The Black American Intelligentsia

As I mentioned in my last post, I had an incredibly eye-opening experience when I was invited over for dinner to an Afrikaner couple’s house on Thursday.  Our discussion wound through many different topics relating to Blacks and Whites, and I would like to continue with some other things that were brought up during the course of our conversation.

Despite my attempts to avoid political discussion, the Afrikaners were quite interested in discussing race and seeing what my opinions on things were.  To encapsulate the argument, it seemed that the husband was of the belief that Blacks just generally do not have the capacity to be educated, intelligent, responsible members of society.  He mentioned that he does employ a few Blacks in his woodworking shop that are very capable, trustworthy individuals, but that such reliable Blacks are very rare and quite hard to find.  I explained that one of my reasons for being here in South Africa was to try to help educate young Blacks and promote responsible living, thereby helping to encourage a higher number of such capable individuals.  I think that this was viewed as a bit of naivety since the reply was that drunkenness, irresponsibility, and lack of education were things that one “will never get out of them.”

In a situation like this one has to walk a very fine line because after someone has been so cordial as to invite me into their home and make a delicious dinner, it is not my place to flat out condemn their beliefs.  They have lived in South Africa all their lives, whereas I have only been here 3 months, so who am I to tell them openly that they are in the wrong?  That being said, I also cannot sit idly by and let my silence serve as tacit agreement to statements and views with which I disagree and many times disagree quite strongly.

My response was that simply based on my own experience in America with American Blacks, I have known, worked, and studied with too many intelligent, capable, upstanding Black people to believe that they as a population are generally incapable of being productive members of society.  The husband agreed that might be the case but also said that “aren’t American Blacks more intellectual than South African Blacks?”  The thought quickly passed through my mind as to what many Americans, especially our more racist population, might think about such a statement.  In any case, I’m not entirely sure how this South African conception of American Blacks was arrived at.  Partly, it might be that the Afrikaners are aware of the mixing of races in America and that many successful Black people exist not to mention the presence of a perhaps small, but still significant Black middle class.  Another part of me also wonders whether the image of President Barack Obama, as a highly intelligent, eloquent individual, might also be somewhat responsible for this view.

Whatever the case, again working very hard to be diplomatic, I was unsure how to respond.  What I initially wanted to say was that that the Afrikaners probably saw American Blacks as being more intellectual because Black Americans had been given more opportunities for a longer period of time (since the civil rights movement in the 1960s) in comparison with South Africa (who only saw apartheid truly come to an end in 1994).  What I ended up saying was that I think there was a time in America when many Whites saw Black Americans as being incapable of education and intelligence and would never have classified Black Americans as intellectual.  Such a view had declined, however, as more time passed from when Blacks had been given access to quality education and jobs that had previously been denied to them.  I said that in this aspect, it seemed that South Africa was still relatively early in the process of change and that given more time, you would probably see more and more South African “Black intellectuals.”   

The husband did not seem to agree, though, stating that it just seemed that American Blacks were just plain different from South African Blacks.  Black Americans, it was pointed out, do not speak different languages from the rest of the American population (I opted at this point not to open up a discussion of ebonics) nor do they have any of the tribal associations that Blacks in South Africa do.  Such points are true, and I do not think there is quite as great a cultural divide between Black and White Americans as Black and White South Africans.

As I have mentioned before, I am constantly working to remind myself that South Africa is not America and that one must be very, very careful about drawing correlations between the two.  Just because something happened one way in the States does not mean that it will happen the same way in South Africa.  This is yet another reason that I am not going to sit and lecture Afrikaners about their own country and its inhabitants.  It does provide me ample food for thought, however, while also giving me a challenge that serves as my inspiration.  After such conversations, I am even more determined to work with the students in my township and help them help themselves become successful to show that people, regardless of their race or geography, are quite capable of becoming respectable and integral members of society.

In conclusion, I also want to stress to my readers that they not develop a demonized image of Afrikaners.  Reading the statements above, without understanding in what context they were spoken, can, especially to the American mind, seem like something spoken by someone who is little better than a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  That is simply not the case.  The Afrikaners I know are hard-working, generous people who one simply should not judge without first considering the history of South Africa and the Afrikaner perspective.

Before ending for the night, I realized that I have been forgetting to include a word from South African English as I promised in a previous post.  Today’s word of the day is:

The location - an area on the outskirts of a town or city where Black South Africans in urban areas were required by apartheid laws to live so as to separate them from the White population.  Even though apartheid is no longer in force, “the locations” are still almost exclusively composed of Blacks.  Also called a “township.”

Example: Look, there's Mr. Spencer.  What is a white guy doing living in the location?