3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Black parents’ experiences and perceptions of race(ism) in highfee-paying independent schools in Johannesburg(2023) Picas, RosemarySouth Africa has a long history of racial segregation and discrimination. Transformation and diversification have been central to the national agenda in all spheres of life post-1994, including schools which have been integrated for many years. However, the recent spate of public complaints against independent and Model C schools, as well as calls for the Human Rights Commission (HRC) to investigate state schools, suggests that many schools are still struggling with systemic racism. High-fee-paying independent schools have been slower to transform and remain predominantly white spaces and pockets of privilege in society. This hermeneutical phenomenological study explored black parents’ experiences and perceptions around race, racism and discrimination within their children’s high-fee-paying independent schools. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis to explore common threads in their lived experiences from an interpretive stance. The themes identified elucidate parents’ subtle, and difficult-to-articulate, racialised experiences, as well as their psychological and behavioural responses. Parents’ perceptions of their children’s experiences are also discussed. Their perceptions of the school’s management of race-related matters are explored and appeared to be strongly related to proactive communication from the school. The racial dynamics that emerged during the interviews are explored to understand parents’ experiences at school. Finally, other social identities, such as gender, class, and nationality, which act as proxies for race or intersect with race, are discussed. The parents’ experience of racism in these white liberal spaces was found to be extremely subtle and yet pervasive. Black parents were found to occupy a precarious position in white schools where they may be compelled to tolerate, assimilate, or reproduce racist narratives to maintain their privileged position. While race was difficult for them to confront on an individual or interpersonal level, parents were active in challenging racism at a structural and systemic level. These findings aim to contribute towards the goal of dismantling systemic racism within schools and in South Africa.Item Reconceptualizing racism(2018) Zikalala, SibusisoIn the literature, the subject of racism has been approached by and large in a particular kind of way. In this paper, I aim to critically engage with standard racism discourse by doing two things. Firstly, I will be showing that the way racism is generally discussed is problematic both for the reasons that (a) its scope is limiting and (b) the way that the concept is used leaves out certain things that are important for what count or ought to count as racism. Secondly, I will be arguing that racism in its most basic form is the undervaluing, the devaluing, and not at all valuing someone else on account of their racial or racialized group.Item The social exclusion of poor whites(2019) Ntshinga, ThandiweIn its attempt to ‘reverse the gaze’ in making white people the subject of analysis, this research report falls into critical whiteness studies. Critical whiteness studies places itself firmly in the post-colonial agenda as an anti-racist social movement seeking to dismantle whiteness and white superiority. My interest is therefore not in poverty as such but rather in the threat to whiteness of those who blur the race/class divide. In this research report, I (as a young Black middle class female scholar) explore the social exclusion of poor whites as it relates to the fragility of whiteness. My fieldwork experience amongst poor white people in East Lynne was marked by hostility. Poor white East Lynne residents made it known that they did not want me around them. Highlighting unaccounted for racial dynamics in reversing the gaze in ‘ethical’ anthropological fieldwork research guidelines, I found that for me to have looked at poor whites solely as they relate to my class position would only hinder the intersectional scope of analysis in a manner specific to being a Black female researcher and its ability to tease meaning and intention out of silence and hostility. With this, anti-Black racism became central to the argument that will be made throughout this research report. Taken from data collected in focus groups comprising of white middle class Wits anthropology students, interviews with poor white East Lynne residents and my own experiences of racism, I engage with African-American political scientist, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard’s ‘whiteness as misery’ as the theoretical framework to the conceptual tool of ‘white fragility’ (DiAngleo, 2011). I therefore turn away from viewing whiteness as prestige to seeing it as internalised racism, self-hatred and diminished white selfhood expressed in how the feeling of ‘anxiety’ surfaces when white middle class students see poor white people which they needed distance from. Poor whites, by blurring the race/class divide, are then symbolic reminders of the fragility of whiteness. Diminished white selfhood and self-hatred at not achieving the upward mobility required to distance themselves from Black people, I argue, is seen through poor whites everyday use of various racist strategies demonstrating a desperate attempt at maintaining the privileges of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa.Item Responding to hate crimes: identity politics in the context of race and class division among South African LGBTI(2016-03-01) Clayton, Matthew RossThis paper examines race and class schisms among South African LGBTI persons using the lens of hate crimes legislation. While much praise is given to South Africa’s constitutional framework which provides for non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, LGBTI persons still face unacceptably high levels of violence and victimisation. An ongoing trend of violent murders of black lesbian women in particular has mobilised advocacy by LGBTI organisations and other civil society actors to call for hate crimes legislation. This paper takes a critical look at hate crimes legislation and the potential problems of its application in a society with gross inequality and power discrepancies. This critique has as its foundation an acknowledgement that action needs to be taken to address the scourge of violence, while at the same time understanding the intersectionality of oppression and the uneven results achieved by liberal legal reform.