We’re all trapped in a web of racism – we must all fight to break it

This week in “How racism shows up when you least expect it”, we have no shortage of potential topics across the breadth of the South African social firmament.

Our fascinating society still surprises us on that front as we clumsily battle to dismantle the centuries of discrimination and systematic exploitation our world is built on.

Weird things happen. Mistakes are made – some of them trivial, others more serious. Most have fairly obvious causes. Still, we find ourselves asking: “But is it racism?”

Street names. City names. Admissions policy at shopping malls. Picture selection, even. There’s probably some guys at the TRESemmé agency still kicking themselves for not choosing different pics to go with the words! People in the mainstream media will have had similar experiences.

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As a white person raised in an indisputably racist culture, I have been battling to unlearn racism all my life. I am also constantly wrestling with the issue in my mind. Lately, when it comes to racism I am starting to believe two things…

1. Yes, it is racism. Racism suffuses the entire system we live and work in. Whether consciously or through gradual evolution, an evil exploitive system has arisen which we all are part of. We feel the effects of racism and we are agents of it. The degree  varies widely. White people are most likely to benefit directly from it and black people are directly harmed by it.

2. Fixing racism means changing the system. We are finding that replacing the white administrators of a racist system with black people will not necessarily stop the system from being racist.

Far be it for me to rule categorically on what is and is not racism, but you see aspects of systematic racism daily. If I walk out of the door of the flat where I work remotely from my laptop, I will bump into a man who must spend a fortune commuting to my complex so he can labour all day for a fraction of what I earn. That’s structural racism right there.

Systemic racism finds expression in the systems we exist in, as well as the way we ourselves behave.

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If someone drops an n-bomb when referring to black people, that’s them expressing their culture. It’s either a culture of blackness and their showing solidarity in the face of structural racism; or it’s a culture of a more dismissive or prejudiced attitude to blackness.

If someone tells a black person in traditional dress to leave a shopping mall, that too is an expression of internalised racist attitudes – whether the person expressing them is black or not.

When someone is shot by a police officer for drinking beer in their yard during lockdown, that’s racism.

In both instances, personal actions are an expression of the broader systemic environment. This is not to say we are passive agents of our upbringing and helpless to do anything about it. On the contrary, we should fight racism in ourselves and our environment wherever we can.

For some of us, like myself and my non-black brethren, there will be more to unlearn than for others. But we stay learning, we stay working, we stay fighting the racist system that robs black people of opportunities and ensures the poor people of our planet are overwhelmingly black.

We look within and we try to identify the parts of ourselves that help to support racism – whether consciously or not. We take note when others point it out to us.

When they do so, we should perhaps try not to take it personally. Being trapped in a racist system doesn’t mean you are a racist. Of course, we should apologise and try to do better. But we should also appreciate our racism has been bred into us and it will show occasionally, even while we try to grow out of it.

Tragically, our society is entangled in a web of systemic racism. We are all affected. So we are all also part of the struggle to break down racism.

Hagen Engler.

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