Gender still seems to be the main focus in Swedish equality research and policies. This was also the case when, many years ago and as a ’young’ PhD-student, Eva Silfver worked at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria for three months. With her on this ‘journey’, she brought an understanding of the importance of acknowledging different social categories in her analyses, for example by exploring processes that ‘other’ people coming from outside Sweden. Yet, she lacked the experience and bodily feelings of what ‘race’ can do to gender in specific situations. This post gives a brief account how she developed a theoretical standpoint or her ‘intellectual journey’ around ‘race’.
Developing a perspective on ‘race’
The successful struggle against Apartheid in South Africa led to an understanding of racial inequality and capitalist exploitation, as immediate and pressing national issues. For a first-time visitor to South Africa such as myself, this initially and speedily, forces a new perspective on ‘race’. Thus, I began to see ‘race’ everywhere; as black or white. My newcomer’s gaze and interpretations could not, of course, capture the full complexity of the situation.
My perception of South Africans’ everyday discussions about their country and diversity of cultures, whether concerning problems or possibilities, is that they are primarily infused with notions of ‘race’. This was something new and unfamiliar to me, as someone brought up in the Swedish post-war era where ‘race’ was seen as a signifier of Nazi ideology and the race biology from which Sweden has tried to distance itself. My interpretation is that we do not want to talk about ‘race’, nor do we view ourselves as racists. While in South Africa, however, I found it easier, and indeed more helpful to use the term ‘race’. This “living contradiction” (as Jack Whitehead puts it) forced me to explore what ‘race’ means in order to use it productively, and to understand why its use is so problematic in Sweden, but that’s something I’ll return to in a future post.
Gaining race, losing gender
When in South Africa, I found myself viewed as a white person first and a woman second. It seemed as if, as my white skin became more visible, my gender faded away. Thus, in the South African context, I had the feeling of being trapped in my own body because of my white skin. In this sense, I gained ‘race’ and ‘lost’ gender.
For example, I felt shame in my whiteness and deeply uncomfortable when people addressed me in Afrikaans. In an effort to distance myself from this legacy of whiteness, I found it more interesting, informative and uplifting to immerse myself in the company of black people, and indeed had difficulty in sympathising with white South Africans’ perceptions of existing affirmative work policies. So, what first seemed to be a ‘Swedish equality way’ of thinking (i.e. more interested in majority black than minority white issues), became an awareness that this could also be seen as a form of stereotyping in relation to assuming that people may or may not be of interest merely on the basis of skin colour.
Gaining ‘race’ and losing gender is one way of expressing my changing perceptions. For example, I saw black workers everywhere, as cashiers, cleaners, and assistants in supermarkets; as, road workers and my Afrikaaner colleagues’ housekeepers. This forced me to see the South African labour market as massively segregated by ‘race’ as well as class. Hence, I gained a sense of the importance of racialisation simultaneous to losing, or blurring notions or consciousness of gender. Later, I was able to understand the labour market also as strongly gender-segregated. Thus, gender inequality for me, seemed in South Africa to lie in the shadow of ‘race’ and to some extent social class, although for South African black women gender has been an issue in terms, for example, of sexual harassment and abuse, sexism, and other oppressive practices.
Because ‘race’ has no biological meaning, but is a social product, hierarchically determined, unstable, and ordered by means of systems of power where one group as the norm produces ‘the other’ or many ‘others’, the acquisition of a ‘race’ perspective enabled me to accept the properties of whiteness, with its attendant privileges and advantages. The property of ‘whiteness’ had become more visible and I was able to appreciate that I am part of the problem, due to my racialised position, paradoxically not because of my skin colour but the possessive investment in ’whiteness’.
Additionally, I became aware of the deficiency in perceptions about ‘race’ issues in Sweden, where what is termed colour-blindness denies the possibility of racialised discourses . This theoretical turn forced me to rethink both my own politics relating to my daily life, and my research in Swedish schools. For example, I began to question the meaning of the word ‘immigrants’ in Sweden, and to recognise the process of ‘doing race’ as important to my research.
While in Sweden, I prioritised gender over ‘race’, but this was clearly untenable in South Africa. Thus, although I ‘knew’ earlier about the importance of highlighting ‘race’, social class and so on, I needed, it seems, personally to experience their instability and fluidity in my own body. The feeling of being trapped in my own white-skinned body struck me so completely that momentarily, I became ‘gender blind’. Although I know (and knew then) that different systems of power work and produce subject positions where different categories intersect, my point is that the interactions between oppressive power systems can dramatically change perceptions of the self. The ‘doing’ of categories lies in the interpretation of them in specific context and times; categories are not stable. Or rather, categories do not carry a priori meaning, but are ascribed meaning in the process of meaning-making or production. Also, in the ‘doing’ of, for example, ‘race’, other social categories can be ‘done’ simultaneously, for example, gender. I believe that is what happened while I was in South Africa.
