Dangerous experiments

Submitted by Dylan Edwards

In 1971, Stanford University Professor Philip Zimbardo enlisted a number of university students as subjects of what became known as the Stanford prison experiments. The purpose of the experiments was to determine the behavioural and psychological effects of imprisonment on ordinary people.

At the beginning of the experiment, students were randomly assigned roles as either “prisoner” or “guard”. So horrific were the results that after only five days (of a planned two weeks), the experiments were called off. The humiliation and cruelty that the “prisoners” had suffered at the hands of the “guards” was so severe that a number of “prisoners” had suffered emotional breakdowns.

Picture the images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison that grabbed headlines in 2004 and you get the idea. (Zimbardo was, in fact, called on as an expert witness in defence of one of the American soldiers who featured in some of those now-infamous pictures.)

Zimbardo’s unsettling conclusion was that ordinary people (his students were liberal, anti-war students at a top university) are capable of doing evil things when they are placed in certain situations. More recently, in his criticism of the US government, he has argued that a “system” can incline good people to behave in ways that they would otherwise find morally repugnant.

South Africa’s now infamous “race video” was produced by four students — all middle class, highly educated young men who are too young to have much memory of South Africa before the demise of apartheid. This has made the video all the more newsworthy the world over: that children of the so-called “rainbow generation” who never knew segregated schools or cities, who have spent most of their lives in a country with a black president, could still have so little regard for the dignity of four members of staff for no other discernable reason than the colour of their skin.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the four students who are responsible for the video is that they have expressed surprise at the public reaction — for them, it was simply a game. The press has also observed that the video was made with an element of playfulness, labelling the scenes depicted as “mock initiation”. Indeed, watching the video, the impression that one gets is of boys playing a game. They are quite theatrical about the whole thing; their roles seem almost rehearsed. The whole production even manages to parody cooking programmes and “reality” TV.

They all protest against accusations of racism, and as evidence of their non-racist credentials, the four have pointed out that they grew up with a black woman in the kitchen and often played soccer with the (black) children of farmworkers. It may seem strange to some observers that the four even dare claim not to be racist. But I think the explanation is quite simple: they think racism is a bad thing and as far as they can see, they have not done anything bad. This is because they inhabit a space where they naturally have that kind of authority over black people, even those old enough to be their parents.

They point to their childhood friends on the farm, but physical proximity to black people is not the same as non-racialism. That we have video footage of the four treating members of staff at their university as their personal playthings is quite likely evidence of how they played with those black children back on the farm — I personally doubt that it was the young white children who jumped over fences to collect a misguided shot at goal. I also don’t think that claiming a black “second mom” clears you of charges of racism, particularly if this black mom is living in cramped worker’s quarters, given virtually no pay, and lives on a diet of door-stop polony sandwiches, while white mom drives to town to have her nails done.

The reaction in much of the Afrikaans media in particular was to argue that the video was the work of a group of twisted individuals, acting alone, and in no way representative of white South Africa in general. But I, for one, don’t buy that. Not that I think all of white South Africa is violently racist, but to condemn the actions of the Free State Four without taking steps towards serious systemic redress in South Africa is a short-sighted approach that treats symptoms instead of causes. It is a bit like stitching up the wound on a child and then sending him off to play in the traffic; you can be pretty sure that a more serious injury is imminent.

For Zimbardo, it was as simple as telling people that the experiment was over, and taking away the roles he had arbitrarily handed out. While our task is much more difficult, it is time for us to call off our experiment. Whites can no longer be thought of as “guards”, blacks no longer as “prisoners” and all vestiges of power and subordination that are imagined to reside in the colour of one’s skin have to be revealed as imaginary. This is no doubt a difficult task, but to ignore it is to sit around and wait for the next Reitz video — or the next Skielik shooting.

Dylan Edwards has worked as a security guard, waiter and English teacher. Upon hitting 25 he had a quarter-life crisis and re-enrolled at university and is currently working towards an MSc in political sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science