Being black,middle class and the object of two gazes

Abstract

The growth of the black¹ middle class in ‘post-apartheid’² South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the hegemonic white gaze and the second is the experience of the marshalling black gaze. The complexities of occupying the positions of being black and middle class and of living with the scrutiny of two gazes concurrently, is explored. The findings suggest that the white gaze persists in seeking to negatively mark and destabilise black professionals and profiting off covert and paradoxical mobilisations of race discourses as a means of bolstering whiteness. On the other hand, the black gaze serves to police the boundaries of what acceptable blackness is. Under this gaze, the professional, black middle class is perceived as having sold out to whiteness and abandoned given conceptions of blackness. The tensions arising out of navigating these dialectical disciplining gazes suggests that this group holds the tenuous position of being corralled from the ‘outside’ and ‘inside.’ The research, however, reveals the complex ways in which racialisation continues to shape black lives alongside the less rigid identity possibilities for blackness that move beyond essentialised identity performances.

Keywords

Black middle class disciplining gazes white gaze black gaze performing blackness loosening identity

Introduction

The past two decades since democratisation have illustrated that the removal of formal institutionalised racism is insufficient for overcoming the more insidious, everyday racisms that persist today and the ways in which racialisation³ continues to shape subjectivities. In this article, we argue that the South African black middle class is corralled by competing normative discourses from whiteness on one hand and blackness on the other. While accepting that ‘race’ continues to impact the lives of the poor, we pay particular attention to the emerging black middle class’ experiences of the operation of race and racialisation in pre- and post-apartheid South Africa.

We support the need for ‘decentring and the de-essentialization of racist, ethnic, and other identities and the de-essentializing of social and institutional processes’ (Rattansi, 2005: 273) and efforts to deracialise South African discourses (see Erasmus, 2012; Maré, 2014). However, we assert that delving into the actual material effects and lived experience of black people who continue to live raced lives can expand this project. Together with Goldberg (2009) we call for a nuanced ability to hold the various, and sometimes competing, realities and positions emerging from discourses of race. We posit that racialised subjects should be exploring and engaging with issues of identity more openly and deeply precisely to challenge the apparent solidity of the effect of racialisation. To this end, we focus on the relatively new black middle class’ experiences in organisations. We speculate that their class mobility and transition into previously exclusionary spaces would provide an opportunity to explore new dimensions involved in experiences of race, racism and racialisation. We found that their new challenges centred not only on negotiating whiteness but also on new complexities in their assertions of blackness.

In this paper we borrow from Butler’s (1988) discursive dismantling of gender identities to posit that race is only real to the extent that it is performed. Following Butler (1988), we understand that racial identities are not stable identities or connected to an essence or expressions of natural, core, or inner characteristics associated with particular identities. Blackness and whiteness as identities are therefore constituted through performative acts. These performative identities are accomplished by ‘repetition of acts through time’ and historic repetition of ‘social sanction and taboo’ (Butler, 1988: 520). It is therefore regulation and reification of institutions and practices (Butler, 1990) rather than any innate biological characteristics that give rise to identity categories such as blackness and whiteness. Just as Butler (1988) and Foucault (1980) pointed out in relation to the theatrical performance of compulsory heterosexuality, we see race as performed through the process of cultivating bodies into discrete races with ‘natural’ appearances and racial dispositions. The recognition of the performative nature of race and identity open the possibility for contesting their reified status.

Our sense-making process is further framed by Iedama and Caldas-Coulthard (2008: 6) who conceive of identity thus:

Identity is realised as representational enactment (meaning), as interpersonal experience (feeling) and organized performance (acting), and as a controlled distribution (who has access to such enactment? Who are legitimate producers/consumers/overhearers, and so on of these enactments?). Identity is not beholden to one particular dimension of being, but corresponds to anything that actors (or analysts) treat as significant.

We argue that the black middle class are compelled to perform their identity in relation to established dictates of what it means to be white or black. To capture this double dimension of expectations, we turned to the established ideas around the ‘white gaze’ and then used the idea of the ‘black gaze’ to capture black-on-black surveillance. In this paper, race and class, as fissures of inequality, provide the lens to understand how the gaze of whiteness and blackness is inflected through class; and how these seek to control middle-class black people. We are mindful too, that race and class in turn intersect with gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and place in discursively constituting identities (Butler, 1990). Both race and class, inflected through other politically mobilised dimensions of difference, discipline and pressure black people to know ‘their place’ and to feel the discomfort of transgressing from what is perceived to be expected and stylised patterns (Butler, 1988) and paths of behaviour associated with being white or black.

Before turning to explore each gaze, it is important to make a note on the concept of whiteness. Like our use of the term ‘black,’ we recognise that there is no essence to whiteness and that those constructed as white are varied in their beliefs, values, outlooks, practises and class positions. Here, we use a sedimented conception of whiteness which draws attention to the historic, social, political, economic, global and local systems that have coalesced to create race-based historical and ongoing social asymmetries. Our reference to whiteness is therefore not a catch-all category under which all white people are imprisoned, but a phrase which enables us to think about systems of inequality and the pernicious effects of racism. Our conception of the ‘gaze’ is to work only with those elements of racialisation that are problematic and oppressive. While we speak of gazes, we remain conscious of the danger of fixed frames which homogenise complex and incredibly fluid phenomena.

The black middle class

There is some consensus that post-apartheid South Africa has witnessed the steadiest growth of the black middle class in the country’s history (Statistics South Africa, 2011). Ndletyana (2014) points out that the middle class makes up 17% of the population with 66% of this constituted by blacks and 34% made up of whites. In 1994, blacks constituted approximately 30% of the middle class. Despite this more than 100% growth, blacks constitute nearly 95% of the 24% unemployed South Africans and the median income of white households is up to five times more than that of black households (Presidency, 2014).

While there is no single definition of the middle class, we follow Ndletyana (2014) who states that this class neither owns the ‘means of production,’ nor does it perform manual labour. Moreover, it is not only determined by occupation and income but is also a subjective cultural phenomenon influenced by place of residence, family-life, consumption, ambition, etc. (Ndletyana, 2014). This resonates with Lopez and Weinstein (2012: 21) who view middle class as ‘a working social concept, a material experience, a political project and a cultural practice – all of which acquire meaning only within specific historical experiences and discursive conditions.’ The black middle class in South Africa occupy the paradoxical position of being part of a black majority while holding minority status in the occupational levels of the organisations within which they work. Moreover, as first-generation members of the black middle class, they continue to have close familial and cultural ties with working-class relatives and communities (Ndletyana, 2014). This results in, not only confronting potential complexities around how they relate to whiteness and blackness, but also contestations around the very notion of a black middle class.

In South Africa, Khunou and Krige (2013) highlight how race, class, gender and life trajectories intersect to determine whether individuals can self-identify as black and middle class or not. They suggest that racial economic differences, white middle-class exclusionary practices, resistance to ‘marketing labels’⁴ as well as relationships with credit and debt all influenced whether the term is accepted or not. Studies in the United States and United Kingdom have also found that self-identifying as middle class is a point of complexity and contestation for black people for various reasons (Maylor and Williams, 2011; Rollock et al., 2011; Thomas, 2015). Rollock et al. (2011) observed acceptance and hesitance in relation to occupying a particular class location. They concluded that there is no one way to be black and middle class.

Despite fitting the educational and socio-economic status position of the white middle class, black Britons do not readily accept being called middle class (Maylor and Williams, 2011). They continued to experience racist attitudes from whites in the workplace (Thomas, 2015), and were viewed by ‘white society as working-class non-achievers rather than “middle-class” academics or other professionals’ (Maylor and Williams, 2011: 350). According to Moore (2008), the popular culture of blackness in the USA is repeatedly associated with black lower-class culture which limits the possibilities of multiple ways of being. This supports the argument that the race lens inhibits class progress and the habitus of how black people occupy middle classness. Fanon (1986: 25) points out that, despite black people’s achievements and ‘the wearing of European clothes,… using European furniture and European forms of social intercourse;… using bombastic phrases in speaking or writing the European language …’, to achieve a sense of equality, he remains a ‘Negro’, ‘barred from all participation in a white world’ (Fanon, 1986: 113–114).

With the development of a class of South African black managers Modisha (2007), following Wright (1997), shows how they occupy a contradictory class location when compared to their white counterparts. Depending on their social background, it appears that there is a subset that is more likely to maintain links with their former working class communities while another group is inclined to sever ties with its communities of origin (Modisha, 2007). Raymond (1999: 109) adds an important dimension by contending that, ‘although one may move into a different economic class, the marks of earlier class experience may still remain.’ As Moore (2008) observed in the United States, in South Africa too, first-generation, black middle-class people often have lower-class relatives relying on them for help. This makes it difficult to simply dissociate oneself from a working-class identity which, as we have illustrated, is more than an economic indicator but steeped in a collective history of struggle. The divisions based on race among the working class do not simply disappear when one moves up the socio-economic register. While grappling with socio-economic changes and what it means to be newly middle class as part of their identities, blacks also have to grapple with how their identities are being shaped by particular mobilisations of whiteness and blackness in a society where racialisation remains a feature.

Eteroma (2010: 161) notes that ‘Blackness is ambiguous, partly because the Black population is not a monolith.’ While blackness is always heterogeneous and contingent on other factors and social locations, black identity is often heightened in response to whiteness. In attempting to deal with a powerful white gaze, there is a reactive need to unite, solidify and essentialise blackness as a means to counter the onslaught. Yuval-Davis (2006: 202) captures this as follows: ‘as a rule, the emotional components of people’s constructions of themselves and their identities become more central the more threatened and less secure they feel.’ The paradox is that both the white gaze and the black gaze attempt to homogenise blackness. Some forms of whiteness work to construct it as inferior and minimise it while the black gaze acts to solidify and embolden it.

The white gaze

Fanon (1986: 110) writes about his experiences in relation to the burden of living under the ‘white man’s eyes’ and the ways in which it structures the black experience. Fanon (1986: 116) claims he is ‘overdetermined from without,’ and says: ‘… I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed.’ Foucault (1995) did not necessarily have the black body in mind when he famously used the prison’s panopticon, the all-seeing watchtower that gave the illusion of total around-the-clock surveillance of the prison population to illustrate how modern power operates to control and maintain hegemonic power and social asymmetries. However, several authors rely on his work in their conceptualisation of the white gaze and its impact on blackness. For Nielsen (2011: 368):

The white gaze functions similarly to the panoptic surveillance with blackness being essentialized via authoritative discourses, legal injunctions, and the establishment of various socio-political apparatuses and practices. These ensure that the asymmetrical power relations remain one-sided and fixed.

The preceding operations of the white gaze have relevance in the South African scenario as apartheid-defined legislative, structural and relational practices are re-evaluated and unbundled and as whites are experiencing black entry into their world as a threat to their privilege, power and dominance (Ramphele, 2008; Stewart, 1996). Jungkunz and White (2013: 446) note:

In a racially unstable society where whites are about to lose their dominance in numbers, and fear losing it in politics and economics, the need to have the threatening other always in sight is paramount.

Reviewing the literature on the white gaze, we identify three ways in which the operation of the white gaze can be related to the South African experience. Firstly, the white gaze arises in the white unconscious as inscribed racialised discourses that control, inferiorise and negate blackness (Fiske, 1998; Jungkunz and White, 2013; Nielsen, 2011; Yancy, 2013). Reflecting on Trayvon Martin’s murder, Yancy (2013: np) says that the white gaze commits an ‘epistemic violence,’ causing ‘bodily stress’ and a ‘deep existential anxiety’ as it profiles the black body as ‘different, deviant, ersatz,’ making it by its mere fact of being, ‘an ontological crime.’ As white political hegemony is challenged in South Africa, the white gaze seeks to discipline black people reminding them that, despite democracy and increasing black mobility, people have in fact not really escaped white contestation. It is the controlling white gaze that is the constant reminder that the previous terms of marginalisation are not easy to erase.

Secondly, as the white gaze controls and inferiorises, it simultaneously denies and protects white privilege. Whiteness claims ignorance, colour-blindness and therefore non-intentionality around racist utterances or behaviours and, thus, in a politically correct way it enforces contemporary racism without taking responsibility for it (Jungkunz and White, 2013). Mills (1997: 18–19) refers to a non-accidental ‘epistemology of ignorance’ that allows ‘white misunderstanding, evasion and self-deception on matters related to race’ so that ‘structured blindness’ continues to operate to maintain white hegemony. This relieves whiteness from being the object of enquiry or from questioning or problematising itself (Jungkunz and White, 2013). Fiske (1998: 70) describes this as a ‘motivated blindness’ that produces a ‘non-racist racism’ under highly visible structures of democracy that serve to ‘mask totalitarian undercurrents’ or more explicitly white hegemony as a totalitarian undercurrent. We have to lay bare the ways in which white dominance and victimhood are simultaneously sustained despite the political and, to a lesser extent, the economic shifts in South Africa and the ways in which they then impact black agency.

A third operation of the white gaze relates to Foucault’s (1995: 203) assertion that:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

The internalisation of the white gaze and the resultant black self-disciplining may shed light on the continuity between apartheid and post-apartheid white hegemony. Biko (1996) argued that, during apartheid, the totality of white power, underpinned by white psychological and physical violence had the effect of occupying the mind of the oppressor and rendering the oppressed no real threat. For him, opposition required a break with feelings of fear and psychological inferiority, re-instilling black pride and a rejection of white societal norms. This applied particularly to the aspirant black middle class whom he believed fell prey to close association and identification with white society (Biko, 1996). As part of a developing democracy, the latent power of the white gaze, and the extent to which it continues to benefit from black self-disciplining and internalised negative messaging, is yet to be fully dismantled.

We are, however, conscious of the need to keep the blind spots of Foucault’s panopticon in perspective. For instance, the way in which its gaze is one-sided and refuses to see other multiple realities, is problematic. We know this because race is lived, challenged, changing and inhabited in multiple ways that are performed for, against and despite, the panopticon vision of the white gaze. Even during apartheid, history is replete with examples of the defiance of the white gaze (Biko, 1996; Canham, in press). Possibilities to demobilise the white gaze have increased exponentially in post-apartheid South Africa. The instability of race as a category has itself undermined the white gaze. Moore (2008) suggests that it is moot to debate the importance of race over class as the more productive project is to study their intersection and consequences of these in various contexts. This is important because an argument in favour of race or class is fraught with the danger of essentialising and imbuing them with a reality beyond their social construction.

The black gaze

Taking account of the blind spots, our reference to the black gaze should be understood in relation to Foucault’s notion of a gaze, which seeks to discipline the object of its attention with the accompanying effect of one’s internalisation of the norms of the one who gazes. Here the black gaze does not look back at whiteness; instead it is a form of surveillance and disciplining that seeks to marshal certain forms of blackness. It monitors the transgression of class boundaries and established and accepted norms of black behaviour. It seeks black uniformity and loyalty to black disadvantage or a black working-class identity. Fanon (1986) alluded to this in his discussion of how black people who left Martinique to study in France were judged and faced contempt on their return. He writes:

And if the newcomer soon gets the floor, it is because they were waiting for him. First of all, to observe his manner: The slightest departure is seized on, picked apart …. There is no forgiveness when one who claims superiority falls below the standard. … And the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a separation. (Fanon, 1986: 24–25)

Unlike the canon of scholarly work on the effects of the white gaze on black people (Biko, 1996; Bulhan, 1985; Fanon, 1986; Manganyi, 1973; Memmi, 1965; Yancy, 2008), there is a relative dearth of scholarship which theorises the black gaze. We note the work of Moore (2008) in the United States and Rollock et al. (2013) in the United Kingdom. In the South African context, we observe that this analytical lens allows us to make sense of the ways in which the black middle class might experience their worlds as policed in multiple ways.

In his documentary, Black Is … Black Ain’t, Marlon Riggs drew attention to the restrictive binaries that had come to define blackness. He was, however, also signaling the freeing, ambivalent and malleable characteristics that constitute it. Importantly, Riggs (1995) was challenging the definitions of blackness that black people impose on each other including restrictive forms of blackness and meanings of inclusion and exclusion from blackness. South African blackness is not without its own contestations and is anything but homogenous. Hall (1996) captures this aptly when he describes the process of identification with a specific group as an over-determination. He states that ‘there is always “too much” or “too little” – an over-determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality’ (Hall, 1996: 3). Identity claims to blackness (or whiteness) are therefore inaccurate because there is no essence to any group. Hall (1996) further notes that identity is constituted by discursive work, which creates symbolic boundaries while at the same time requiring what is left beyond the boundaries to consolidate the process of its creation. The black gaze uses these operations to create within-group boundaries and to problematise non-conforming forms of blackness.

Methodology

Because of the contested positionality associated with black ‘middleclassness,’ we were interested in the experiences of black professionals who possibly remained marginally represented in senior levels within organisations. However, they also had to be individuals who had social capital in the form of high levels of education and economic security and some level of organisational power and status. We began by conducting one-on-one interviews with 10 black middle to senior managers. To augment these interviews, we decided to conduct a focus group to understand how positions adopted might dynamically shift or be further elucidated in conversation with others in the context of a different sample. We saw the two processes to be in productive conversation. We wondered if the two forms of data collection would elicit different kinds of data but found that there were more similarities than there were differences.

The profiles of those participating in the one-on-one interviews were similar to that of the focus group participants. Through previous research and ongoing practitioner consulting engagements with organisations, we were able to send a selective invitation to a group of individuals who fitted the profile of being black at a senior management level within organisations. Participants were thus accessed through purposive sampling while others were invited to participate through snowballing as they were known by those participants who were directly invited by the researchers. We report on the interview and focus group data using pseudonyms. We are aware that attributing quotes from the focus group to any individual downplays the fact that conversation is developed in a generative, iterative manner.

We told participants that we were interested in their subjective experience of emerging positions, identities and the ways in which new realities were being negotiated. Eight participants (five female and three male) accepted the invitation for the focus group and 10 participated in the individual interviews. All participants were either employed as senior managers, executive consultants in the corporate sector, or they were academics involved in higher education work. They had all lived in apartheid South Africa as adolescents or adults. From the stories told, it is probable that they were simultaneously first-generation university graduates and members of the middle class based on socio-economic status. While we accept that a middle-class perspective is not generalisable, we were interested in the intersection between race and class and we paid attention to how their positional, educational and material achievements influenced their relationship with blackness.

Methodologically, we observe that the interviews provided a rich exploratory opportunity and the focus group facilitated a dynamic and generative process where ideas were debated and perspectives given an extended opportunity for elaboration and clarification. The value of conducting a focus group was that it allowed for interactive data collection and an exchange of many different meanings (Flick, 1998; Payne and Payne, 2004). Even though gender was not a direct area of investigation, obtaining a sample with a more or less even gender representation allowed us to engage the nuance between the data generated by women compared to that of men. Being able to hold raced, classed, gendered and geographical intersections was enabled by an intersectional consciousness similar to that advocated by Moore (2008) and Ahmed (2010).

A qualitative thematic analysis was undertaken to elicit the major themes from participants of their lived experience of blackness in contemporary South Africa. The interrogation and analysis of these themes was driven by the theoretical assertions and concerns expressed in the broad methodological approach of discourse analysis. Within this approach, subjectivity is a ‘site of multiplicity, of continuous and discontinuous forces, states and feelings’ within particular power relations (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2008: 94). While eliciting the major themes, we therefore also considered the functions and effects of particular discourses, how these are shaped by the present social context, attempts at undermining, resisting, changing current discourses; the contradictions that run through discourses and how versions of blackness are constructed through discourse (McMullen, 2011; Parker, 2002, 2013; Potter and Wetherell, 2011).

Findings

We expected that participants would report that they continue to live with the residue of a white gaze that seeks to maintain unambiguous white dominance or hegemony. However, the more interesting finding for us was that as a result of class mobility, black middle-class participants now also have to contend with the growing and keen gaze of blackness. We spend some time here reviewing the operations of the familiar white hegemonic gaze but turn to exploring, in greater detail, what we have labelled as the ‘black gaze.’ A phenomenological analysis of participants’ experiences of each of these gazes is presented below.

Being black under the hegemonic white gaze: Marked and destabilised

The white gaze continues to use several strategies to negatively structure individuals’ experiences and so destabilise blackness. The act of marking blackness occurs through overt and steady but also subtler, indirect and masked operations of the gaze. Describing how blackness is triggered and galvanised by the marking gaze of the white other, a focus group participant notes: ‘[T]he whole blackness thing is something created by white people and it determines how you react and respond to the stimuli of being black’ (Themba, male).

The socially constructed nature of race and blackness is foregrounded here. Simultaneously, participants are clear that the white gaze intentionally negatively frames, disavows and inferiorises blackness and ensures that blackness is burdensome and loaded with psychological and embodied distress. The white gaze is said to be firmly drawing on notions of white superiority and black inferiority. Xolani (male) notes:

The fact that anything that is good is white—the boss, the umlungu, the white person—also means that everything that is black is bad, and that there should not be any aspiration to blackness.

This firm location of blackness as negative is experienced as burdensome, making work-life ‘a constant battle of defining my space and validating my existence and my reason for being and demonstrating that I had earned my space’ (Nomhle, woman). Words like ‘draining, taxing, belittling, offensive, undermining and disempowering’ are used to describe the exigencies that delimit participants’ ability to be meaningfully productive and focus exclusively on work performance. In addition, the burden of always being ‘the representation of everything that is black’ (Jabulile, woman) means that the white gaze draws on a homogeneous, undifferentiated, negative mobilisation of blackness that implicates all black people and allows little room for individual expression of creativity and potential. There was general consensus about the homogenising effects of the white gaze among the focus group participants.

The intense emotional and embodied reactions evoked by the white gaze are captured in statements like, ‘My body heat will rise.’; ‘I see red, literally’; and ‘I shut down … It is like an out of body experience …’ Anger and rage are often repressed, framed as dysfunctional and delegitimised by black participants with the association made between anger, blackness and craziness. Fazila, a woman focus group participant notes: ‘It makes me crazy—sometimes I feel like an angry black woman. I often go back to[a] book called “Women and madness”.’

There is a history to the figure of the angry black woman into which Fazila consciously plugs. The figure of the feminist killjoy is not unfamiliar to the popular imagination and feminist scholarship (Ahmed, 2010; Lorde, 1984; Woodard and Mastin, 2005). This trope of craziness needs to be understood with reference to the context which creates it. Failure to do so pressurises the black woman to take responsibility for generating unhappy feelings. Ahmed (2010: 68) notes that, ‘feelings can get stuck to certain bodies in the very way we describe spaces, situations, dramas. And bodies can get stuck depending on what feelings they get associated with.’

Eloquently capturing the psychological impact, in the focus group, Xolani (male) asserts:

The psychological damage to black people is severe, and it is not something that we may even be conscious of. … The damage of these constructions on the mind of the black person could not possibly be understood.

The distressing psychological, affective and embodied consequences of dealing with, or repressing, responses provoked by oppressive whiteness demand energy. This detracts from living freely and destabilises blackness. While there are few recent studies in South Africa that specifically describe the psychological impact of white supremacy (Noble, 2013), Manganyi (1973: 53) remarked on the psychological impact of oppression, stating that it leaves black people with a ‘malignant sense of helplessness,’ anxiety states and reactive depressions. For Hook (2005: 479), the colonial encounter wreaked a violence that was ‘epistemic, cultural, psychical and physical.’ The consequent historical trauma is evident in the ways in which black participants experience the white gaze.

The effects of the overt white gaze were easily acknowledged as a familiar extension of experiences under apartheid. However, participants added that the covert, but equally powerful, white gaze paradoxically, sought to at times invisibilise and, at other times, hyper-visibilise blackness, adding a further layer of complexity to the black experience. Buhle, a black woman participant recalled how her chief executive officer made blackness hyper-visible by commenting on the fact that he is unable to appoint black women because of their inability to handle power. By doing this in her presence, he simultaneously invisibilised her as a black woman. She says:

In his brain I was not in the room at the time. … It is mind boggling, because you sit through these things and you just became invisible …

Here it is apparent that the invisibilisation is not just raced but also gendered. She is invisible and simultaneously hyper-visible because of the confluence of her race and gender.

Another less direct, but disconcerting, use of the white gaze is that race was camouflaged, not actually named and instead surrounded by pockets of silence. By engaging in race-neutral discourses (Wise, 2010) blackness is pushed into an uncertain and disempowering terrain. For example, the use of terms such as ‘historically disadvantaged’ and ‘previously disadvantaged’ were experienced as contesting blackness and as an attempt to ‘weave around blackness’ (Zizwe, woman). Explaining further, Zizwe said that, in these instances, she wanted to say: ‘It’s ok. You can say black. I’m not offended by being called black. That is when I feel my blackness is contested.’ This reflects a discursive investment in particular forms of blackness across most of the participants. However, this investment coexists with at least half of the focus group believing that there are places and moments when they operate in the world fairly unconscious of their race identity. Examples appear below:

I don’t know if I consciously think of myself as black. (Themba, male)

I never viewed myself as black, because I tended to live inside my own head. Sometimes I’m not black when people speak to me over the phone, until they encounter me personally. In many instances I don’t walk around conscious of how I look. (Xolani, male)

If I go to my aunt’s place in Soweto, like to a wedding or so, I do not think of myself as black. However, if I go into a company that I work for, I suddenly realise that I am black. If I go to a country in Europe or China, I feel very black. (Zodwa, woman)

When I came into this room I did not think I was black. (Zenese, male)

From the preceding excerpts, the common view is that participants do not inhabit the world with a consciousness of their race identity. This identity is triggered in the presence of particular forms of whiteness which operate to reinforce social asymmetries. Another strategy for disempowering blackness is the substitution of prejudicial codes for supposed black incompetence. Zenese (male) notes:

… in other countries you have what people call a fixer, but this person said that in South Africa you have a ‘breaker’, and he used the black accent. The word black was not mentioned, but I was at a loss to explain to this person how offensive this was. I felt so disempowered.

A consequence of silence and race-neutral discourses is that black people are unable to have the race-conversation, explore racialisation under the white gaze or interrogate their own use of the race lens. This has the effect of neutralising their agency in the face of racism and attempts at deracialisation. The silencing of the race-conversation can therefore also be linked to ways in which unexamined fear continues to immobilise black agency and allow white hegemony to benefit from the continued presence of an insidious kind of fear. Participants convincingly talked about the continued ‘power of whiteness.’ Buhle mentions her fear five times while relating her concern about confronting her manager about an obviously racist statement he made:

… I was fearful and I did not say anything or respond. I was afraid to say something and I could feel the fear. Other people felt anger, but I was too afraid to say anything at the time. I was too afraid to defend myself.

In another incident, Fazila reports mustering the courage to confront perceived racism, she says:

After I had done that, that night the fear became so huge that I found myself doing something to myself that I had never done before—I hit myself, because I was so fearful of what could happen the next day. I walked up and down my passage hitting myself. Speaking out is like there is a reaction that takes over, and when you wake up and realise that you still have to operate in this world and whether you will survive it tomorrow the realization is sometimes very severe.

For this participant, the fear is so pronounced that she physically self-disciplines and wonders if she will survive this experience in the days to follow. She is caught up in exercising caution and restraint and disciplining herself on behalf of whiteness. This incident captures the way in which the white gaze covertly profits off a fear that has its roots in the apartheid past but that is unexamined and may have no bearing in reality today. Importantly, for Fazila and Buhle, gender identity operates together with race to discipline women in ways that the black male participants do not experience. While this was not overtly discussed in the focus group, it is clear from the differential accounts and the individual interviews, that there is an added burden placed on women. For instance, an interviewee recalled the following account with a client:

I was actually called a tea girl by a client because I phoned him with regards to his account, ‘I am sick a tired of being phoned by a tea lady’. (Abigail, woman)

Zodwa was given the following feedback by her white manager:

She needs to develop emotional control […] at times Zodwa displays her emotions too easily and this can make others uncomfortable and doubt her capabilities.

Five of the women interviewed and three focus group members had a story to tell about their devaluation. hooks (1996: 78) argues that: ‘Devaluation of black womanhood is central to the maintenance of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’

While participants’ experiences of the construction of blackness initially centred around the power of the white gaze to directly and indirectly shape blackness, significant parts of the focus group and one-on-one interviews turned to the ways in which blackness was also shaped by the gaze of other black people. This layer of complexity and the ways in which it confounds black peoples’ negotiation of their subjectivity is now explored in greater detail.

Being black under the marshalling black gaze

The principle finding from the data examining the black gaze suggests that the primary function of this gaze is to solidify markers of blackness so as to demarcate the boundary signifying who is really black and who is an imposter. These operations were coded through skin colour and performativity associated with class.

Blackness: Coded in the skin

We opened the group discussion by asking participants to offer us their definitions of black.

I will frame the notion of being black as being an indigenous African, whose roots are located here in Africa. We have the notion of different skin colours, and of course some people have darker skins, but for me that is the first distinguishing factor.

This response from Themba (male) described blackness as comprised of indigeneity defined by geographical location and the marker of a dark skin colour. This way of seeing blackness on the African continent differs from diasporic expressions of blackness as geographical location is a less immediate marker. Appiah (1992) and Mbembe (2007) have critiqued this as a form of nativism by questioning the essentialising discourses of black origin. They argue that no one has claim to originality as nation-states were created by colonisers and migration has been part of human existence for centuries. However, the codification of blackness in skin colour, in South Africa has come to have deeply affective resonance for some people. Thus, the quote from Zizwe (woman) below makes the case for blackness as a physical manifestation located in her person:

For me, blackness is about the colour of my skin and physical identity. I identify with darker hued people all over the world, because I think that discrimination is universally based on the colour of our skin. I think the thing that unites people all over the world is the colour of their skin, and I think that black people have less access to resources.

For her, the common suffering of black or ‘darker hued people’ all over the world is a point of identification for black people. Black is universally understood as a marker of oppression. This is consistent with the earlier assertion by Themba and three others that blackness is also a reaction to whiteness. From Themba’s contribution we thus see that he simultaneously holds the views that blackness is constituted by skin colour and also believes that it is a reaction to white oppression. While the preceding excerpt by Zizwe departs from Biko’s (1996) inclusive conception of blackness as beyond pigmentation and constituted by a strategic and political identity associated with oppression, she finds shared ground with him by identifying suffering at the hands of white supremacy as common to blacks all over the world (More, 2014). For the two participants quoted here, blackness is defined by place, appearance and a common experience of suffering. Perhaps their point of divergence is on the subject of place of origin. The first codifies blackness as an indigenous essence while the second has a global conceptualisation of blackness characterised by skin colour and common suffering. This is closer to Fanon’s (2008) conception of blackness which principally derives from darker skinned people being the universal object of racism.

The visual representation of blackness was, however, contested by Lynne (woman) who evoked Steve Biko’s (1996) inclusive view of black and disentangled blackness from geographical origins and location.

For me blackness is something that stands apart from geography and pigmentation. I was exposed to black consciousness, so I view blackness as a political identity.

This brings about a tension between those who can flexibly and strategically use particular identities and those where their identity as black is inescapably coded in their skin. A darker-skinned person is marked as black and unlike a lighter-skinned person, cannot disentangle from this reality and its often destructive consequences. For example, the participant cited below evocatively draws our attention to the claim that she does not meet some of the outward cues of blackness. Her mixed ancestry together with the historical construction of being ‘coloured’ makes her blackness open to contestation. Her blackness is tentatively held and she signals the accompanying ambiguity, complexity and lack of fixity and permanence across temporalities and geographies:

I realise that if I call myself black in any particular place it could be contested, perhaps because I grew up with a coloured identity. No matter where I am, people will question my claim to be black, unless I am in a context where black consciousness prevails. I always feel a little hesitation, no matter where I am. (Fazila, woman)

In the first instance then, the boundaries of blackness under the black gaze are defined by a complex interaction between skin colour and its variability, geographical location and experiences of oppression and solidarities. Worth noting too, is the implicit complexity in the move between essentialised and unstable forms of blackness operating in this sample. While participants were unanimous on the pernicious consequences of the white gaze, their own conceptions and experiences of blackness were varied.

Blackness: Coded through performativity and class

Accent and place emerged as two performative class markers that all participants felt were important lenses for the operation of the controlling black gaze. Here, we observe that blackness encoded in the skin is rendered even more complex when it is contested by blackness itself and layered with psychological parameters and performativity associated with class. Below we see that class mobility, as enabled by democracy, has meant that notions of stable identity have given way to volatility.

While participants agreed that it is the racial other which creates and makes them aware of blackness, they also shared the experience of blackness being shaped by the black gaze. Zenese (male) puts it poignantly as follows:

I never had my blackness contested by white people, because they created it. I think that blackness is contested by black people. People will often say that I’m a coconut because I will not do certain things. You tend to get people who attack something because it does not conform to what they expect as part of your identity.

In this excerpt we see the assertion that, because oppressive white people created blackness as an imposed identity, they have no interest in contesting it and are more comfortable with blackness as homogenous. However, it is blackness itself that questions and brings into awareness differing markers of blackness as mechanisms for policing blackness with an eye out for non-conformity. Viego (2005: 135) notes that appearance is always unstable: ‘this instability will, in turn, make any claims to “authentic blackness” disputable.’ Even when you have pigmentation as a defining marker, you might be perceived as inauthentic if you do not perform other markers of blackness. Markers for black authenticity are associated with certain kinds of performances, language and geography. In the United States, Moore (2008: 496) notes that, ‘because of the common association in popular culture of blackness with the social and cultural experiences of the black lower-class, middle class blacks may have their blackness interpreted as inauthentic.’ Similarly, while there has always been a small class of black elites in South African society, the historic legacy of colonialism and apartheid have tended to flatten blackness to a single class and way of being. Performances of blackness which divert from this script are therefore seen as inauthentic.

Concurring that the black gaze polices blackness, Xolani (male) says:

Sometimes I feel black among black people. If I go to the Transkei and there is slaughtering and cultural activities, there is a sense that I make sure that I fit in. Even here today, it is like I have to affirm myself by using the lingo.

Here he connects the cultural performativity required of him to be authentically black during his visit to his ancestral home in the Transkei with the switching of linguistic codes that is required of him in the current setting by moving between Xhosa and English.

In the following excerpt, Themba (male) articulates the anxiety and complexity of blackness as a contested identity:

In terms of the performance thing, I think there are contestations happening all the time—it is about convincing ourselves that we have not sold out.

Those perceived to be distancing themselves by adopting beliefs or behaviours consistent with whiteness are seen as sell-outs and race traitors. Not selling out to the black cause is important for many black people because selling out means that one has taken a decision to shun blackness and adopt whiteness. Consequently, middle-class black people who have the material trappings of whiteness often seek to perform blackness through language and keeping porous boundaries between suburban and township life. This is similar to the performance of blackness in the United Kingdom documented by Rollock et al. (2011) and in the United States as observed by Moore (2008). The use of the correct lingo and linguistic code-switching required in different spaces accomplishes a number of tasks including the need to authenticate blackness in ways that pigmentation alone can no longer accomplish. This enables them to make psychological claims to a part of ‘authentic’ blackness. This also allows an excess form of blackness which expands beyond the narrow confines of race.

The political capital associated with language and accent was especially marked in the individual interviews. In this instance, there is a clear relationship between the white gaze being interpolated with the black gaze. The three excerpts below illustrate the workplace value that it is placed on accents obtained through private schooling:

That whole speaking English thing, which is supposed to make you clever, irritates me because when I speak to a lot of graduates from aboFort Hare, or black universities … the accent … they have a good command of content but they are not given the time of day because their accents are seen as unintelligent. (Phindile, woman)

There are a lot of naive people out there who hear a certain black accent and associate it with being smart which I think is absolutely rubbish. (Lerato, woman)

Some of us are coming from the rural areas and we don’t speak English like a private school black dude and we get looked down upon. (Pule, male)

The preceding excerpts from the interviews resonate with the focus group which argued that language and accent are key markers of particular performances of blackness – proper blacks speak ‘black’ languages and competent blacks speak English with white accents. In the following account on racialised political commentary, there is a race-based divergence on the political economy attributed to speaking in a particular manner. For black people, it is characterised as ‘sounding so white’ and therefore not to be taken seriously, and for white callers, it is understood as eloquence.

I heard the people from the Democratic Alliance political party on a radio interview. They had these private school accents and black people phoned in and said ‘ah these people they sound so white’. It doesn’t matter what they were saying. White people phoned in and said ‘stop it, leave them alone just because they are eloquent and they are smart you have a problem’. (Nozi, woman)

In the workplace, there is a clear association of ‘white’ accents with intelligence. However, the value of these accents does not carry over to social spaces where black legitimacy is marked by ‘authentically black’ ways of speaking. Blackness is performed differently in the corporate workplace which is constructed as a middle-class space when compared to its performance in working-class spaces. For Xolani, a strong ‘black’ accent has cultural capital as a marker of ‘authentic blackness.’

There is the notion of being ‘blacker than thou,’ or issues relating to hair or how you speak to what you speak. (Xolani, male)

These different performances reflect the differential value that is attributed to the performances depending on where they occur. Rollock et al. (2011) report on similar transitions in performance among a sample of the UK black middle class when they are in public spaces.

Geography emerged as an important marker of what blackness is imagined to be and what it is not. Four participants understood popular conceptions of blackness to authenticate township blackness. Therefore, as illustrated by Phindile (woman) below, a person from Soweto would be more authentically black than someone from the Northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

I think people will say that they are from Soweto or Langa Township, which makes them more black – they are original.

Authentic blackness is also closely associated with proximity to one’s ‘roots’ or a form of rurality signifying a place of origin. However, it is also used to delineate ‘the kind of black you are.’ In the excerpt below, Zizwe believes that she is othered by some Xhosa black people as ‘one of those’ when she reveals that she has no connection to the Eastern Cape which is perceived as the place of origin for Xhosa-speaking blacks.

My father is Xhosa, but we have no connection to the Eastern Cape because my grandmother grew up here and my father never took us back. So Xhosa people will say ‘Ah, you’re one of those’. … People will ask ‘where are you from’, but I struggle with that because I don’t know what they want to hear—I will say that I grew up in Soweto. I wonder if they want you to say that your grandfather came from some rural place.

Struggle, material deprivation and poverty are raised as another of the markers required for one to be authentically black. Those who fail to identify as having struggled with poverty are also ‘not black enough.’

Blackness is connected to poverty and struggle. If you did not struggle, you are not black enough. You had no connection to the experience. (Lerato, woman)

Zizwe reflects on her childhood experience of feeling like an imposter in Soweto because she went to a privileged school and could not claim the experience of struggle.

The Group Areas Act was very much in effect, so we had to change our uniforms and go back to Soweto, where we did not really belong because ‘where were you when people were struggling?’

The preceding excerpts appeal to a history of shared identity which preceded democracy and upward class mobility for most black people. Again, it is the middle-class status of these participants that moves them further from these authenticating claims of poverty. This is consistent with the literature surveyed earlier which indicates that black Britons did not want to assume a middle-class identity for fear of distancing themselves from a historically working-class black identity of struggle. This presents the dilemma of class mobility for first-generation black members of the middle class. As forerunners, they are perceived as a threat to black solidarity which, in its current form, expects conformity. For the participants who meet the visual cues of blackness, there is additional labour required to retain links to working class and more stable forms of black identity.

Discussion

In examining participants’ experiences of the white and black gaze, we see the complexity and contestation that arises for them as they mediate the double register of both gazes.

The oppressive white gaze is seen to operate in ways that are simultaneously continuous and discontinuous with apartheid. The fact that the white gaze is experienced as overtly locating and promoting black inferiority is in keeping with the argument that white hegemony seeks to police blackness in response to it being challenged with the transition of black people into the middle class. However, in addition to policing and destabilising blackness, the white gaze simultaneously obscures and deflects attention from a critical engagement with whiteness itself. This is done through more covert operations such as paradoxically invisibilising and hypervisibilising blackness and benefiting off insentient black fear. The analysis illustrates that black women experience the white gaze in more destructive ways. This was chillingly illustrated by the participant who self-disciplined by physically assaulting herself. This results in considerable psycho-social demands being placed on black subjectivity as it confronts and engages the complexity of this dual overt and covert operation of the white gaze. Energy is redirected to fending off the controlling white gaze. In Du Bois’ (2009) conception, this is the burden of the second sight which comes with double consciousness. More importantly, however, through continued practices of not naming and interrogating racialised experiences, engaging in race-neutral discourses and not examining fear-based responses that may be a remnant of apartheid-related experiences, black agency is neutralised. This happens in two ways. White hegemony is not sufficiently challenged and black people miss the opportunity for examining and disrupting the effects of racialisation and exploring new liberated subjectivities (Nielson, 2011).

If living with the white gaze’s attempts at inferiorising and homogenising black subjectivity is not sufficiently demanding, the black middle class increasingly also has to contend with a black gaze’s attempts at shaping blackness. This doubles the burden and complexity of negotiating their identity and subjectivity.

Black people who move from the working class to the middle class are perceived as non-normative and are disciplined by the black lower classes through the discourse of ‘sell-out’ or ‘race traitor.’ Black people have to navigate identities imposed from the outside (the white gaze), self-constructed notions of identity, and the identity that comes with strategic identity politics (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). This element of identity volatility has emerged as a result of the class mobility occasioned by democracy. While race loyalty based on years of common oppression against black people appears to prevent black people from a sense of middle-class loyalty with white people (Maylor and Williams, 2011; Modisha, 2007), there is a sense in which the emergent middle class experiences its class location in an unsettling way. The findings of this paper suggest that middle-class blackness is challenged as an inauthentic identity owing to its movement away from uniform performances of identity constructed by identity politics and the white gaze. However, the inauthenticity enables identity fluidity which loosens stable notions of blackness. The findings suggest that some people who belong to the black middle class see themselves as neither coopted by whiteness nor as having deserted blackness. Instead, class mobility and the paradoxes of living in this moment have opened up South African identities.

A look at blackness suggests that it is complex, changing, and contested. Johnson (2003) suggests that blackness is a politicised identity – avowed and disavowed, attractive and repellent, while simultaneously fixed and malleable. It would seem that, while there remains a significant investment in maintaining working-class forms of blackness which are steeped in authentic ideas of blackness, the lived experiences of some middle-class blacks challenge the boundaries of post-apartheid blackness. As many black South Africans experience first-generation class mobility, interact with other Africans in a newly open South Africa, engage with white people as social equals, and reimagine who they are within the binaries of apartheid categories, there is a sense in which they are unsettled by these changes. This is captured in Hall’s (1991: 10) observation that ‘identity emerges as a kind of unsettled space … between a number of intersecting discourses’. If we are to follow Ndlovu’s (2012) idea that the selection of a single dimension of identity as most salient is always contextually contingent and fluid, we can also say that black identity is always overlaid by other, contextually significant, factors such that it is never stable or uniform. This is even more significant in periods following radical societal change. Democracy has presented an interesting set of ironies for black middle-class South Africans. It has enabled class mobility and hence access to socio-economic opportunity while, at the same time, loosening and tightening conceptions of blackness.

Conclusion

Just over 40 years since Manganyi (1973) reflected on the meanings of blackness in the South African context, this paper has found that the question of black identities remains fraught as it is marked by impulses for static conceptions of identity in a changing world. The interplay of competing pressures ironically generates possibilities for dynamic identities that are contextually contingent rather than stable and unchanging. The performative nature of race elucidated in the moments of contestation moves us from the fallacy of race as an essentialised identity to one that is historically contingent. We note the importance of engaging with scholarship from global locations that grapple with similar social challenges while recognising how the South African landscape produces identities rooted within this context. Against the backdrop of a history of colonialism and apartheid, we found that the class mobility of our sample into the middle class has opened up subjectivities which simultaneously conform to, and challenge, given notions of black ways of being. The study reinforced an intersectional awareness of how identities intersect in various ways often with differential outcomes for black middle-class women. Further research that holds the multiple and changing identities of the South African middle class is required. To close though, we argue for generative spaces for the exploration of the multiple ways in which local histories structure identities while being alive to how these shift in contexts of change.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Susan Van Zyl for her generous advice on earlier drafts of this paper. The University of the Witwatersrand Research Office provided an enabling space for deep reflection in Parys. Appreciation is extended to the participants for their time and generous sharing of experiences. We are most grateful to the reviewers for their constructive feedback which has strengthened this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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