Race. It’s tricky to talk about. The word alone feels icky to me. In the last few weeks I’ve experienced and heard stories that I don’t know from home. There have been times in this blog when I’ve wanted to talk about race but it’s felt wrong, un-pc, like when mum and dad told me as a kid to not join the crowd in calling the Italian kids at school wogs. Dad easily says the ‘blacks’ (his upbringing?) but I hate that the main signifier is colour. It feels disrespectful and rude. Am I really reducing someone down to a colour, what’s on the outside? Why not just categorise people by toe nail length and ear lobe size? But then how do you speak about this topic that is so topical here still? I wonder why it feels so uncomfortable to talk about and for me in particular. Is it my upbringing, Australia, travel experiences, dad’s random new friends he’d meet out and about and bring home? But then I think why shouldnt we talk about race?! Shouldn’t our different races and cultural backgrounds and practices be celebrated? Has the history of oppression in relation to race around the world unreturnably coloured the word race negatively ? Is it possible to rebrand ‘race’ with positive connotations of identity, community and connection, and in countries like SA?

Talking with Jenny’s mum at a family lunch (the braaied lamb was to die for!) I say I don’t really think we see race back home but then I question it. Maybe the terminology is just different – we say “cultural background”, but we often talk about where your grandparents were from not what colour they were. Dad thinks it’s because the majority of Australians are white (is that true?) All things considered I can say we have never had a formal system of classification to the size and scope of SA (though we certainly have our shameful history in relation to our first peoples which continues today. I hear this morning of WA shutting down remote communities. Really?!). But I still can’t believe that just over 20 years ago people walked around here with ID books stating their race. Dad loves to tell the story of when he went to the government office to register my birth and when asked what colour i was: black, white, coloured, Indian, he replied she’s pink- the guy thought he was taking the piss.

From conversations with people here I’ve learned that especially in Cape Town race classification continues in a different way, informally. A visitor at the service tells how Varsity (University) lecture theatres and common areas bear clear signs of segregation. There’s even jokes about where people sit on the main steps of her uni – in the shade the blacks, in the middle the whites in the blaring sun (trying to turn black?) and in half shade, half sun the coloreds. We theorise that people are attracted to comfort and who they know but it also raises the question of how to break this cycle and tackle the burden of intergenerational trauma. How does the country in general move forward when people say it is stuck? One of the counsellors says emphatically “Why should I think about what happened to my grandmother?” but is it that easy to shake off? Another says we need to start all over again with our children’s children. Laura the local intern says the country may need to implode to regenerate. Wow such strong words.

The most recent experience re race was at a club on the weekend. Amid the usual vodka, gyrating (who me?) and a creepy 60+ y.o. man who openly admitted he was there to pick up and “did I have a boyfriend?” (yikes! My own fault for being curious) I met a voluptuous velvet skinned mama with a serious twinkle in her eye. I had knocked her whilst getting too involved with my booty dance and so the apology led to a d&m (as it does). She asked do we all know each other from work (about the group I was with)? When I said no she did the dramatic pull back of the head with a lopsided eyebrow crunched look. It seems a mixed race group is a rareity here, that is unless you work together. She whispered to me if I ever needed a place to stay I should stay with her (hmmm..was she flirting with me?) and(/but?) tonight she wanted to pick up a white guy to mix things up. There was something about that that I wanted to celebrate but I was also disturbed by. Was that really her criteria?

It seems mixed race couples are still uncommon here. I hear a story from Jenny about her double date couple friends – one black, one coloured, who, after dating and battling their parents for acceptance for 3 years broke up a year ago from the pressure. How desperately sad is that? A modern day Romeo and Juliet. A German counsellor at work dating a coloured guy confirms this saying most mixed race couples are European (Swiss, German etc) South African rather than both local. She shares that her boyfriend is struggling to find a sharehouse. Apparently many people openly state on their ad ‘looking for white professional’. He’s professional and now he’s got a white looking profile pic. She says the first thing a person puts on their CV here is race. Seems strange to me until I learn that, unlike before, the affirmative action (Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) or now Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment (lots of Bs and 2 Es)to be more inclusive…) laws now mean the darker you are the more likely you are to get a job.

Jenny says she’s in favour of BEE: people have been oppressed for so long, they need a ‘leg up” and support to become part of the workforce. My South African family disagree. For them being of Indian background means they were and are now again stuck in the middle. They say even if their children get top marks they are not guaranteed a place at university or a job. I consult dad for the ex-pat opinion. He’s in favour of BEE but he struggles to see how the country can heal and prosper if its most knowledgeable and skilled people are leaving. He sums it up by saying if you are sick, do you care if it’s a black or a white doctor? No. You just want the best doctor.

I can see the points of view of all three – it’s societal and yet it’s also so personal. Dad’s point is also flawed – wouldn’t the best doctor probably be white because 20 years ago you couldn’t even study to be a doctor if you weren’t white? It feels complex and I wonder what the answer is to the problem created by a system that so crudely upset the natural order of things. How do you improve the standard of living and skills of those previously disadvantaged whilst moving beyond the structure and labels of race? I’ve heard people talking of mentorship and I’d love to engage more in discussions but I still feel very much like an in outsider in this conversation. There must be a way and maybe people are already doing this at a grassroots level.

My own experience comes when out for dinner with a new friend who asks me “What’s your background?”  Me: “dad’s South african and mum’s German. What about you?” Standard reciprocal conversation. But I can feel the deep intake of breath, the narrowing of eyes assessing what I was asking, what to share. I realised then this isn’t a straight forward “Irish and English background” answer here. It’s laden with subtext and connotation. After a 15 minute explanation – “well mum is this and dad is that and my grandparents are this so technically I’m coloured”, he tells me his family are all teachers not just because of their intelligence and passion for education but because there were no other options for them at that time. Can you imagine? I ask him what percentage of colour you need to have in you to be classed ‘coloured’. He says how ever you look on the outside. He laughs that you now need an escort with you to look at records in the Research Office because someone went in and set records alight when they discovered colour in their heritage. The irony is he says you can walk down the street and the ‘black’ guy on the other side of the road could be more white than you. I think about my granny born in Robertson (I teared up a little when driving through there on my Garden Route tour) near Cape Town struggling to make a living, technically Cape Malay but given a golden ticket from my grandpa who signed her affidavit as white. To be limited by your skin colour. I can’t imagine that. I want to call myself coloured to honour her.