Race vs culture

A lot has been written on TL about race and about racism — some of it insightful, some less so, to say the least. I usually steer clear of writing about this because it is such a sensitive issue and because certain idiots will always try to capitalise on anything one says that may appear in any way as creating an opening for a personal attack. However, when the woman in my life and I were enjoying our pizza at a well-known pizzeria in Port Elizabeth last night, we were struck (in my case for the umpteenth time) by the friendliness that exists between customers (including ourselves) and the almost exclusively black staff at the restaurant and I decided it was time to write something on this theme.

It is not only at this specific restaurant that I have observed such cordiality — at coffee shops (including the one at the university where I work, where I often sit and work on my laptop) and other such establishments it appears to me to be no different. From this it seems reasonable to conclude that, at least at a pragmatic level, race relations in South Africa are in good shape. Invariably the staff — mostly, if not exclusively black these days — and white customers communicate well, which has not surprised me, given the conspicuous friendliness with which waitresses and waiters approach you. It helps a bit, I believe, if one speaks some Xhosa (or another indigenous language), as I do, but that does not appear to be essential.

Taking this restaurant experience as one’s point of departure, I must confess that I do not see any reason why race relations in this country cannot be harmonious. This may seem naïve to some, and I am certainly not blind to the manner in which professional competition between black and white may affect such relations for the worse, or to the vested interests that some whites and blacks may have in promoting feelings of suspicion between the races, or, for that matter, to the lingering racial fears that still exist regarding the racial other in some black and white quarters.

My point is simply this: if, at such a pragmatic communicative level, one witnesses such friendly, harmonious exchanges between people of different races, should one not be entitled to take this as a model of what race relations could be?

Granted, not everyone seems to be able to look at people of other races and cultures as people — that is, as being human — no less than oneself. For me this has never been a problem. I recall one day telling my grandmother on the farm where I grew up that it was strange not to have my Xhosa friends visit me in the farmhouse, while I could visit them in their “stroois”, and asking her why the differently coloured farm cats, some tabby, some black, some ginger, seemed to treat one another as “cats”, that is, playing, sleeping, and sometimes fighting among themselves in such a way that they clearly recognised each other’s equal “catness”. Which seemed to me to entail a lesson for humans.

Things are never that simple for us so-called “higher animals”, of course. For one thing, other animals don’t seem to be susceptible to the divisive force of that strange thing we call ideology (or discourse). I mentioned “other races and cultures” above and with a reason. The history of racism is one with many shifts and contortions, and has to do with, among many other things, the history of imperial conquests, of totalitarianism, and of fascism (in Germany and in South Africa).

Reflection on race and racism also has a history. During the 1980s, I recall, there was a debate on race and racism in the journal Critical Inquiry, and what struck me at the time was that most of the contributors did not even regard “race” as a useful or valid category for cultural, social or anthropological analysis, preferring “culture” in its place — a preference predicated on the belief that it is one’s culture, and not the pigmentation of one’s skin, which “makes you what you are”.

This may seem plausible, and up to a point I believe that it is right. In fact, the critics of what Hardt and Negri call “modern racism” in Empire, rejected the latter position precisely on the grounds that, unlike the one that views culture as being constitutive of one’s identity, it was essentialist in a biological sense, that is, it reduced people to an essential racial condition because of the biological fact of their skin colour. Moreover, this “modern racist” position was hierarchical — some races were regarded as being intrinsically superior to others, and this was unchangeable. Nazi ideology concerning Jews, as well as apartheid, represented such a modern racist position.

So, if one can reject “modern racism” on the assumption of the priority of culture over genetic racial endowment, what is wrong with granting it (culture) the fundamental role in determining what one is as an individual subject? It would have the further advantage of dispensing with hierarchy, in other words, if one’s culture is the source of one’s identity, this means that all cultures are fundamentally “equal”, even if they are “different”.

There’s the rub. As Hardt and Negri observe, referring among others to Balibar’s and to Deleuze and Guattari’s reflections in this respect, this new emphasis on culture as the provenance of one’s “cultural identity” is just a subtly disguised form of racism in a “postmodern” sense. The granting of priority to culture has a rider, after all, which states something like this: it is not one’s skin colour that essentially determines what you are in the hierarchy of races, “race” is simply an index of culture, and this is where the roots of one’s collective and individual identity lie. But — and this is a crucial “but” — one can NEVER shake off one’s cultural determinants. Once a Jew, always a Jew; once an Arab, always an Arab; once an African, always an African; once a European, always a European and so on.

What makes this a position of “postmodern” racism is the fact that it recognises cultural “difference” and attributes a fundamental, pluralist “equality” to all cultures, but subtly, insidiously, it reintroduces the racist virus by insisting that one should recognise and “respect” these cultural differences. Paradoxically, it acknowledges that cultures are historically determined and therefore contingent (they could have developed differently) BUT simultaneously claims that recognising existing cultural differences is necessary in practice to be able to preserve different cultures and to promote intercultural understanding.

The upshot is that, again paradoxically, the affirmation of the primacy of culture for identity serves the same purpose that the essentialism of modern racism served: it surreptitiously promotes the preservation of “race” but this time in the guise of “culture”. At an ideological or discursive level, therefore, by implication it imprisons individuals in their cultures of origin, as it were.

Postmodern racism is wrong, of course, that is why I said earlier that one can agree with the culture-primacy position “up to a point”. It is wrong for the simple reason that, as psychoanalytic theory as well as post-Saussurian, poststructuralist linguistics teaches one, no one who has acquired language — any language, which always has a diacritical or differential structure — is ever “imprisoned” in his or her culture. From the moment that one has language — which is inescapably the repository of cultural values — one is able to use that very language which is the bearer of one’s culture to criticise one’s very “own” culture, and either attempt to transform it, or (if that seems a futile exercise) reject and abandon it, in the process appropriating a different cultural position.

In short, as a linguistic being, every person is capable of adopting a critical position vis-á-vis one’s “home” culture, and of migrating to a different, more acceptable cultural position. If this were not the case, people like myself (and there are many) would have remained caught in the straitjacket of apartheid ideology, because we grew up in that cultural context, instead we rejected it. At the cost, of course, of being regarded with severe suspicion and even of being ostracised. Criticism of one’s own culture always comes at a price. But if it is done on the basis of a set of preferred values, it is worth it, and in the process one becomes an autonomous being in so far as one escapes from the clutches of ideological suffocation.

Not everyone is capable of doing this, of course. Most people are too caught up in the comfort zone of their “racial” or cultural ideologies or discourses. But perhaps there is hope for moving beyond these realms of zombie-like imitations of what one’s “culture” seems to prescribe in the name of cultural “purity” or “loyalty” — judging by the apparently healthy state of race relations in South Africa as displayed at the pragmatic social level of interaction between races in restaurants, people are (re-?) discovering their common humanity in their ability to overcome so-called cultural differences effortlessly at the level of verbal communication.