But "WE" Know Who's Who

Thinking of being at City Mission Educational Services is enough to get me out of bed at any hour because each day I learn something new and also create new relationships. The kids are just amazing and I am dying to get to know them better. This morning, we were running late, as usual, but we showed up just in time to jump into the day's activities. 

This whole time we've been here, race has been a huge topic of discussion. In class last week we talked about race as both arbitrary and also quite strict. We discussed measuring race and also how race came to be an issue by watching a film series called Race: The Power of an Illusion. I am finding that there are so many questions that I am going to have to accept I might never have answers for. In Cape Town, racial classification is a big deal. Everyone is "something" and often times the justifications are so unclear.  Although this buzz word, race, has been on my mind for the past few weeks, I was really caught off guard by the events that occurred in the classroom during today's lessons.

After a hectic lesson about the media and dieting in grade six life orientation the class got out of hand. The students are expected to write the questions in their notebooks from the board and then answer them independently. The amount of distractions in the room makes it incredibly hard for many students to even focus enough to copy the words from the board. One teacher (I will not use any names) takes a violent approach to classroom management. When the learners would get out of their seats she might slap them over the head with a notebook or even hit their hands with rulers if they were not writing their work. Sometimes the children lay under the desks during class and she will walk over and kick them. As you can imagine, the class is often out of control. The teacher does this mostly in a playful manner but on occasion the student does not laugh after the encounter and then the entire class goes silent. Today the students accused her of "child abuse" but she recanted that they don’t even know what abuse is. This brought the class to an uproar.  As an observer this classroom is  incredibly hard for me to see and tolerate. I've come to accept it as a way that she interacts with them but I have noticed that the students behave so much better with less instigating methods of discipline. The children were out of control and the accusations were flying.

One student, John, who is black called out this coloured teacher on discriminating against the black students. He said that she only hits the black kids and only disciplines the black students. She argued that it was not the case. She made an example of a quiet boy who is black who never gets disciplined and it's because he is sensitive and even though he doesn't do his work she'd never hit him because he couldn't take it.  While I was observing this situation I realized that the only kids who were misbehaving were the black kids. It made sense to me why they were the only ones being disciplined, it had nothing to do with their race, but to the children this was racism as clear as it can be. They were adamant about their accusations and they began to yell in Xhosa. Many black people's primary language is Xhosa. When the students get upset they revert back to a comfortable language and speak and swear in Xhosa. What they were saying was clearly offensive because the teacher walked out of the room after saying, "I don’t want to teach you anymore".  I noticed that there are many divides in just one classroom. There are blacks and coloureds, girls and boys, street kids, township kids, poor kids, smarter kids, and really motivated kids too.  This sort of categorization is so common in Cape Town classrooms but to me it's really just a distraction from what should be going on, learning. The children are used to labeling each other; they cannot get past categorizing each other and appreciate who each other actually is.

After the argument in the classroom, another teacher came in to teach "Maths". After she wrote the problems on the board the previous conversation continued. Arthur and John pulled her aside and instead of copying  the problems from the board they began to voice their complaints. They said that they felt that they were being discriminated by the teacher because they were black. Katelyn, the only girl in the class, kept me informed as my personal translator. She told me they were feeling discriminated against and at first I asked her what for. She said "for their race of course" and that took me by surprise. I know that race is such a big deal here but to me I don't see the difference. Everyone who is "black" is black and everyone who is "white" is white to me.  Since that has been my American perspective I had trouble understanding this dilemma. I decided not to press this issue with the students but in private I asked one of the teachers to explain this in depth. After a while I asked her where the line is drawn. I understood that there was a separation and also it was a big part of life but I couldn't understand when someone was dark enough to be black or light enough to be coloured. She thought this was so funny and asked me if I saw everyone the same. I shyly said that I did and I really could not identify one or the other. After she laughed at me she started to show me by using examples of students from the classroom and pointing out which categorization they were. She then asked me to identify which race one of the students was. I said I didn't know. This was because I was afraid of being wrong because I thought that the student might find it more offensive but really I also felt so uncomfortable about calling someone out on their race when I didn't even know their name. It felt dehumanizing. She told me the boy was coloured and then she said that it was ok if I didn't know who was who because "we" do. 

This entire situation opened my eyes to how differently people see race here. For the rest of the day I found myself trying to  decipher who was which race and it made me a bit confused and I wondered why it mattered to me. Before that conversation, I wouldn't have given anyone's race more than a passing glance but afterward I have realized that I have a lot to learn and even more to think about.