The limitations of 'inter-racial contact': stories from young South Africa

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The limitations of 'inter-racial contact': stories from young South AfricaLouise Vincent

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The limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’:

stories from young South Africa

Louise Vincent

Abstract

This paper argues that, while the demise of apartheid has led to manysituations in which South Africans now come into closer contact with oneanother, this increased ‘contact’ does not amount to greater racialintegration. Contact occurs within a context of unequal power relationsin which ‘whiteness’ continues to be privileged over ‘blackness’. The resultis that white people tend to benefit more from contact with the racial‘other’ than black people, who often experience this contact as reinforcingtheir expectations of continued white dominance and privilege. Whilecontact may undermine blatantly racist practices and overt racial conflict,racialized patterns of reasoning continue to exist, often unnoticed andunchallenged. These include the assumption that race is an incontrover-tible fact of experience, the privileging of whiteness, the assumption thatthere exist different (biological) races which evince different forms ofsocial behaviour and that these are essential properties of people ratherthan being historically or socially contingent.

Keywords: Whiteness; South Africa; racial contact hypothesis; racism.

Personal interpretations of past time � the stories that people tellthemselves in order to explain how they get to the place theycurrently inhabit � are often in deep and ambiguous conflict with theofficial interpretive devices of a culture. (Steedman 1986, p. 1)

Introduction

Opposition to apartheid gave rise to many differing ideologicalpositions on how appropriately to understand race and racism. Oneof the pivotal points of debate between what we might term ‘radical’

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and ‘liberal’ opponents of apartheid concerned the contrast between‘non-racialism’ and ‘multi-racialism’. The race debate also under-pinned competing ideological positions within the liberation move-ment itself. Central to the Congress tradition of the ANC was acommitment to ‘non-racialism’ which was contrasted with variants ofboth ‘Africanism’ and ‘black consciousness’. Rather than arguing fortolerance between ‘races’ it is the radical proposition of non-racialismthat we acknowledge the nonsense of race and proceed politically fromthat rather than any other starting point. Today, natural scientistsmostly agree that race does not exist; it is not a pertinent criterion ofclassification (Guillaumin 1999, p. 361). The ideology of non-racialismis vindicated as the factual truth � no mere political slogan.

But this is not the view of most South Africans for whom theexistence of four distinct races: ‘whites’, ‘Coloureds’, ‘Indians’ and‘Africans’ remains a taken-for-granted item of common sense. More-over, this cosmology should not be understood merely as anunfortunate residual effect of apartheid. Rather, new life has beenbreathed into these categories in the transition context as they begin tobe employed for multiple purposes of redress and political manoeuvr-ing. Racial identities have shown themselves to be resilient in the post-apartheid period, rainbow-nationalism notwithstanding (see Ansell2004, p. 4). Indeed, non-racialism sometimes appears less a feature ofthe current context rather than more so, as the unifying imperative ofthe official liberation movement ideological line on the subject of racegives way to opportunities for South Africans to assert forms ofidentity whose foregrounding was regarded as impolitic in a differentera.

Gibson and Macdonald’s work based on a large, nationallyrepresentative survey conducted from late 2000 to early 2001 foundthat ‘South Africa is obviously not a single unified country; racialdifferences persist on virtually all dimensions of political and sociallife’ (2001, p. 2). What Richard Dyer has termed the ‘imagery’ of racecontinues to exert its power over every feature of our lives:

The myriad minute decisions that constitute the practices of theworld are at every point informed by judgements about people’scapacities and worth, judgements based on what they look like,where they come from, how they speak, even what they eat, that is,racial judgements. Race is not the only factor governing these thingsand people of goodwill everywhere struggle to overcome theprejudices and barriers of race, but it is never not a factor, nevernot in play. (Dyer 1997, p. 1)

While we have formally, legally discarded race then, it continues tohave an often unacknowledged and unseen power to determine

The limitations of ‘inter-racial contact’ 1427


perceptions, experiences and relationships. This remains the case evenin the liberal, youthful, intellectual, relatively secluded space of theSouth African university which is the site of the present study, where itmight be expected that, if anywhere, race would be of diminishingsignificance in people’s lives as they socialize and study side by side ina shared institution.

The study

This paper sets out to tell stories about race and identity among aparticular stratum of society: undergraduate university students. Theresearch emerged out of a political sociology course on ‘Race, Classand Gender’ taught by the author to second-year political studiesstudents at one of the country’s so-called historically white campuses,apartheid having had the intention to set up separate educationalinstitutions for the different race and ethnic groups it defined. Todaywhite students make up some 50 per cent of the total studentpopulation of this particular institution. The other 50 per cent consistsof 36 per cent (black) African (including a sizeable portion from otherAfrican states), 10 per cent Indian and 4 per cent Coloured.1 Theresearch process was one in which the author interacted closely over aperiod of six to seven weeks at a time with groups of some 80participants in each of three research/teaching cycles. Each group wasdemographically mixed, some 50 per cent being black with the latter amix of 50 per cent South African and the other half non-South-African African. The research ‘data’ used in the paper consist of thestories told and written by the participants2 to one another and to theauthor.

Story-telling research is a departure from conventional socialscience studies on ‘racial attitudes’ which typically take the form oflarge-scale surveys or questionnaires. A recent example of the use ofquestionnaires to gather accounts of subjectivity from white SouthAfricans illustrates some of the weaknesses in survey research for thispurpose. In her 2001 book, Whiteness Just Isn’t What it Used to Be,Melissa Steyn points out that ‘[t]he question that respondents hadmost difficulty with required them to recall an incident from as early intheir lives as they could, and to comment on how they had understoodthe meaning of their ‘‘whiteness’’ in the incident. This was the questionmost frequently left blank. Those who did make the mental effort torespond to this question gave valuable information’ (Steyn 2001, p.175). There is an undertone in this last comment of reproachfulness onthe part of the researcher towards those subjects who did not ‘makethe mental effort’ to provide interesting data rather than seeing this asan outcome of the research method itself.

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A further difficulty in this form of research on racial attitudes ishighlighted by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva who points out that surveysprovide a limited analytical context: ‘often the somewhat mysteriousmeaning of check marks on restricted questions and items’ (2003, p.64) leads to researchers assuming what answers such as ‘disagree’ or‘strongly agree’ mean whereas interpretation of these answers is farfrom straightforward. Survey research tends to move from thestandpoint of methodological individualism so that what is beingcollected is a data set of individual ‘attitudes’ which are not easilyconnected to a system of racial domination (ibid.). The effect,moreover, of answers to questionnaires and surveys is to fixsubjectivity rather than allowing room for self-understandings whichmay be multiple, shifting and contradictory.

The use of narrative research is well-established in the social sciences(see, for example, Plummer 1995; Bonilla-Silva 2000; Bonilla-Silva,Lewis and Embrick 2004) and takes as its starting point theseperceived weaknesses in survey and questionnaire research as a meansof accessing subjectivity. Narrative research shifts the onus onto theresearcher to employ methods which create the circumstances underwhich the detailed and complex responses Steyn was looking for aremore likely to emerge. Detailed accounts are obtained throughprotracted interaction with a small number of participants who areasked to tell their stories in a variety of forms.

Aguirre has defined stories as ‘social events that instruct us aboutsocial processes, social structures, and social situations’ (2000, p. 3).The stories we tell are a mechanism which we use to characterizeourselves both to ourselves and to others. But stories are not justindividual ‘events’, nor are they random. Rather, as Bonilla-Silva,Lewis and Embrick point out, stories also narrate social relations sothat ‘certain kinds of stories are told at certain historical moments forspecific reasons’ (2004, p. 556). In telling stories, we ‘draw on availablediscourses and chains of meaning’ (ibid.) and in this way the stories wetell reflect and often reproduce existing relations of power andinequality. The racial stories that the participants tell here can, then,be read as a lens through which to view the contemporary dominanttropes of race in South Africa as manifested in day-to-day life.

The invitation to participants to tell their stories has nothing to dowith assuming that they are in possession of an objective interpreta-tion of ‘how things really are’ which they then make available asresearch material. As we all know, ‘individuals twist and turn,reinterpret and falsify, repress and forget their experiences in pursuitof a construction of their personality to which the past has to besubordinated’ (Haug 1992, p. 20). So what we can investigate is not‘how it really was’, but how individuals construct their identities,change themselves, reinterpret themselves and see what benefits they



derive from so doing. In short, we can explore how they inscribethemselves in the existing social structures (Haug 1992, pp. 20�1) byexamining their use of available race repertoires. This use tends toreflect the positioning of actors in the racial hierarchy: ‘actors at thetop of a racial order tend to display views, attitudes, and stories thathelp maintain that privilege, whereas actors at the bottom are morelikely to exhibit oppositional views, attitudes and counternarratives’(Bonilla-Silva, Lewis and Embrick 2004, p. 559). Stories give us accessto these different social representations and help us to understand theparticular work that contemporary frames of race do at the presenthistorical moment.

Interrogating the contact hypothesis

If South Africans are to believe their own public relations, the societyis slowly normalizing its race relations as an inevitable result of thedemise of laws barring inter-racial contact and of programmes whichactively promote such contact, such as employment equity require-ments, quotas in national sports teams and affirmative actionprogrammes. It seems intuitively likely that inter-racial contactimproves racial/ethnic relations (see, for example, Dixon and Rosen-baum 2004; Morris 1999) whereas absence of such contact promotesprejudice and stereotyping. This is the unstated dominant assumptionat institutions that have striven � often as a result of direct governmentpressure � to become more ‘racially mixed’ since 1994. People comeinto a mixed environment, so the theory goes, mingle and become lessprejudiced as a result. The mere fact of the existence of people ofdifferent skin colours in contact with one another will produce thiseffect. However, what is referred to as ‘contact theory’ or ‘the contacthypothesis’ in the social science literature is not unproblematic in itsassumptions. As Dixon and Durrheim point out in their work oninformal segregation on South African beaches, social psychologiststend to investigate ‘contact’ under optimal conditions which can havethe effect of obscuring the extent to which, ‘notwithstanding its formalabolition . . . segregation remains pervasive as an informal mechanismfor ordering and defining social relations’ (2003, p. 1). This is the casenot least because contact always takes place in a context, an importantaspect of which is spatial location, and space, as is now increasinglyunderstood (see, for example, the work of Pile and Thrift 1995;Twigger-Ross and Uzzell 1996), is never an empty container for socialaction. Relations of power and discipline are, as Soja has argued,‘inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life’ (1989,p. 6).

In this article experiences of inter-racial contact in a particularspatial location are explored in order to ask a number of questions

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about the contact hypothesis and to expose some of the difficultieswith the assumptions it makes. In the first instance, we need to askhow much contact is really going on in putatively ‘mixed environ-ments’ and to recognize that there is an important difference between‘contact’ and integration. Second, having recognized this distinctionwe need to know to what extent there is a natural progression fromcontact to integration. In particular, we need to ask how commonlyparticipants experience an active guarding against contact leading tointegration on the part of key protagonists in contact situations. Third,it needs to be recognized that contact takes place in the context of asociety with a legacy of entrenched racial segregation. Contact istherefore likely to be experienced very variably by people who enter thecontact situation not as social equals but from very different sociallocations. We need to be able to discern and understand how relationsof power and dominance are inscribed in the racialized patterns of thisvariability.

How much ‘contact’ is really going on?

People who formally share membership in an institutional setting donot necessarily experience very much actual contact with one another.Nor is such contact as does occur necessarily more than passing orsuperficial. There is an extensive literature, generated particularly fromthe United States, addressing the question of continued substantivesegregation in formally integrated contexts such as schools anduniversities (see, for example, Patchen 1982; Epstein 1985; Hallinanand Smith 1985; Hallinan and Williams 1989). This literature dealswith a variety of factors which influence the extent to which formally‘mixed’ environments tend to re-segregate, including the relative size ofin- versus out-groups, the degree of heterogeneity (Blau (1977) showedthat the probability of inter-group contact increases as heterogeneityincreases) and the extent to which integration is explicitly supported byrecognized authority figures in a particular setting (see, for instance,Schofield 1995). The latter literature finds that administrators who arecommitted to promoting integration and combating re-segregation canmake a difference in creating a climate and organization culture that issupportive of integration (see Moody 2001).

The institutional setting within which the present research processtook place embodies a strong tradition of a particular brand ofliberalism. The latter is characterized by staunch individualism, asuspicion of government and programmes of active political redresssuch as affirmative action, a preference for ‘autonomy’ in research andteaching and for an approach to racial integration which seesrelationships as a function of individual choice rather than socialstructure. In short, the institutional setting is characterized by core



features of what Patricia Hill Collins has referred to as the ‘newracism’ in which racial inequality is perpetuated by a hegemonicideology that ‘racism is over’ (2005, p. 54). Social ills are crafted asproblems located within specific individual relationships and thepossibilities for social action are thus undermined. The hegemonicliberal humanist discourse insisting that we focus on ‘our commonhumanity’ erases the specificities of raced experiences and evades thequestion of who has the power to define that humanity.

This particular institutional culture, which its major protagonists seeas neutral and apolitical, makes it very difficult to achieve some of therequirements for integration that are highlighted in the literature oncontact theory. At the same time, because the institution formallyeschews racism, it becomes difficult to tell exactly where continuedinequalities emanate from and thus difficult to foster change. As aresult, dining halls, friendship circles, dating, social meeting places,sports and lecture room seating continue to be highly raciallysegregated within the formally de-racialized institution. As oneparticipant observed, ‘boys sit with boys, girls with girls, whites withwhites, blacks with blacks and so on’ (Race Stories, April 2004). This isexperienced particularly starkly in residences which are often proudlyparaded as sites of inter-racial contact where people of ‘different races’live together. Residential facilities remain effectively segregated as aresult of unwritten rules and norms that are quickly understood andscrupulously observed by all: ‘In res. he quickly learnt that thecommon room is for the ‘‘darkies’’ and the bar is for the ‘‘whitedudes’’’ (Race Stories, April 2004). Exemplified here is a process whichDurrheim and Dixon have referred to as the translation of racistexclusions into spatial exclusions which are ‘thereby naturalisedbecause of the apparent transparency, objectivity, and innocence ofplace’ (2001, p. 448). Such spatial exclusion makes segregation appearas natural and necessary and, as a result, all the more impervious tochallenge.

This finding is echoed in many studies of race. For example, in thework of Wits sociologist Alan Morris on race relations in Hillbrow,Johannesburg, he found that, while overt acts of racism are infrequent,residents continue to express racist views about one another and ‘mostapartment blocks were occupied solely or mainly by one particularracial category’ (1999, p. 667). In many instances, Morris argues,‘contact did not lessen prejudice but served to reinforce it’. Racialpropinquity, then, is not the same thing as racial integration and thelatter is not a necessary or even likely outcome of situations of ‘racialdiversity’. Integration implies something more than merely surfacetoleration of those regarded as being of a different racial category andincludes, as Pettigrew suggests, acceptance, friendship, equity andequality (Morris 1999, p. 683). Far from contact with ‘other races’ in

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the putatively mixed environment of the university leading to the de-racialization of modes of thought and behaviour, it is often precisely inthis environment that such patterns are entrenched. As one participantcommented, ‘It was at [university] that he began to be fully aware ofand bothered by racism’ (Race Stories, April 2004).

The continued hegemony of ‘whiteness’ in the institutional culture isreflected in the details of daily life. Residence menus have beenchanged to incorporate a broader range of cuisines � but the optionsare labelled ‘African’ and ‘normal’. There can be no more explicitexemplification of Richard Dyer’s point (1997) that to be white is tooccupy the position of privileged normalcy. Moreover, while theabsence of racial integration among students is highly visible becauseof its group nature, this is itself linked to the broader question of statusequality within the institution. The majority of faculty, particularlysenior academics along with senior administrators, are white and male.The literature on re-segregation shows that if an institution isstructured in such a way that positions in the organizational hierarchycorrelate with race then this can have the effect of perpetuatingrelations of dominance and subordination, magnifying and calcifyinggroup differences (see Hewstone and Brown 1986). Where status is notcorrelated with race in the organizational hierarchy, a supportivesubstrate for integration is available.

Informal policing to guard against ‘contact’ leading to integration

It is thus important to recognize that integration is not just somethingwhich fails to occur for incidental reasons. Rather, there are significantways in which integration is actively guarded against by keyprotagonists in contact situations so that the post-1994 context maybe viewed as having given rise to new forms of informal butnonetheless powerful racial entrepreneurship which have replacedofficial injunctions against integration. The policing of sexuality is oneof the most cogent examples of this. Apartheid’s concern with thecalcification of racial boundaries was, as Posel writes, ‘rooted inwidespread anxieties about racial mixing’ (2001, p. 73). Apartheid, atleast in part, was meant to offer the reassurance that ‘white womenwere safe from the threat of black male sexuality’ (ibid.). Taboosagainst sexual integration continue to be a very significant thematicthread in the way in which race is experienced in the society. Complexrules of dating allude constantly to strict injunctions against inter-racial and even inter-ethnic sexual interaction. And as Patricia HillCollins points out in her work on black sexual politics, ‘onefundamental rule governs all others � marry a partner of the samerace and different gender’ (2005, p. 248). While South Africansare now formally entitled to break this rule � on both counts � and



the desegregated youthful space of the university provides opportu-nities for intimate love relationships to develop, few do. While manywhite participants claimed they had ‘no problem’ with peoplechoosing to love across the colour line, this ideology, which HillCollins calls ‘love who you want’ (2005, p. 249), masks the extent towhich intimate relationships continue to be profoundly conditioned byrace.

Of course a racialized sexual code of conduct is not universallyembraced or adhered to and there are examples of code-breakingbehaviour. Nonetheless, the existence of the code is widely acknowl-edged. Men and women who enter the racially mixed environment ofthe university, then, believing that they can adopt a colour-blindattitude to dating are quickly disillusioned, with the attitudes andresponses of peers acting as a highly effective disincentive, both fromwithin their own ‘colour bloc’ and from without. Those who choose tocross colour lines find themselves entering social spaces where they areactively repulsed, as in this description of a black man approaching anall-white group at a club: ‘They smiled at him but their body languagechanged. The two guys with them gave a half manly acknowledgementbut then the one closest to him leaned over and whispered into his earso that only he heard, ‘‘fuck off’’’ (Race Stories, April 2004). The whitemale sense of belonging in this space takes the form here of territorialentitlement. Constructions of place identity are closely linked withrelations of power: ‘one might say that the rhetorical traditionsthrough which people locate their selves and others are also ideologicaltraditions that sustain relations of domination’ (Dixon and Durrheim2000, p. 33). Claims to colour-blindness serve only, as Hill Collinspoints out, to erase black pain (2005, p. 277).

Code breakers find themselves having to contend with losing socialground within their own racial milieu as a result of their dating choices.Sexual contact has a way of quickly bringing into play some of thesharpest knives in the armoury of racism: ‘she was worried about howeveryone would react if she was seen with a black man. What if herparents found out? The white boys wouldn’t want to talk to her. Theywould call her a slut and think she might have Aids’ (Race Stories,April 2004). When things go awry in this way there is an ‘I told you so’response from within black circles: ‘What killed him was that most ofhis black friends told him he should have stuck to his own skin colour,he should have known better’ (Race Stories, April 2004). Sexualcontact across colour lines is read by onlookers as richly symbolic,with the black participant seen to be in search of something far morecomplex than mere romance. Inter-racial sexuality, as Childs (2005,p. 545) reminds us, has played a central role in the treatment of blacksin society which goes some way to explaining negative reactions toblack/white unions from within the black community. In the context of

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continued white racism personal choices to date across the colour lineemerge as highly politicized and the subject of public debate,regardless of the attitudes of the protagonists themselves.

Essentialized forms of racial reasoning operate as powerful internalmechanisms for patrolling the boundaries between one supposed raceand another. Included here is the widely acknowledged close policingof one another for signs of deficient blackness by black students. Theform that this takes speaks to the ways in which race is viewed as morethan a set of physical characteristics but is routinely thought toembody also social practices incorporating modes of dress, hairstyles,speech, mannerisms, choice of music and so on. As a result even theapparently neutral business of choosing a course of study is infusedwith racial interpretations and those who buck the trend must contendwith the fallout from both sides of the colour line, as in this example ofa black student who chooses to study philosophy but feels ‘uncomfor-table in tutorials because of ideologies that people have about blacks.Black people are considered stupid and they do not think like whitepeople.’ But the discomfort does not only arise as a result of whiteracism: ‘A lot of black students question why I do philosophy. They saythat black people are not meant for philosophy and that we cannotthink beyond what is there’ (Essay, May 2004).

The underlying assumption of apartheid racial reasoning was thatrace adhered to persons as a cluster of essential elements rather thanbeing mutable, fluid or socially contingent (Posel 2001, p. 72). It is anassumption that continues to guide the widespread labelling of someblack South Africans as ‘coconuts’ (black on the outside, white on theinside) by other black people who regard themselves as moreauthentically black. It is ironic that the essentializing logic of apartheidreasoning is being served up by a new echelon of self-styled guardiansof ‘tradition’ and cultural authenticity who depict people with darkskins who do not behave, speak and think ‘as blacks should’ as anemblematic warning of what can happen if ‘contact’ goes too far.Coconuts are people who have become contaminated by whitenessthrough too much contact with its ways. This is a particularly harshirony for those whose mannerisms and accents arise out of having beenbrought up in exile in highly politicized anti-apartheid families.

She grew up in Swaziland, Lusaka and London where race andcolour were not an issue to her. Her parents were involved with theANC. She remembers going to rallies chanting ‘viva ANC’, ‘vivaMandela’. Now ten years into our new democracy . . . it is hardwhen black people call her a coconut and white people assumethings about her because she is black . . . black people judge herbecause she never experienced apartheid South Africa at its worst.(Race Stories, April 2004)



Accent is a crucial marker for perceived racial authenticity but thereare many others too, not least the familiar controversies surroundingblack hair � a subject which many black participants asked to write a‘race story’ chose to focus on:

In post-apartheid the emancipation of black people required blackpride and unfortunately created degrees of blackness. People weremore and more being criticised for being ‘coconuts’ and hairstyleswere being scrutinised creating . . . a fictitious binary between peoplewho are black and people who are not black enough. I shaved myhair off in Grade 11. (Exam,3 November 2003)

The requirements for being authentically black are widely recog-nized despite the fact that in the particular institutional environmentof the university, populated as it is by a majority of black students whocome from privileged educational circumstances, few actually manageto meet these requirements:

She went to a ‘white’ school, played with white children, spoke tothem in their white language. Yet she is black. She loves RobbieWilliams, that song by Goo Goo Dolls, she used to have an AlanisMorrisette CD and would buy it again if she had the cash. Herfavourite actor is Mel Gibson, her favourite filmmaker QuentinTarantino and her favourite TV show, Friends. Yet she is black. Herskin is brown like the earth, her hair black as night, her lips full andthick, her nose wide and flat. She is black. African. Negro. Native.But to some, not black enough. (Race Stories, April 2004)

Many black South Africans face the dilemma of an uncertainidentity as a result of conscious efforts on the part of parents whodeliberately seek for their children ways of being that are considered aleg-up into a world of privileged reserved for whites:

Her mother felt it was better for her to learn to speak Englishfluently and this has been a contributing factor to the racialencounters to follow for the rest of her life. As a result of onlybeing able to speak English she finds it easier to relate to and befriends with white people. For her, encounters with her own race aremore difficult as she has been socialised with whites. At family get-togethers she always feels lost as she cannot talk to her familymembers in their African tongue and they cannot speak English.People often mistake her for a foreigner. Her parents felt that shewould be better accepted if she spoke English. Now there has beenblack empowerment and people are proud to be black and maketheir culture known. But she does not know much about her culture

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to be able to fit in. Her dilemma is that she is neither white nor blackalthough people say that she is more white than black. (Race Stories,April 2004)

For white students who grew up schooled in a set of expectations ofwhat black people are really like, it is equally confusing to meet peoplewho do not carry with them that set of anticipated characteristics. Asone white participant put it, in reference to her black friend, she neverreally considered her friend ‘an actual black’ because ‘she comes fromEngland and doesn’t seem to be black. She doesn’t know any of theculture and can’t speak any African languages’ (Race Stories, April2004). So, while this individual has close personal contact with a friendwho is physically black, in her own mind she is not in fact in contactwith ‘an actual black’. James Scott has memorably described thisability on the part of the powerful to frame the nature of theirexperience as ‘the power to call a cabbage a rose and make it stick’(1990, p. 5).

White experiences of ‘contact’

A key point overlooked by those who believe that nothing needs to bedone beyond removing the formal barriers preventing inter-racialcontact is that such ‘contact’ as does take place occurs within abroader context of power relations and reflects those power relations.It is not unusual for example, for whites to gain more from encounterswith the racial ‘other’ than the other way around. For those alreadyempowered in society, those who occupy the position of privilegednorm in relation to a range of markers � white trustworthiness,intelligence, beauty, cleanliness, morality is not in question � contactwith black students largely serves to allay baseless fears: that theirpossessions will be stolen in mixed residences, that black tutorialmembers will lower the standards of class discussion, that blackresidence members will engage in unsanitary practices in residencebathrooms. For these students ‘contact’ in a context in which theoverall hegemony of whiteness remains intact is reassuring. It tellsthem that they need not change after all. They can go on beingthemselves. These students may therefore report a decline in theirprejudices after entering the mixed environment of university. But Iwould suggest that such a result needs to be interrogated, revealing asit does, very unequal power relations, as the following account of lifefor a white male in a ‘mixed’ university residence clearly illustrates:

Coming to [university] he had an overall feeling of trepidation atmoving into a more ‘exposed’ environment than he had been in thepast, growing up as a white male. He had been to boarding school



but it was an elite private school. Although there were plenty ofblack people they had always been in a minority and had neverseemed a threat as it were. Now he didn’t know what it would be likeliving somewhere where his race was a minority. He had beenwarned that at other universities where residences were ‘pitch black’everything had to be kept totally locked up as a result of the endlessstealing. Furthermore his black classmates had been from wealthyfamilies and most of them had no problem mixing with the whitemajority. The prospect of res. now presented a different scenario.Whites were a minority and blacks were from all walks of life, notjust a tiny rich elite. His fears and worries turned out to be totallyunfounded. Life in res. turned out to be very much like life inboarding school. White boys seemed to be the only ones who reallystuck together. There was no black ‘popular group’ which everyonetried to fit in with. Instead, he ended up having the same colourfriends, and ran around the res. getting drunk and having fun as if heowned the place, just as he would have had he been in apredominantly white res. He also found that theft was never aproblem. (Race Stories, April 2004).

To be put into contact with fellow black students is here initiallyanticipated as a form of ‘exposure’ but the implied sense ofvulnerability is short-lived. It is precisely one of the markers of thecontinued dominance of whiteness in the institutional culture thatwhite students are able to negotiate these encounters with ease. Initialfeelings of trepidation quickly give way to the reassuring realizationthat all will be well because there is nothing in the prevailing socialrelations in the residence to disturb dominant white males’ sense of‘place identity’: conceptions, interpretations, ideas and feelings about aphysical setting (see, for example, Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff1983, p. 60). Their sense of ownership over the space of the residenceserves to reinforce a collective sense of self on the part of white maleoccupants and this is further reproduced by collective practices withinthat space: ‘getting drunk and having fun’ without having to modifythis behaviour in any way to take into account the presence ofsubordinated groups.

Some white South Africans recognize that their skin colourcontinues to privilege them: ‘Because I live in a society in which whitemiddle-class males are still largely in a position of dominance, I tend tosee my success, and even my own subjectivity, as universally natural’(Exam, November 2003). This recognition is rare, however. It is farmore common for white people to be entirely unaware of the privilegedhegemonic position they occupy and, in fact, to feel disadvantaged bythe post-1994 political context. These sentiments echo nationwidesurvey data which indicates that whites are only half as likely as other

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South Africans to accept the view that whites continue to benefit fromapartheid (Gibson and Macdonald 2001, p. 13). In settings wherewhite people have direct experience of affirmative action programmesand of being in competition with high-flying black achievers, fears aremagnified out of all proportion to the reality of continued highlyracially skewed prospects of future employment and economic success.

In the modern world as a white male I am expected to re-inventmyself but this is particularly difficult for me. As many jobs onceexclusively my domain because of my race are no longer there forme. (Exam, November 2003)

In the historical context of South Africa today my parents see thegreatest threat to me as affirmative action. (Exam, November 2003)

She questions whether or not she has a bright future because she iswhite. Is there a point to paying for an education if she may not beable to use it? Will she have unwillingly to move overseas? She hatesthat because she is white she loses her privileges and opportunities.Apartheid was not her fault. She realises that whether you are liberalor not, you are white and should be scared of your past because youare now paying the consequences for it. (Race Stories, April 2004)

The privileges of whiteness are particularly difficult for white peopleto recognize partly because white people seldom think of themselves asraced. ‘Race’ is thought to have something to do with black people.Echoing Richard Dyer, Bennett and Friedman (1997, p. 53) point outthat it is precisely part of the privilege of being white that white peoplesee themselves as diverse individuals and as self-evidently irreducibleto their race. It therefore comes as a surprise when white people findthemselves seen in the eyes of black people ‘as white’ � seeing the raceof the ‘other’ is permitted to white people only. Racialized reasoning isnot simply about the assumed existence of various races but also,importantly, includes a hierarchical component in which whiteness, asboth a biological and a social condition, is privileged. Whiteness is atthe apex of a hierarchical racial order (Posel 2001, p. 71).

Far from operating merely at the symbolic level this form ofinterpretation has a real existence in the ways that white peoplecontinue to think about black people, which was a surprising insightfor many of the white participants who saw themselves at the outset asliberal, having neutral or insignificant views about race, having manyblack friends and acquaintances. One white participant recalled,during the research process, asking his white friend about the friend’scoloured girlfriend. The way that he framed the question was to ask‘how bad was she?’ Retelling the story, he later reflected:



The more black she was the worse it was, reflecting my belief thatwhite equals beautiful while black equals ugliness. I saw mywhiteness as having more value than Peter’s4 coloured girlfriendbecause she had a darker skin (which only, after all, refers to theamount of pigment in the skin). It indicates that I somehow felt likea higher grade of humanity. I realised that I unconsciously feel that Iam a better or higher quality human than those who have a darkerskin than me. This is because I have always been advantaged by mywhiteness. For example when collecting a passport or ID book I stillfeel as though because I am white I can skip the queue. I havelearned a grading system for human identity. The more black,feminine, homosexual or poor you are, the lower your grade will be.(Exam, November 2003)

The process here was one of the research subjects closely interrogatinghis own question and its hidden assumptions so that he became awareof the ways in which his racial views were operating. This would nothave been possible if the investigation were by way of superficial surveyquestionnaire-style research. Many white people hold views which theyfail to interrogate in this way, and which they believe are adequatelyhidden from their black counterparts by a veneer of middle-classpoliteness. It is precisely this veneer of polite superficiality which theblack participants in my study found maddening. Contact provides thecontext in which meaningful interactions of this kind are possible withmany participants in this process reporting their experience of it asrare and life-changing. But this kind of interaction requires consciousintervention and leadership rather than simply expecting genuine andhelpful confrontations to happen of their own accord.

Black experiences of contact

In contrast to the dominant white experience, ‘contact’ stories fromblack participants frequently recalled very negative encounters whichled to a heightened awareness of marginality. Whereas white partici-pants experienced the dominant institutional culture of the universityas ‘normal’ and had difficulty seeing what was specific or alienatingabout it, black participants very clearly experienced it as ‘white’.Because identity is so closely tied up with place, to enter into anenvironment that feels foreign and even hostile is to experience notonly a loss of the comfortable at-home familiarity of place, but also aloss of self (Dixon and Durrheim 2000, p. 36). Many whose skin colourdelineates them as marginal told stories detailing the myriad minuteadjustments and compromises that are made on a daily basis in anattempt to manage the discomforting sense of being discordant withdominant norms:

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Personally we struggled with getting used to eating with a fork andknife, but we had to learn. I didn’t want to stick out. (Essay, May2004)

I have a thick coloured accent. I admit that when speaking to whitepeople I hide this accent as this will allow them perhaps not to thinkof me as coloured but as an educated female. Although I am oftenmistaken for being Indian, my colouredness comes out when Ispeak. I try to adapt to be more acceptable. (Exam, 2003)

The pain associated with contact in the context of racism brings tomind the work of Frantz Fanon. Describing racism as a system ofunreason, Fanon argues that there is ‘nothing more neurotic . . . thancontact with unreason’ (1992, p. 225).

As long as the black man is among his own, he will have nooccasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his beingthrough others. . . . I was satisfied with an intellectual understandingof these differences. It was not really dramatic. And then . . . Andthen the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. Anunfamiliar weight burdened me. (Fanon 1992, p. 221)

In contrast to the privileged lack of consciousness of their own racewhich almost all white participants reported, one black participantdescribed how she experienced her blackness as ‘a cloud’ which wasconstantly over her. This powerfully evocative image was taken upagain and again in the weeks that followed by other participants whoused it to portray the way in which race is always with you � if you areblack.

By virtue of being black you know that you have a ‘cloud’ ofstereotypes that is always with you when you are living. This hascontributed to the lowering of success of most black students, evenat university. . . . I feel uncomfortable even in tutorials because ofhaving internalised an ideology that black people are stupid andthey do not think as a white person. Although there is talk of arainbow nation there will always be a great divide between black andwhite. (Exam, November 2003)

The image of race as cloud brought to mind Blake’s poem ‘TheLittle Black Boy’ (1789) which is discussed also by Susan Gubar (1997,p. 12) in her exploration of the subordination of blackness to whitenesswhich lies at the centre of racist ideology. In Blake’s poem the ‘LittleBlack Boy’ is black, ‘as if bereaved of light’ but his ‘soul is white’. ‘Andthese black bodies and this sunburnt face/Are but a cloud, and like a



shady grove’. In this image, blackness is synonymous with absence oflight and, by implication, of value, goodness, merit. The association ofblackness with defilement is by no means merely symbolic orimagined. Racism operates as a visceral reaction to bodies construedas ‘other’ and is experienced, as in the following extract, as a fear offilth. Here, far from benign acceptance, the reaction to the perceivedcorrupting consequences of ‘contact’ with the other is the literal desireto be disinfected:

When I first arrived at university a worrying factor for me was how Iwould share bathrooms with fellow black students. Contrary to myexpectations I found them to be the cleanest of all other race groups.While I profess my deep-seated love for black people, I am aware ofhow to a certain degree I respond to black people in a negative way.For example, a fellow Indian friend remarked how her res.neighbour, a black girl, asked her to tie her hair up into a ponytail.And she, my friend, was extremely hesitant to do so. Feelingcompelled, she did it, but afterwards washed her hands in jik[bleach]. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have felt the same.(Race Stories, April 2004)

One of the things that apartheid did, as the word implies, was toseparate people spatially. It was one of apartheid’s obvious andaxiomatic ‘achievements’ that blacks and whites had limited experienceof one another. It is often assumed that it was only whites who lived‘sheltered’ lives during apartheid but the reality is that the whole pointof apartheid was to separate everyone from everyone else. This hadmany obvious unfortunate effects but, if we take Fanon’s point,apartness was also a kind of protection: ‘In terms of race, I found thatI was very sheltered. By living in a coloured area, I had never reallycome into contact with real racism’ (Exam, November 2003). It is oneof the ironic features of apartheid’s demise that this form of‘protection’ has fallen away and the full brunt of racism is experiencedin situations of contact with the racial ‘other’. If apartheid was aboutkeeping people ‘in their place’ then the present moment can beunderstood as characterized by struggles to redefine place. Thesestruggles include processes of withdrawal, renegotiation of meaning,appropriation and, importantly, the emergence of new legitimizingnarratives of separation and exclusion.

Black participants, including many from neighbouring states,reported seeing themselves as black for the first time, or at leastcoming to a new awareness of their black identity only throughexperiences that placed them in prolonged contact with whites, forexample at school, university or work. For some this is experienced asmerely a strangeness, a newness: ‘I remember being fascinated by being

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in the same lecture theatre as two white students. It was my firstinteraction with another race, and it felt strange as well as beinglectured to by a white lecturer for the first time’ (Exam, November2003). For others, the experience is far more difficult to cope with.Very few of those in positions of social dominance are aware of theextent of anger and alienation experienced by some of the people theyinteract with daily.

The apartheid story is rendered in an infinite variety of ways to thenext generation who, in turn, incorporate that story into their ownrealities in many different guises. One participant spoke of how, livingin the countryside ‘where there were no white people’, his grand-parents had shared their past experiences with him. He described hisresponse as a filling of ‘his heart and mind with anger when it came toother races, especially the white race’. When it came to coming touniversity he found the ‘atmosphere’ uncomfortable ‘because it turnedout to be a place full of different races’. He found it particularlydifficult to cope with having ‘to share almost everything includingbooks, places to sleep, places of entertainment, places to eat, etc.’. Hewould spend much of his time alone in his room. ‘It was especially badwhen some of his friends would chat with white people. . . . To him,people were not supposed to eat, sleep and talk together if they werefrom different racial groups’ (Race Stories, April 2004). For thisparticipant the dissonance that results from experiencing the perceivedinappropriateness of different races together in a single space is sogreat that it results in what Dixon and Durrheim have described asdefensive withdrawal: ‘individuals avoiding certain places in order topreserve self-integrity’ (2000, p. 37). Black participants frequentlyspoke of feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the sheer numbers of white peopleencountered in the shared space of the university. One wrote that she‘couldn’t stand them [whites]. After all, white people are so different. Itwas so bad that she wanted to leave the university’ (Race Stories, April2004).

Apartheid ensured that interactions between the different ‘races’defined by official ideology often took place in very constricted andstereotypical settings. Many parents of black children naturally set outdeliberately to shield children from anticipated harmful interactionsand situations. Isolation fostered fear and suspicion of all thoseregarded as ‘other’ and resulted in a shared disinclination to perforatethe barriers of race. For this reason, those occasions or contexts inwhich ‘encounters’ with the other do happen emerge as significantmemory experiences in people’s lives. Such encounters occurredsporadically, incidentally and atypically before 1994 but after thatdate become much more widespread. Many children born to parentswho had experienced the full force of apartheid and tried to shieldtheir children from its worst effects found themselves being thrust,



from 1994, into newly available opportunities, particularly in educa-tion. The shift is one from encountering ‘the other’ in a limited rangeof highly unequal settings to encounters as neighbours, fellowstudents, potential lovers, opponents and friends. In many of thestories told by black participants initial optimism quickly gives way tohostility at the reality of continued white dominance accompanied byunacknowledged attitudes of superiority. This hostility often extendsalso to those whom apartheid designated ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’:

He doesn’t like Indians, especially when he hears them saying theyare ‘black’. He thinks that Indians are not trustworthy becauseduring apartheid they behaved like white people. They even calledblack people ‘kaffirs’. Now that the black government is in power,they say they are ‘black’. He is trying to put everything behind himand concentrate on his studies but he finds it hard to deal with whathappened to him and his family because of the Indians. He is inresidence and when an Indian guy comes close to him or tries to talkto him, he ignores him. (Race Stories, April 2004)

While apartheid’s spatial barriers have fallen, its racial categoriesremain influential in the social imaginary.

Thus black participants evinced differing responses to interracialcontact. These included attempts to remake the self in order to fit inbetter with the hegemony, active rejection of the gaze and the adoptionof an oppositional stance, and complex intervals between the two.These differing responses echo the work of Somali psychologistBulhan (1977) in which he outlines three major identification patternsamong the black intelligentsia. He terms these ‘capitulation’ to thedominant culture and ideology, ‘revitalisation’, which involves arepudiation of the dominant culture accompanied by a defensiveromanticism of the indigenous culture, and ‘radicalisation’ in whichindividuals come to be able to engage with the dominant culture onmore equal terms (cited in Moosa et al. 1997, p. 4). For many of theblack South African participants in this research process, theseprocesses were experienced sequentially. Participants recalled startingout as children who equated whiteness with perfection and blacknesswith inferiority:

She always assumed that being what she was was a temporarytransition period, that being black would not be her identity forever.Every night before she fell asleep, she prayed for what was of mostimportance to her then. . . . That nightmares would stay at bay, thatno-one would kill her parents, and the most pressing � that the nextmorning she would wake up with soft blonde hair that moved in thewind, and eyes of a bright colour like those of the people she

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encountered every day. At an age where one would think young kidsworry about having nice toys and stable best friends and the coolestcrayons and of course the most practical lunch, she wondered whyher lunch smelled only of heavy suppers of the night before,wondered why her hair didn’t return to its old ‘position’ when sheawoke from nap time, assumed that her bum and breasts were biggerbecause she didn’t do enough sport. She thought all this wouldchange with time, because what she saw every day, who sheencountered all day every day, was the norm. White people arethe standard, everything else was a deviation. But then, white peopledidn’t register as white people � they were just people, human beings.(Race Stories, April 2004).

Encounters with dominance often accentuate feelings of inferiorityand result in the attempt to adapt or accommodate oneself to theexpectations of the dominant gaze but such encounters also hold theseeds of possibility for the construction of an oppositional identity.Inevitably, face-to-face contact with white people on a daily basis mustreveal that not all whites are intellectually, ethically or physicallysuperior. At the same time however, social relations continue to bestructured, hierarchical, racialized assumptions and patterns ofbehaviour. For Fanon, as with many of the black participants in thisstudy, the only solution is self-assertion: ‘I resolved, since it wasimpossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assertmyself as a black man. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, thereremained only one solution: to make myself known’ (1992, p. 223,emphasis in original). This solution is not without its painful contra-dictions in the context of white racial hegemony, as suggested to me inthe account of a young woman who spoke, on the one hand, of being‘black and proud’ but, on the other, of feeling the need to shower twicea day and hand-wash her underwear:

I say things like ‘I’m black and proud’ . . . but I do know my ownpains of growing up black. I live it every day. In the way I do certainthings, like I have to shower every morning regardless of a nightshower and I do not put my underwear into the washing machine.I hand-wash it every day. (Exam, 2003)

This young woman’s choice of anecdote resonates startlingly withFanon who refers to ‘catchphrases strewn over the surface of things:nigger underwear smells of nigger; nigger teeth are white; nigger feetare big’ (1992, p. 224). Fanon goes on to write of ‘Shame. Shame andself-contempt. Nausea. When people like me, they tell me it is in spite ofmy colour. When they dislike me, they point out that it is not because ofmy colour. Either way, I am locked into the infernal circle’ (ibid.).



Many of the white participants in this research process started outfrom the position that apartheid was not of their making and had littleto do with them, a position of confusion about why they as youngwhite South Africans could somehow be regarded as complicit.Moreover, they asked why apartheid was such an issue for blackstudents when they had not, after all, really known its full burden. Inshort, they felt that black South Africans should ‘get over it’, seriouslyunderestimating the continued reality of apartheid experiences inpeople’s lives. In response, one black participant wrote as follows:

It is easy to say that I’m not racist and that I am not affected byrace. The reality of it is how do I feel about that white man who usedto drive around in a Hippo5 shooting teargas in my community? Thesame man would come at odd hours of the night to arrest my familyand often they would be thrown into detention for months. . . .Today, I sit next to the siblings of those who were the iron fist inmy community and they want me to believe that I was not directlyaffected by the policies of the apartheid regime. They are quick toremind me that was all in the past but it is this past that haunts meto this day. One afternoon I witnessed the IFP attack the communityof Mofolo, one of the townships that make up Soweto. In that raid afriend of mine was raped and then stabbed several times until shebreathed no more. She was only 18. Her 16-year-old sister was alsoraped and stabbed to death. Her mother who was 42 years old wasalso raped and killed. Her grandmother who was 60 was also rapedand stabbed to death. These are experiences some of us will carry toour graves yet some people want us to forget and act like it neverhappened. (Course Evaluation,6 2004)

For the most part, in contemporary South Africa where thedominant narrative is one of black empowerment, aggressive indivi-dualism and an impatience with what the hegemonic logic hassucceeded in casting as ‘backward-looking’ fixations with the past,such stories have become what James Scott has termed ‘hiddentranscripts’: because of their counter-hegemonic character they emergeapparently suddenly and startlingly to challenge the discourses whichserve the interests of the powerful. As Scott points out, the strugglebetween the dominant and the dominated is not merely a struggle overmaterial resources. ‘It is also a struggle over the appropriation ofsymbols, a struggle over how the past and the present should beunderstood and labelled, a struggle to identify causes and assessblame’ (1985, p. xvii). To have access to social power is to be in aposition to determine what Scott has termed the ‘public transcript’(1990, p. 5). When dominant actors are forced to confront the hiddentranscripts of the dominated as they were in this research process

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involving the public articulation of stories, the effect can be politicallyexplosive because it has the potential to tear apart what Statman andAnsell term ‘the system’s political and representational ecology’ (2000,p. 281). An example of one such moment in which a prevalent hiddentranscript was suddenly and startlingly made public was when a youngblack woman, whom no one had hitherto really noticed sitting in thefront of the room, stood up during a discussion on race and waved herarm across the room, saying, ‘it’s you whites, that’s the problem’, herbreaking voice filled with loathing and anger. Her words were met withvigorous nods of recognition from the black participants present. Formost South Africans this is an unusual experience because relationsbetween black and white remain in so many instances superficiallyfriendly, the public transcript of hip, happening rainbow nationalismmasking underlying suspicions, even hatreds.

Conclusion

What Deborah Posel has termed ‘apartheid’s modes of racial reason-ing’ (2001, p. 70) remain widely normalized in the modalities ofthought and social practices of the everyday life of South Africans,even of the present generation who have had relatively scant directcontact with apartheid. Apartheid’s starting premise was that SouthAfrica consists of a number of races which differ from one another in avariety of ways. Its institutional, social and political structures createda society fissured along racial fault lines. In this sense it became itsown best justification as the experience of apartness normalized andnaturalized social differences. More than a decade after apartheid’sformal demise South Africans continue to take the existence ofapartheid’s racial menu as self-evident: there are ‘other races’ andone has expectations of various kinds about how these people behave,whether or not they are clean, noisy, intelligent, trustworthy. Evenwhen experience proves those expectations to be invalid, the mode ofreasoning is not replaced by the dissolution of racial categories butrather, by new generalizations � blacks are in fact ‘the cleanest of all’.

Apartheid and colonialism left South African society scattered withpowerful institutions whose history and residual character is colonialand ‘white’ in very deeply embedded ways. The historically whiteuniversities are among these. There is little documentation oracknowledgement of the extent to which black South Africans,entering these institutional cultures � human, architectural, pedagogic,social � often for the first time, frequently find the experience deeplypainful, dislocating, disruptive, unsettling, angering, confusing anddifficult. The psychologically testing nature of early encounters withthe racial ‘other’ is seldom fully acknowledged particularly by those



whose skin colour accords them a privileged place within the existinghierarchy of racial reasoning.

In response, many of those disadvantaged in hidden but powerfulways by these institutional cultures that continue to characterize manylocalities in South Africa have sought to employ race in new ways. Thisgoes not only to the obvious mechanisms of race as utilized inaffirmative action programmes but also to more subtle forms of racialpolicing in which those within the category demarcated ‘formerlyoppressed’ who might most readily be in a position to benefit fromdemocracy’s fruits are policed from ‘within’ as deficiently or impro-perly black. In this way there is an active attempt to shore upapartheid’s potentially crumbling racial edifice and to propose ways ofauthentically being black which define integration with racial ‘others’as betrayal. In part this is a response to the inadequacy of programmesof redress which wield race as a blunt instrument, with insufficientattention to questions of power and privilege that characterizerelations not only across races but within all these categories.

To regard cordial relations, the absence of overt conflict or physicalconfrontation as a mark of racial harmony is clearly a mistake. BlackSouth Africans experience the absence of a willingness to engagepassionately and sincerely with questions of prejudice, stereotypesand racism as deeply disrespectful and a mark of continuing whitearrogance. This attitude, which one person described as ‘the wide blue-eyed smile that never reaches the eyes’, emerged as far more offensiveto the black participants in this research process than stereotypicalremarks or attitudes that were openly expressed. It may seem prosaicto note that apartheid’s legacy runs deep but across our society there isa significant failure fully to acknowledge, or respectfully anddedicatedly to engage with, its continued presence in our lives. Onthe part of white South Africans in particular there is little recognitionof how far-reaching and courageous was the liberation movement’sbanner of non-racialism as contrasted both with programmes whicheffectively left whites out of the picture altogether and with thoselabelled ‘multiracial’ which accepted the apartheid categories as agiven starting point for political action. While there is much talk of thegoals of social redress and the exigencies of service delivery, non-racialism receives less press these days but it too is one of the goals ofliberation that is yet to be realized not only for South Africans but forhumanity. We should not hope for it to arise naturally and inevitablyfrom the removal of formal barriers to inter-racial contact.

Notes

1. These categories are of apartheid’s making but continue to be employed across the

political spectrum because they continue to be socially and politically important for purposes

1448 Louise Vincent


of redress as well as analysis. Within the logic of this system of classification, ‘Indian’ refers to

people of Asian descent, ‘Coloured’ to those of mixed race heritage and ‘African’ to those

who are indigenous black African. ‘White’ refers to those of colonial descent. The boundaries

between these putative categories are clearly entirely fictional. Nevertheless, in Dyer’s terms,

the power of this racial ‘imagery’ persists.

2. The stories have been slightly edited for length, grammar and sense. The 2004 stories

arose from a brief in which the students were told to ‘write down a race story or stories’ �they were encouraged to write about themselves in the third person, a technique that is

thought to encourage ‘pure’ description as opposed to justification or explanation.

3. As part of the research/teaching cycle students wrote an exam in which they were asked

to ‘tell your own race story and use the literature that you were exposed to during the course

to analyze that story’.

4. All names have been changed.

5. The Hippo was an armoured vehicle used to police black townships during apartheid.

6. At the end of each research/teaching cycle participants were given the opportunity to

write about the experience. The task was open-ended in that participants could write

anonymously about any aspect of how they experienced their participation, the role of the

teacher/researcher, fellow participants, etc.

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Environmental Psychology, vol. 16, pp. 205�20

1450 Louise Vincent


LOUISE VINCENT is Associate Professor in the Department ofPolitical and International Studies at Rhodes University.ADDRESS: Department of Political and International Studies,PO Box 94, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa.Email: [email protected]



The limitations of 'inter-racial contact': stories from young South Africa

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