5/25/10

Our lecturer today, Melissa Steyn, was the first and will be the only Afrikaans lecturer we will have on this trip. I had been hoping to hear the Afrikaans’ side of the story while we are in South Africa and I felt that she was able to bring some of the oppressors’ point of view to the table. The thing that stood out to me the most was her personal recollection of her childhood and adolescence mindset. She stressed the fact that being born into a position of power within the apartheid system forms an identity, which rests in the embodiment of what the system stands for. It is not that she hated black people but, rather, that their suppression was just part of life.

Steyn also discussed racialization, pointing out that one major difference between the States and South Africa is that her country was aware of the racialization in the country because it was institutionalized, while people in the United States have no idea that it even happens. In the States, because racialization is not in place legislatively, people are blind to the fact that it happens.

Steyn’s two points made me think about racialization and suppression in our own country. Americans don’t like to think that they are racialized; they believe that because we technically have equal rights not one could be racially separated or suppressed. But as the speaker pointed out, racialization happens even on the very basic level of nightclubs. Radicalization happens but is often masked by the excuse of different tastes. Someone says that they go to a certain bar because they like the music at that bar, but in fact the deep-rooted reason is because people of their same race go there, that bar is comfortable.

People in our own society, in the States, are born into systems, which also dictate their idea of where they belong and their overall mindsets of the social norm. People think that because they have received a better education or live in a better area, that that means they are better than individuals outside of that particular community. There is a hierarchy that is put in place at birth by our “equal” society. The ideals that dictate this hierarchy and racialization must be first acknowledged and second addressed.

This racialization, segregation of race in public areas, is something that I will be noticing and paying a lot more attention to from now on. I will have a better understanding of why the groups form in places like the UMC and how that formation has been dictated by several psychological factors.