A Bantu in My Bathroom

A Bantu in my bathroom!

• Is it morally acceptable to stipulate the colour of your housemate?
• Is it really possible to leave your privately-held views on race at home?
• Are we really prepared to accept the requirements of a non-racial democracy?
•  Last year I came across an interesting ad in The Star while searching for accommodation. The person who placed the ad was willing to share her house with a stranger. But it was the description of the preferred lodger that really caught my attention. The advertiser – call her Sally – made it clear that she was looking for a white person.
• I could not resist. I picked up my phone and called her.
• ‘Hi there. Is that Sally?!’
• ‘Yes it is!’ a rather friendly voice answered. She could not possibly be racist, I thought. Racists can’t be so jolly, surely?! Racists are supposed to be angry and have heavy Afrikaans accents. This woman did not sound like someone whose late husband wore khaki shorts. She sounded like someone who could make us cute little cucumber sandwiches and a fresh pot of Earl Grey tea – using tea leaves. She could have been Mrs Higgins, the wonderful old white lady who taught me to play the piano at primary school – St Mary’s Primary, for poor coloured kids in Grahamstown. And, like Mrs Higgins, I imagined Sally owned a bicycle with a square, brown basket at the front, which she cycled around her quiet neighbourhood, especially when she needed to go to a grocer to stock up on Earl Grey tea leaves.
• But, of course, it is difficult to recognise a racist only by the tone of their voice, so it would be unfair of me to deprive Sally of a chance to defeat a stereotype. Non-racists do not have a monopoly on being jolly. Besides, it didn’t help that I was ‘speaking well’. At any rate, I shouldn’t be hasty with character judgements on the basis of a phone chat. I needed to hear a bit more.
• ‘I’m phoning about the room that you advertised? I came across the advert in The Star and was wondering whether the room is still available?’
• ‘“Oh yes it is! Are you interested?’
• Wow, how welcome can one be? Is the company of the family cat that tiresome after all those decades of unconditional love and dedicated companionship? Is the little puss no longer good enough as an old white lady’s best friend?
• ‘“I am interested, yes! I have been looking to move to Sandton ’cause it is closer to work. But … I’m not white, my dear. Do I have to be white?!’ (I suspect it is not necessary to confess parenthetically that I was having soooo much fun.)
• ‘Yes, as the advert said!’ There was a slight but noticeable shift in her tone now. A hint of irritation could be detected miles away and the possibility of a khaki-clad husband, still alive and well, could no longer be ruled out. In fact, I imagined a man called Gert sitting in the background, reading the back pages of Beeld, lowering the newspaper, and looking beswaard (‘gravely concerned’ in the most Afrikaans way possible; ‘beswaard’ is an emotion uniquely felt in the language and being of Afrikanerdom). I was on a roll now and decided to go for gold!
• ‘Don’t you think that’s a little bit racist?’ I asked.
• ‘Not at all! I just want to live with people of my kind! People I can relate to! What’s wrong with that?’
• A fair response, perhaps? I wasn’t’ so sure. So I continued for a little while longer. I had nothing else to do that morning; no Earl Grey tea to serve visitors at my end.
• ‘But what does race have to do with getting along with someone? How do you know that your next best friend will NOT be a black person? You can’t know just by looking at someone’s skin colour whether or not you will get along with them, surely?’
• ‘You clearly have a chip on your shoulder!’ she snapped back. At this point I realised that she would make for a wonderful guest on my radio show. I started regretting not recording our exchange.
• ‘I am a talk show host at Talk Radio 702, ma’am and would like to … ’ and before I could finish she hung up. I was left with a naughty smirk on my face and my brain went immediately into ‘so-what-does-it-all-mean?’ mode.
• I decided to share the anecdote with listeners of my weekly radio programme Politics and Morality on Talk Radio 702. I posed the question, ‘Is it racist to rent your room only to persons of a particular race group?’ It was one of the most revealing conversations I’ve had with a radio audience.
• It goes without saying that each radio station – in fact, each showon a radio station – has a specific profile of listeners who self-select that station or slot. So I know we cannot draw easy generalisations about the entire country based on the viewpoints of one radio station’s callers. In fact, one can’t even take those whocall in during a particular time slot as representative of all those who are listening to that particular slot! But from somewhere deep inside my gut (if that counts for anything?), I suspect that the discussion which followed did probably reveal truths about most of us. Social scientists, of course, might have other thoughts. Anyway, here is what happened on radio that night.
• There was a broad convergence in opinion among my listeners, black and white. The majority thought that it was not racist to have a racial preference for a tenant.
• One group of listeners thought that since the property was privately owned, Sally could do whatever the heck she wanted to do with it so long as she did not break any general laws of the land. For this group, Sally’s preference was no different to someone who wanted to live only with non-smokers. It was not even a question of whether Sally’s attitude was justified. It was simply her right to have this attitude, finish and klaar!
• A second group had a somewhat more complicated position. This group thought that if Sally had a flat or cottage in her yard and only wanted whites to live in it then she really would be a racist. However, from my description of the advert it was clear that we were talking about a room in the main house. That, apparently, changed everything. Your own house is a much more intimate, private space than a cottage on your property that you’re not living in yourself. And so Sally should be let off the hook for having race-specific preferences in her choice of housemate.
• These arguments fascinated me. I was desperately trying to make sense of our racialism, and attitudes towards others, in this conversation. I disagree profoundly with both sets of opinions and wrestled with my callers for almost two hours. I understood where they were coming from but could not quite put my finger on a deep discomfort I felt with their convictions, especially those who fell into the ‘in-my-backyard-perhaps-but-NOT-in-my-house!’category. As is often the case with live radio discussion, the most precise language often only hits you after the fact. While I put up a good fight challenging my listeners, it was only really in the days and weeks afterwards that I figured out what had bothered me. The attitudes which lurked beneath those seemingly reasonable and innocent arguments were morally odious. When those underlying attitudes are fully excavated and closely examined, they betray a deeply ingrained and objectionable racialism – and sometimes outright racism – many years after democracy’s birth. I believe that those callers who argued that what happens behind the walls of private property is not up for moral evaluation, are just not thinking carefully.
• First, let me make an important concession. There is definitely something both tempting and intuitively right about the claim that we all need a break from the burden of social and moral rules. Our private lives, including decisions about who we let into our homes, must be allowed to be beyond the wagging finger of moralists. ‘Allow us to be racist at least on our own turf!’ a choir of Save Our Sally (SOS) members might shout. To shout back ‘No!’ seems hasty.
• There is something to be said for protecting the private space from public morality. If we value individuality and authenticity, as we surely must if we are to take seriously the meaning and point of liberal pluralism, then we must allow for conditions under which all of us can peacefully co-exist with maximum opportunity to be our true selves.
• And, if your true self is someone who only wants to break croissants with whites (or only eat pap and chakalaka with blacks) then society must put up with those preferences. That is logic that I get, with which I agree for the most part, and which I am happy to attribute, in the non-white spirit of Ubuntu, to those Sally supporters who argue for her entitlement to do as she pleases with whomever, and on, her property.
• But there is a difference between the right to rent your room to whites only and our entitlement to judge your actions morally. We do not think that a woman’s right to marry a misogynist bastard means we cannot criticise her decision. We do not think that a gardener’s right to accept his employer’s insistence on being called ‘baas!’ and his employer’s right to offer premium wages for being called ‘baas!’ mean that we cannot evaluate the moral quality of that relationship. And many of us seem to think that the right of a millionaire to display his or her wealth ostentatiously does not mean they are immune to moral comment. Remember, for example, the uproar when businessman Kenny Kunene threw lavish parties – he was criticised for behaviour that some regard as immoral even though he has a right to throw lavish parties.
• Morality follows us just about everywhere, and so I don’t think we can simply say that just because Sally has a right to live with whomever she wants, and just because she should in general be given space to live a life she chooses for herself, that we cannot ever raise moral questions about her private choices. We can, and this ad I stumbled upon seems a perfect case in a country with our racial history, about which to ask probing questions about the motives behind these preferences, their origins and their content. So her domestic preferences are fair game.
• Besides, I seriously doubt that Sally regards herself as acting immorally. Only someone who is genuinely amoral would truly not care about the moral quality of her actions, let alone what the rest of us have to say about it. Sally does care.
• Sally was happy to engage me and offer reasons for her actions. She was implicitly accepting that she could be criticised but thought she had a sufficient defence for her racialised preferences. She is not a hermit. She is not a sociopath. She lives in society. She is of society. I therefore reject the all-too-easy (though tempting and seemingly reasonable) claim that how we behave privately and what we do with our private property cannot and should not be morally probed. It can and it should. And if we had a chance to meet Sally, I suspect she would agree, but simply say her preferences are morally acceptable. Well, are they? Before answering this question, there is one more aspect of Sally’s case that I want to comment on and which complicates the racial preference debate.
• It crystallises around a recent visit from a friend of mine, John, who now lives in Oxford.
• John was fascinated when I told him about the advert saga and the radio discussion it spawned. Being a near perfect human being, the original ‘Mr Nice Guy’, John confessed that when he had been on the lookout to share a house with someone in Oxford, he declined an opportunity to live with a disabled person. He did not think he could live with someone who had a serious physical disability. Agreeing to live with such a person he felt would effectively mean agreeing to take on a certain kind of responsibility, which he felt he was not capable of fulfilling. He had no prior relationship with the person and this lessened the emotional stakes somewhat when it came to turning down the offer.
• Of course, he felt horrible about the decision because it feltcallous. But it was an honestly-made decision. It was based on truthful self-evaluation of what kinds of living arrangements were comfortable for John. And that, surely, is okay? We cannot be expected to be moral saints. This is also why it is okay, too, to simply not want to live with someone who is a smoker, say. But these factors – Am I ready to be a quasi-carer for a disabled housemate? Can I put up with puffs of smoke? – are not signs of a bad moral character, suggested John. They are simply a combination of satisfying one’s arbitrary preferences (‘I don’t like smoke!’) and considering practical facts (‘I just won’t be able to cope with negotiating the needs of a disabled housemate.’)
• I’m not convinced that Sally’s preference is in the same category as these preferences. And it is, at any rate, debatable whether John’s attitude towards disability is acceptable, even if someone’s irritation for smoke is acceptable. These cases are too different to be treated in the same way, but there is something to be learned from the differences, and the false appearance of salient similarities. Is it possible, if we get back to Sally, that there is nothing more to Sally’s preference than convenience? John finds it inconvenient to live with a disabled person. Let’s say you find it irritating to smell smoke. So is there not simply a similar kind of inconvenience that Sally will experience in being ‘forced’ to live with a non-white person?
• I hope no one finds this line of reasoning compelling enough to let Sally off the hook. My skin colour is not a disability. It is an arbitrary difference between me and Sally. And so it is not clear to me that Sally would be inconvenienced by a black skin in her house in a way that can seriously be regarded as too high a burden for anyone to bear. If I was judging Sally for not adopting twenty orphans, I think one could easily make a case for why it would be acceptable for the inconvenience of such an adoption to be a reason for Sally to politely decline. But my skin colour? The analogy between the disabled lodger and a black lodger is therefore unconvincing. (I will leave aside another response to John, of course, which is to challenge his assumptions about disabilities, and what exactly the ‘burdens’ would be living with a disabled person. I have no doubt that millions of self-sufficient disabled persons would rightly take deep offence at the suggestion that they are an inherent burden on abled-bodied persons. All that is important here, for my purposes, is for us to recognise that when someone says she only wants to live with white people in her house, she can’t justify that preference by saying it is ‘inconvenient’ to have a black person around. That is an honest response, perhaps, but a morally impotent one. In fact, one might even doubt the supposed honesty and innocence of the ‘inconvenience’ argument even: racism is often the operating motive, but how many of us are capable of admitting to that kind of motive?)
•  So where does all of this leave the first batch of my callers who suggested that it is Sally’s house, and so she can choose her tenant. I hope the arguments I have introduced make it clear why that is at the very least a hasty response from my listeners. In short, yes, Sally has a right to live only with white people but the fact that she has a right to make a random decision of this kind does not mean we can’t judge the way she exercises that right.
• The more difficult, and much more important, question is ultimately whether there is something wrong with the preference itself? Is there something wrong with Sally wanting to live only with whites? After all, there are many preferences we have in life that are arbitrary, and acceptably so. I do not have to justify why I prefer white meat to red, Bon Jovi to Simphiwe Dana, Chopin to Mozart, Johannesburg to Cape Town, bulkier men over scrawny ones. So if there is so much in the rich texture of our lives that are merely preferences, the ingredients of our individual personalities and idiosyncrasies, then surely that can straightforwardly extend to preferences about the race of persons with whom we share a house? No?
• I find it hard, I must admit, to be too prescriptive about what things should guide people’s preferences. But if we can have critical conversations about the basis of our preferences, then surely we should? I do not know the details of Sally’s preferences because we did not have a chance to take our conversation further, but I think we can make some reasonable guesses if we place her life within the socio-political context of our country. We live in a country in which all of our lives are racially saturated from a young age; this is particularly true of South Africans who grew up during apartheid. Sally is one such South African. It is very likely that she internalised the racial hierarchy of apartheid that assigned certain roles to different race groups and instilled in whites a sense of superiority and in blacks a sense of inferiority. We were legally forced, as members of different race groups, to live apart in geographically segregated areas. We socialised in reasonably homogenous groups for a large period of time. It goes without saying that as both co-conspirators and victims of this system many of us hardened our attitudes towards members of other groups.
• So on the one hand, there is a certain kind of innocence about the preference that Sally expresses. It really just might stem from the way she was socialised, and she merely wishes for maximum comfort in her own home. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
• On the other hand, the origins of the preference are morally odious. The preference is the product of our racist past. And there is the conundrum: if I know that preferences stem from a morally odious past, should I not find ways to rid myself of those preferences, provided that it is possible to do so? This is difficult. The argument is only persuasive, I admit, if someone accepts that preferences that stem from a racist past should be eliminated. And it is not clear that there is a duty to do so.
• I would therefore criticise Sally’s preferences, still, but in a qualified way:Sally’s racialised preferences are the product of a racist past and are therefore morally odious. But Sally does not have a strict duty to now get rid of those preferences as an adult since no one is demonstrably harmed by those preferences. However, to the extent that Sally accepts that she shares the goal of a non-racial, democratic South Africa, she might want to reflect on what steps she could take to begin to chip away at the enduring nature of her racialised preferences – steps that will involve now getting to know ‘the other’.
• That, to me, seems like a more careful reaction to Sally’s preference than the crude, ‘It is her home!’ retort of many of my callers.
• So what then of the second batch of callers who thought it would only have been racist for Sally to object to blacks in a cottage in her garden? When the second group made that distinction between the flat in the yard (which they think Sally should be comfortable renting to Sipho) and the main house (from which Sipho can be excluded) they betrayed dark secrets about themselves and our country.
• Firstly, this viewpoint is an acknowledgment (indeed, an expression) of deep racial angst. Why else would you be fine with Sipho sleeping in the flat outside but heaven forbid that you should wake up in the morning and the first thing you see on your way to the bathroom is the heart attack-inducing spectacle of Sipho smiling at you, a horror that just might elicit a scream of apartheid proportions, ‘Help! There is a Bantu in my bathroom!’
• There was an eeriness about the calm with which this group of Sally-supporters made the distinction between a flat in the yard and the main house; a kind of unreflective, resigned acceptance that racial angst is a mundane truth that is to be accommodated – though, of course, in the backyard only, not in my father’s house!
• Secondly, there is no appetite here for extinguishingthis racialised preference. No one ever asked what Sally might do to overcome her insistence that only whites could be housemates. I was robustly engaged for daring to criticise what someone does with their private property. I was robustly engaged for not appreciating how a room in a house – as opposed to a flat in a yard – makes all the moral difference in our choices of who to live with!
• Yet, not one listener, black or white, displayed the same robustness towards Sally. No one grappled with how it is that eighteen years after our democratic journey had started, race-specific friendship preferences (which, by her own admission was the basis of Sally’s search for a white housemate) could still endure uncritically. Indeed, the question did not even arise for my listeners. Racialism, it seems, has become something of an enduring meme.
• Not that I am a proponent of non-racialism; rather, I was fascinated by the deep inconsistency that South Africans display. (Racialism, by the way, simply means that we recognise racial differences, usually on the basis of skin colour, hair texture, and other observable traits. It is unscientific, of course, but that is true of many other socially constructed categories also. We can and do ‘see’ race. Racism is something else: it is when you go a step further, using racial differences as a basis of unfair discrimination, going from ‘seeing’ race (racialism) to being prejudiced (racism). In contexts that are less personal (such as public debate about voting preferences), the same group of radio listeners are quick to bemoan racialism’s reach and endurance. But racialism’s reach and endurance inside their homes and hearts dare not be spoken about. Why can you complain so easily, in disbelief, about people with racial political preferences, but defend your right to have exclusively racial preferences when it comes to your friends? This is a tragic lack of self-examination.
• The discussion confirmed just how deeply ingrained racialism is in our collective social psyche. Sally’s advert was not an exceptional affair. She was simply being honest and giving public expression to familiar, widespread racialism that can be easy to miss because it tends to be, for the most part, non-violent, privately-held and expressed away from the glare of public scrutiny. Sally is ultimately one of us. We cannot disown her.
• Most importantly, and most tragically of all, is the failure of too many South Africans to see the intimate links between the private and public spheres. If you cannot imagine being best friends with someone of another race group, if you cannot imagine sharing a house with someone of another race group, then how on Earth do you think racial tension at work and in public spaces will ever be dealt a death blow? The very same radio listeners fighting for Sally’s right to display racialism privately are the ones who jam the phone lines in discussion and debate about race-based public policies like affirmative action and black economic empowerment.
• ‘How do you think we will ever achieve a non-racial South Africa if we still use race categories?!’ they will ask me rhetorically. Yet, the same old race categories are allowed, without a hint of self-criticism, let alone a hint of irony, to influence their most personal choices.
• Clearly our private actions and attitudes provide a much more honest test of where we are at in terms of racial integration than does our willingness to participate in rainbow nation acts in the workplace or in a sports arena. Also, the amount of effort we put into eliminating racism (or racialism, if that is your goal also) in our private lives will also partly determine how successfully, and how quickly, we do so in the public sphere. This causal connection between the domestic and public spheres is lost on too many South Africans.
• There are two insights we must take to heart: one is that we should be on the lookout for sophisticated tactics we all use (often subconsciously) to mask racism and racialism, such as seemingly innocent explanations for counter-productive attitudes and choices – ‘It’s simply a matter of taste (or preference or randomness ) that Sally does this or that!’; the other, and perhaps more important, conclusion is that we need to appreciate how public racism, and racialism, are in part sustained by what we do or do not do in the privacy of our homes. We take our private racism, and our private racialism, into the public space. We therefore cannot make progress in the public space without fixing what we do in private.
• Non-racism, and non-racialism, begins at home

• Eusebius is the new host of Talk at 9 on Talk Radio 702 and 567 Cape Talk
• McKaiser’s coulmns are published in various newspapers, including the New York Times
• These are all-new essays – not previously published
• A foreword by Jonathan Jansen

Author(s): Eusebius McKaiser

• EAN: 9781920434373
• eBook EAN: 9781920434373
• Pages: 208
• Format: Trade Paperback
• Price: Buy eBook