BLACKS WHO TWANG AND OTHER TRAVESTIES

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation online about how black people navigate white spaces and more often than not, shrink in those spaces.

This particular discussion was about black people who have never encountered white people. It got me thinking, particularly about the concept of intelligence and how we measure it. It is taken for granted that as a black person, the more convincing your accent is the more intelligent you are, the more adept you are at going toe to toe with a white individual the smarter you are.

This person’s narration of her experience, having been educated in black township schools and then being selected to attend an interschool’s camp where she had to engage with white people, was uncomfortable to read. She spoke of how her white colleagues were the most confident and outspoken, followed by the black pupils who were exposed to whiteness and knew how to survive in those spaces, and coming in at the tail end of the pack was the black students whose tongues couldn’t quite curl around the jokes and whose frame of reference was entirely different.

The point of bringing this up was to highlight the pressure to assimilate to whiteness. It may not come in your primary education or even secondary and high school education but come it will because this world and the systems that are in place – educational and otherwise – are designed to exalt whiteness. Now I’ll tell you why this made me uncomfortable. I fall into the category of blacks who grew up exposed to whiteness.
I lived in a pretty insulated village where white people had created their own ecosystem of sorts – the schools were segregated (although very subtly done), domestic workers and the field workers would get rations every Friday, enough to keep them coming back for another week.

When I look back at it now, it is all good and well to create jobs but when are we interrogating the sort of skills we are giving black people and by extension the kind of jobs we resign them to?
Anyway, so here I was having a childhood quite similar to that of my white friends, we had similar interests, we’d have sleepovers, we’d share lunches and had inside jokes.

What I remember retrospectively in shame now is how when we went to high school and when pupils from schools outside of our village joined us we would mock them, we didn’t understand why this one boy always stood up to answer a question in class.
I’m horrified now because the awakening of my consciousness allows it. We all assimilate to whiteness, every single thing we do is geared towards being palatable to white people.

We talk with our inside voices
We never want to come across as the angry black.
We put on personas and accents.
We roll our eyes when we talk about our elders.

And that is my gripe with this forced assimilation, I say forced because where is the choice in a world that reinforces that if you do not behave a certain way you will not progress. I have a real problem with how it forces us to forget who we are, we look down on respect, sense of community, and it really just creates a dissonance that takes too many years to untangle.

I’m appalled at the fact that whiteness as a concept rewards what it identifies with and harshly punishes anything that opposes it. The friends I mentioned earlier who we had similar interests with – none of them remain in my life. Even my Grade I teacher unfriended me on Facebook because I spoke about race relations, how uncultured of me, right?

My heart bleeds for our parents because on some level they had to have resented who we were becoming. Shout out to them though for figuring out that the best way to give us a shot in life was to arm us with the tools to flourish in a system that is designed to crush us. And shame on us for thinking that that in any way makes us better than someone whose parents either chose not to do that or could not afford to do that. The bottom line is we have more in common with each other than with the whiteness we try to rub shoulders with.

All of these musings got me thinking about graduations and how black families are so beautifully festive at these ceremonies. Because we get it, even if you have back to back graduations in your family, on some level we know that we were never meant to partake in these celebrations, we were never meant to succeed and when we do – we ululate with the force of our ancestors behind us and we summon more strength to triumph in the next arena which we were never meant to; the work space. Whenever I need to remember who I am, whenever the system beats me down, I play Thandiswa Mazwai’s Nizalwa Ngobani and I am revived. Stay revived.

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