Unpacking (white) privilege in a South African university classroom: A neglected element in multicultural educational contexts

Abstract

Multiculturalism currently aims for the political accommodation of difference instead of the subversion of the resulting privileges of difference. In the South African context such a distinction is especially important since the economic and symbolic subjugation of the majority of Black South Africans continues despite political transformation, and is exacerbated by an unwillingness to reflect on privilege and inequality. Drawing on Biko and Soudien’s critique of multiculturalism and vision for anti-racist education, this paper describes a classroom activity set for 164 nationally and culturally diverse second year sociology students at a university in Cape Town, South Africa. The activity tasked students to reflect on texts by Peggy McIntosh and Khaya Dlanga (one canonical, the other contextual) and reports on these students’ nuanced understandings of personal biography, experiences of privilege and self-reflexivity that connects personal experience to social structure and historical contexts. It concludes by offering modest implications for moral education in a multicultural university classroom.

Keywords:

• privilege
• pedagogy
• whiteness
• multiculturalism
• anti-racist education
• South Africa
• race

Notes

1. We use South African historical ‘race’ categorization for descriptive purposes without subscribing to its ideology or reality. We intentionally capitalize these descriptors to indicate historical provenance. According to the Apartheid population group system of classification, ‘Black’ South Africans are typically of African descent, ‘Coloured’ South Africans are either of mixed race, or indigenous first peoples or of Malay descent, ‘White’ South Africans are of European descent, and Indian South Africans are of Asian descent, including from the Indian subcontinent.

2. 73% of Indian South Africans held this view while 67% of Coloured South Africans did so.

3. The students in this study are from Cape Town which is in the Western Cape province.

4. Coloured and Black are different (in the USA these terms have been used interchangeably).

5. Black Economic Empowerment is a government policy aimed at redressing past imbalances by improving Black economic access and material wealth through promoting Black business ownership and supplying incentives for procuring goods and services from Black-owned businesses.