of this study have four broad implications for scholarship focusing on the perpetuation of racial hierarchies in racially diverse schools. First, many scholars have documented the processes through which school policies and practices reinforce racial boundaries between students (Carter 2005, 2012; Ispa-Landa 2013; Lewis 2003; Pollock 2004; Tyson 2011). These processes often lead students of color to feel excluded from educational spaces, which they come to see as “white” (Ispa-Landa and Conwell 2015; Lewis 2003). In such contexts, where do black students turn when they experience interpersonal racism? I have described how these students may come to see avenues for expressing their grievances as blocked. In schools where both teachers and students laugh at racially charged incidents, and where accusations of racism can themselves be met with penalties, black students may learn to mute their perceptions of discrimination. Future research could examine whether similar mechanisms for the denial of interpersonal racism at school operate in other social contexts. Recent work by Carter (2012), for example, shows some striking similarities in the construction of racial boundaries in U.S. and South African schools, despite significant historical and demographic differences between the two countries. Future research could examine whether these similarities extend to the types of processes documented in this article. Are black students in racially diverse U.S. schools, for example, more likely than South African students to code the types of incidents described here as racist? What factors might explain this variation (or lack thereof)?

Second, researchers could attend specifically to the role of humor in maintaining social inequality both inside and outside of schools. In contexts where people frame racially charged incidents as jokes, objecting to such incidents becomes difficult. Humor, as I documented here, can be used as a tool to silence marginalized groups and to reproduce unequal power relations. Furthermore, a key feature of the more subtle types of racism that have consolidated following the elimination of de jure racial segregation is that individuals can often deny that their actions have any racial intent (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Waters 1999). Humor may be one mechanism through which such denial is accomplished.

Third, I demonstrated the utility of focusing on moments where issues that are usually ignored suddenly emerge in conversation. A large body of literature identifies the topics that are silenced in the official curriculum by examining what is included or excluded from history textbooks (e.g., Pavasovic-Trost 2014; Weiner 2014). In observing the dissemination of the official curriculum in dynamic classroom interactions, I focused on moments where issues sidelined in formal lesson plans inserted themselves into classroom discussions. These moments highlight both the potentially volatile nature of these topics and teachers’ attempts to restore order to their classrooms. This approach presents an opportunity for analyzing the conditions under which talking about issues of structural racism reinforces a generalized silence about these very issues.

Fourth, based on the data presented in this article, I suggest that the messages about racism transmitted in schools might be different from the messages students receive at home. Some white children may still be socialized into explicit forms of prejudice, the expression of which at school may cause them to be “referred for racism.” Through hidden and formal curricula, however, they may learn to rearticulate these sentiments into the more subtle expressions of racism that reinforce racial hierarchies in the era of civil liberties. For some black children, the institutional muting of discussions of racism may itself confirm messages they receive at home about the persistence of racism, as they learn at school that their experiences are not valued or validated. However, it is also possible that, at least for some black children, the messages received at school could discredit the lessons learned at home. This may be especially true in a South African context where young people are taught at school that they live in a very different world from that of their parents and where they can contrast the realities of the desegregated educational spaces in which they study to the apartheid-era segregation experienced by their parents. As time passes, future research could examine whether black children whose parents attended racially diverse schools continue to code racially charged incidents as “not really racist.”

Students in this study were indeed reticent to label racially charged events as instances of racism, and they often did a lot of interpretive work to explain to me why incidents they initially coded as racist were not really so. As I demonstrated, a normative climate questioned the very existence of interpersonal racism at school. In such a context, black students were taught to doubt and deny their perceptions of discrimination. As research on experiences of racism (Williams and Mohammed 2009) and attributional ambiguity (Salvatore and Shelton 2007) shows, these processes can have deleterious emotional and physiological effects on individual well-being. In addition, these processes structure unequal experiences for young people in desegregated educational spaces.

Furthermore, the muting of discussions of structural racism in history classrooms may have broad political consequences for social inequality. Others have argued for the importance of studying the nonacademic outcomes of schooling (e.g., Dreeben 1968). By teaching young people about the relevance (or irrelevance) of the past for contemporary inequality, history classes have the potential to influence young people’s future political behaviors. Children and adolescents are not just future workers; they are also future voters and decision makers. How they learn to understand social inequality in school has the potential to affect the types of decisions they make when they occupy these positions. By teaching young people to ignore interpersonal and structural racism, racially diverse schools may present themselves as models of transformation and forestall uncomfortable and divisive classroom dynamics. In doing so, however, they entrench racial inequality.

Research Ethics

My research protocol was reviewed and approved by the Harvard University Institutional Review Board. Teachers and parents/guardians gave their informed consent, and students gave their informed assent prior to formal interviews. Adequate steps were taken to protect participants’ confidentiality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and conversations, I thank Mary Waters, William Julius Wilson, Jocelyn Viterna, Bart Bonikowski, Kevin Lewis, Dror Cohen, Simone Ispa-Landa, Tracey Shollenberger, Cassi Pittman, Leo Wilton, Brenna Marea Powell, Amy Binder, Kammila Naidoo, Tapiwa Chagonda, Rob Warren, and the three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the University of Johannesburg’s Wednesday Seminar and at the Colloquium on Youth at Stellenbosch University.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (#1029273), by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and by the South African National Research Foundation.

Notes

Author Biography

Chana Teeger holds a National Research Foundation Innovation Postdoctoral Fellowship in the sociology department at the University of Johannesburg. She received her PhD in sociology at Harvard University. Her current research, which lies at the intersection of scholarship on race, education, inequality, and collective memory, examines how the history of apartheid is being taught to—and understood by—young South Africans.

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