Yesterday I was sitting in a pub in Rondebosch (the one I tend to frequent) and the pub, which is by all accounts a 'black' pub, was inundated with whites. It was rather amusing, since I knew that the reason likely had to do with the fact that the new school year is upon us, and there are American overseas students aplenty who are doing a semester abroad and mostly living in Rondebosch as near as possible to UCT. The pub in question is the main one down the hill from UCT, and clearly these curious folk have an eye for some 'cultural immersion'.
But then I got to thinking, isn't this sort of experience somewhat 'inauthentic'? Is it not the case that people see you as white or American or whatever before they see you as human, and doesn't that affect the way they approach and/or treat you? When my friends had temporarily left me sitting alone with my beer, a young white South African came up to me and, a bit tipsy, said 'nice to see a white bro at the Pig'. In terms of experience, authenticity seems to require that you are seen as a human being before you are seen as a certain TYPE of human being. It was similar when I was staying in Chamanculo; I wanted to know how people 'normally' acted, but given that I was a white guy walking around a slum in Maputo with a smile on my face and seemingly reckless abandon, their behaviour around me was obviously affected.
I suppose the best example of an 'authentic' experience is John Howard Griffin's experience in Black Like Me, e.g.:
* * *
I told myself that I was tired, that I must not judge these men who picked me up and for the price of a ride submitted me to the swamps of their fantasy lives. They showed me something that all men have but seldom bring to the surface, since most men seek health. The boy ended up wanting me to expose myself to him, saying he had never seen a Negro naked. I turned mute, indrawn, giving no answer. The silence rattled between us and I felt sorry for the reprimand that grew from me to him in the silence. I did not want this cruelty to him, since I knew that he showed me a side of his nature that was special to the night and the situation, a side rarely brought to light in his everyday living. I stared at the dimly lighted car dashboard and saw him attending an aunt’s funeral, having Sunday dinner with his parents, doing some kindness for a friend—for he was kind. How would I let him see that I understood and that I still respected him, and that I formed no judgment against him for this momentary slip? For instead of seeing it as a manifestation of some poor human charity, he might view it as confirmation that Negroes are insensitive to sexual aberration, that they think nothing of it—and this would carry on the legend that has so handicapped the Negro.
“I wasn’t going to do anything to you,” he said in a voice lifeless with humiliation. “I’m not queer or anything.”
“Of course not,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s just that I don’t get a chance to talk to educated Negroes—people that can answer questions.”
“You make it more complicated than it is,” I said. “If you want to know about the sexual morals of the Negro—his practices and ideals—it’s no mystery. These are human matters, and the Negro is the same human as the white man. Just ask yourself how it is for a white man and you’ll know the answers. Negro trash is the same as white trash. Negro decency is about the same, too.”
“But there are differences. The social studies I’ve read…”
“They don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white,” I said. “They only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and less leisure, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don’t spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man’s conditioning.”
“Yes, but Negroes have more illegitimate children, earlier loss of virginity and more crime—these are established facts,” he insisted without unkindness.
“The fact that the white race has the same problems proves these are not Negro characteristics, but the product of our condition as men,” I said. “When you force humans into a subhuman mode of existence, this always happens. Deprive a man of any contact with the pleasures of the spirit and he’ll fall completely into those of the flesh.”
“But we don’t deprive you people of the ‘pleasures of the spirit,’” he said.
“In most places we can’t go to the concerts, the theater, the museums, public lectures… or even to the library. Our schools in the South don’t compare to the white schools, poor as they are. You deprive a man of educational opportunities and he’ll have no knowledge of the great civilizing influences of art, history, literature, and philosophy. Many Negroes don’t even know these things exist. With practically nothing to exalt to the mind or exercise the spirit, any man is going to sink to his lowest depths. It becomes vicious—and tragic.”
“I can’t imagine how it must be,” he said. “I don’t think it’s fair. But just the same, plenty of whites don’t have access to these things—to art, literature, history, and philosophy. Some of the finest people I know live in the country where they never get to museums, concerts.”
“Living in the country, they are surrounded by natural museums and concerts,” I said. “Besides, those doors are always open to them. The Negro, too, fares better in the country. But most are deprived of education. Ignorance keeps them poor, and when a town-dwelling Negro is poor, he lives in the ghetto. His wife has to work usually, and this leaves the children without parental companionship. In such places, where all of man’s time is spent just surviving, he rarely knows what it means to read a great book. He has grown up and now sees his children grow up in squalor. His wife usually earns more than he. He is thwarted in his need to be father-of-the-household. When he looks at his children and his home, he feels the guilt of not having given them something better. His only salvation is not to give a damn finally, or else he will fall into despair. In despair, a man’s sense of virtue is dulled. He no longer cares. He will do anything to escape it—steal or commit acts of violence—or perhaps try to lose himself in sensuality. Most often the sex-king is just a poor devil trying to prove the manhood that his whole existence denies. This is what the whites call the ‘sorry nigger’. Soon he will either desert his home or become so unbearable he is kicked out. This leaves the mother to support the children alone. To keep food in their bellies, she has to spend most of her time away from them, working. This leaves the children to the streets, prey to any sight, any conversation, any sexual experiment that comes along to make their lives interesting or pleasurable. To a young girl who has nothing, has never known anything, the baubles she can get—both in a kind of crude affection and in gifts or money—by granting sex to a man or boy appeal to her as toys to a child. She gets pregnant sometimes and then the vicious cycle is given impetus. In some instances the mother cannot make enough to support her children, so she sells her sex for what she can get. This gets easier and easier until she comes up with still another child to abort or support. But none of this is ‘Negro-ness’.”
“I don’t know…” he sighed. “It looks like a man could do better.”
“It looks that way to you, because you can see what would be better. The Negro knows something is terribly wrong, but with things the way they are, he can’t know that something better actually exists on the other of work and study. We are all born blank. It’s the same for blacks or whites or any other shade of man. Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty of the ghetto.”
He drove without speaking through a thundershower that crinkled the windshield and raised the hum of his tires an octave.
“But the situation is changing,” I said after a time. “The Negro may not understand exactly how, but he knows one thing—the only way out of this tragedy is through education, training. Thousands of them sacrifice everything to get the education, to prove once and for all that the Negro’s capacity for learning, for accomplishment, is equal to that of any other man—that the pigment has nothing to do with degrees of intelligence, talent or virtue. This isn’t just wishful thinking. It’s been proved conclusively in every field.”
“We don’t hear about those things,” he said.
“I know. Southern newspapers print every rape, attempted rape, suspected rape, and ‘maybe rape’, but outstanding accomplishment is not considered newsworthy. Even the Southern Negro has little chance to know this, since he reads the same slanted reports in the newspapers.”
The young man slowed to a halt in a little settlement to let me out.
“I’m sorry about a while ago—I don’t know what got into me,” he said.
“I’ve already forgotten it.”
“No offense?”
“No offense.”
“Okay. Good luck to you.”
* * *
The truth is that for the fatally curious individual, you want people to be people, and you want to know what people are 'really' like, and it ends up being a sort of Catch-22 situation, since at the outset people treat you based on what they see in your appearance, and then once they get to know you, they treat you as a friend. There is seemingly no 'middle ground' where you can experience an authentic 'first impression' from another; i.e. 'pretend I'm just like anyone else; how would you react?' But in the end, maybe this is a good thing, because, as was discussed in the previous post, it means that there is no concept of 'normal': the unique attributes of any individual depict how he/she is reacted to. Still, though, I believe it would be nice to walk around a place like Khayelitsha without drawing attention to myself, to see how 'day-to-day struggles' unfold.
Maybe I need to have a talk with John Howard Griffin's dermatologist...
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