Racism is personal

The international outcry following the killing of George Floyd by police in the United States and the worldwide protests against anti-black racism, especially by young people, have pricked the conscience of right-thinking people everywhere. We have seen remarkable scenes of camaraderie and the toppling of statues of colonialists and those who profited from and maintained the slave trade. Such unprecedented protests under the terrible conditions wracking the globe by the COVID-19 pandemic have indelibly imprinted themselves in our minds if not in history.

The South African (SA) and continental African responses have been noticeably muted. The African continent experiences subtle but not endemic racism, and its institutional form and content have escaped racist embedding. Perhaps because of our navel-gazing occasioned by emergency health restrictions and fatigue with our own struggle with racism – despite our own spring of student discontent occasioned by the Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall campaigns – and our colossal failure to come to terms with the public and private racism?

Yet, there was immediate intellectual criticism of a woefully unscientific ‘Commentary’ by a noted academic at the University of Cape Town (UCT), our oldest university. Strikingly, a coterie of UCT academics – unable to reflect on their ossified self-righteousness and sense of superiority – used race-baiting, and true to form trotted out a couple of black academics who proclaimed on behalf of all other blacks that they were not offended. Malcolm X called such persons ‘field n. . .s’ and Steve Biko and many of us would have called them ‘non-whites’, ¹ who uncritically locate their entire raison d’être externally to their very essence. What quickly emerged was an attack on the black academic association for being from the humanities, faceless, anti-white, and so on, while patently ignoring those factors that constrain black academics to be so wary of the status quo that they actually chose to be anonymous in an open democratic era. Fear is still an important determinant in SA politics, ² and shockingly in the academy, which should epitomise the precepts of our lofty Constitution and its much-vaunted freedoms!

Closer to home, racism continues to afflict us in SA psychology. Arising from the ashes of the apartheid formations, the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA) was confronted with racism from its Inaugural Congress in January 1994. The academy which comprised overwhelmingly white racial exclusivists – actually, it still remains white dominated, even when blacks are ‘let in’ – decided not to encourage their students to join the anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-sectarian professional society that sought to create a home for all psychologists, and which remediated the nefarious previous involvement with apartheid.

Although PsySSA cleared the way for eventual acceptance of psychology as a scarce and priority profession by the newly-created democratic state and the same public service salary structure as the medical and dental professions, there was resentment and a hankering after the old days. Most grand-parented white psychologists in the educational sector and those in the health and other sectors left for private practice, denuding the ability of the democratic state to provide patently needed psychological services to those who were previously underserved, but who are the majority and poor.

Yet the PsySSA leadership, who happened to be significantly black, actively restored our return to psychology internationally, and tended to work with previous oppressors. We successfully hosted the most representative International Congress of Psychology, going out of our way to include even those who chose to break away because of their resistance to black leadership and the founding principles articulated in the PsySSA constitution.

The same undercurrents of white privilege, entitlement, and rage formed the Psychology Action Group to undermine the first black-led Professional Board for Psychology and whose recent incarnation was so divisive, seeking to restore some bygone glory, perhaps past hegemony. This infantile solipsist regression has fomented an adversarial trajectory that harms all of us, and destroys public trust in the discipline. There seems to be nary a care for the demographics of a largely white profession 26 years after supposed equality, wrought through long and painful struggle against exclusion of the black majority from the profession.

There are numerous significant incidents by recidivist racists which have tended to shape the cementation of their anachronistic thought and which has deleteriously impacted our profession, but this is not the space to dwell on this minority within a minority. What we need is for those who eschew denialism of their own acts of omission or commission to stand up and be counted. Out those who resort to racism, yet benefit from what the rest of us – who have really sacrificed to bring psychology to where it is in our profoundly fractured society – have created for them, through the trauma of the failed Truth and Reconciliation Commission process and constantly fighting narrow ethnic or melanin advantage, which essentially is what white othering is about. All the reasoned arguments for inclusivity, equality and unity of purpose will continue to fall on deaf ears unless we acknowledge the need to be better than the past that continues to draw us backwards.

We can deal with structural racism, but unless the personal racism is dealt with, openly and without rancour, we will be the laggards in transformation. Remember that we were the first learned society to lead the way some 3 months before the advent of democracy. Can there ever be over-reaction from those who have endured and who may still experience racism? Such ineffable trauma is perhaps expressed by the dictum ‘We know it when we experience it’ ³ which overt and covert perpetrators obstinately refuse to acknowledge. Then too, as the COVID-19 virus is hosted in individuals, racism spreads, and finds succour in the public.

So, racism is personal, very personal, and we must get over ourselves and stop the spread of this virus to realise the quest for our common humanity.