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March 30, 2006
A White Woman's Perspective on the Outside
Posted at March 30, 2006 12:42 PM in Race Relations .
Perception is an interesting thing, particularly, when mixed with fear, perception can hold such power.
This article deals with the power of perception, how people can be made to feel a particular area is "dangerous," somewhere you really don't want to be and "don't spend the night". Fear, used to intimate and control and create a perception that the place is unsafe and you really shoudn't be there.
This article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb '06 issue of DiversityInc magazine. Back issues of the magazine are available on the site and I'd advice picking up a copy. There are other articles in this particular issue worthy of reading.
By Sonja Sherwood
© 2006 DiversityInc.com®
March 15, 2006
Bed-and-breakfast owners in Soweto are discouraged. Daily, almost hourly, tour companies truck in busloads of white tourists who never stay the night. A black cabbie told me that he used to drive one of those buses. "The guides tell everybody it's dangerous," he says, rolling his eyes.
Neo rents a pretty room out of her home just around the corner from the Nelson Mandela Museum and Desmond Tutu's home. It's a prime address, but concerns about safety keep tourists away. "It's because of those white tour companies," Neo says.
I ask her why, if Soweto is as safe as she says it is, her house is surrounded by a wall with a gate. "To mark property lines," she explains.
Neo's porch is closed off by an iron grille she keeps padlocked, even during the day. The door to my little room is a massive farmhouse chunk of tree trunk with a reinforced frame and a medieval bolt the size of my wrist. As I roll my head on my pillow to avoid the crime-fighting floodlights beaming through the window, I notice a little button on the wall that could have been an instant alarm. All night long, dogs bark.
As a visitor to South Africa, I quickly learned there is no way to approach the country without prejudice. Guide books warn against exploring Johannesburg by foot. The train station is full of muggers. Renting a car? Keep windows up and doors locked, and never come to a stop at an intersection without an exit strategy.
Pick up a book about this amazing country and flip it open. See if you don't find someone notable saying something horrifying, like Carl Jung's observation that the air smells of soil soaked with blood.
"I've never seen so much hatred in peoples' eyes—and I'm from the Middle East," an Iranian friend told me before I left. My mother suddenly recalled that a blond girl "just like you" was murdered in Soweto a few years back. "Johannesburg is the rape capital of the world," my partner informed me.
In democratic South Africa, anyone can go anywhere and do anything, but I felt confined. Blacks and whites live in the same neighborhoods, attend the same schools, compete for the same jobs. Slogans for Klipdrift liquor playfully combine Afrikaans and African words alongside images of a white man and a black man enjoying a drink. Television ads show mixed-race couples sharing a table at Spurs, a popular steakhouse.
Conviviality and commerce are bridging the divisions of the past, but crime fear keeps the gulf wide. How can you keep an open mind when it is filled with suspicion?
White South Africans move from one capsule to another, from their walled homes to their locked cars to their guarded malls, where they shop under surveillance that they, unlike Americans, actually welcome. Even office buildings in downtown Johannesburg are built defensively. The ones that I visited had artificial courtyards or hollow centers with skylights, as if to create the illusion of protected public space.
Outside, black pedestrians stream through the city in complete freedom. Hillbrow and Berea, absolute no-go zones according to guide books, are buzzing with a spirited street economy that belies their slum reputation. My black driver laughs as I read aloud the dire warnings from my tour book. "I live right over there," he says.
Whites stay in their cars. In the downtown district of Braamfontein, two older white women stand at a crosswalk. They glance neither left nor right as a sea of color surges all around them. Down the street, the South African Institute of Racial Relations publishes statistics that show murder rates are down 30 percent since a black government took office. The women's lips are tight. They look impossibly nervous.
I heard plenty of tales—someone slain at their doorstep, cell phones snatched on the street—but the stories sounded a little different depending on whom I asked. Whites voice alarm; blacks downplay danger.
Even though crime has fallen since 1998, national victim surveys reveal that the public feels less safe. Fear created apartheid, and I believe the stories South Africans tell about each other keep people apart still. Worry over crime, more so than the actual crime, is the most dangerous thing in South Africa.
Perception has a powerful effect on behavior. One night I needed a notebook, so I left my hotel and crossed the street to get to the stores on the other side. I did not take the ridiculous hotel shuttle that ferries guests across the street every 15 minutes, but its existence made me feel like I should. I got my notebook, hurried back to my room, and felt like I'd survived something.
"You are no cowardly lady," my driver surprised me by saying one day. But fed a steady diet of warnings and alarming tales, I became just that, because I slipped into the trap of believing it's not paranoid to be careful. Isolated by an unnaturally heightened sense of caution, I became like the white South Africans who stay in their cars, and never discovered what might have come of a reservation at Spurs or a Klipdrift with a stranger.
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