Being a migrant learner in a South African primary school: recognition and racialisation

ABSTRACT

This article is an exploration of racialised understandings of migrant learners within the educational space of primary school and the social context of xenophobia in South Africa. These understandings draw from small-scale creative visual research that focused on migrant learners’ perspectives on their school experiences. Framed by the concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘White privilege’, it uses the spatial encounter between two learners – one racialised as White and one as Black – and draws on elements of storytelling to present their fragmentary, mosaic-like narratives, highlighting two facets of racialisation: the prizing of White migrant identities and the erasure of Black migrant identities. This study contributes to the field of children’s geographies in terms of revealing how migrant primary school children experience the school space differently as differently racialised individuals, as well as how research approaches common in education (picturebooks) and Critical Race Theory (storytelling) can enable such stories to emerge in migration research.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• migration
• South Africa
• racialisation
• White privilege
• visual methods

Introduction: migration and migrant children in the ‘rainbow nation’ of South Africa

Migration is undoubtedly one of the most pressing issues of our times (Castles, de Haas, and Miller 2013). It has been estimated that, worldwide, there are 35.5 million children living outside of the country of their birth, making it an issue of global interest and concern (IDAC 2021).

South Africa is a country with a long history of immigration (Kang’the and Duma 2013). There are estimated to be 2.5 million residents who were not born in the country, amounting to around 5% of the total population (Ruedin 2019). The second largest economy in Africa after Nigeria, many people move to South Africa due to poverty or lack of employment in their home countries, as well as forced migration due to violent conflict (Ruedin 2019). Migrant¹ communities include the thousands of Zimbabweans and Mozambicans who entered South Africa in search of refuge in 1980s (Gordon 2016) and those fleeing the more recent iterations of conflict and hardship in countries such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Burundi, Somalia, South Sudan and Ethiopia (Motha 2005). ‘White’ migration from outside of the African continent has been on a smaller scale and is mostly considered to be for economic or lifestyle reasons.

While human rights law that supports refugees and asylum-seekers is well codified in South Africa, the ability of individuals to realise these rights is limited (Landau and Amit 2014). There are strong anti-immigration voices within the state apparatus, media and public (Ruedin 2019); immigrants are often blamed for the country’s economic problems, underdevelopment and crime (Landau, Segatti, and Misago 2011; Motha 2005). Many provinces are grappling with the subsequent reality of xenophobic attacks against migrants, particularly migrants from other sub-Saharan African countries (Nyamnjoh 2010). Thus, not only has the country been accused of xenophobia, but more specifically, Afrophobia – of discrimination against Black Africans from other countries. Neocosmos (2006) provides an in-depth look at how such discriminatory discourses are constructed by the South African state. He describes the idea of South African exceptionalism, a discourse which ‘is not simply founded on the belief that South Africa is an exception in Africa because of its industrial development, but includes a tendency to see the rest of the continent as rural, backward, immersed in poverty and politically unstable and corrupt’ (78–79). This is within a country that was (re-)founded, in its modern democratic post-apartheid,² post-colonial form in 1994, on the vision of building national unity and the ‘rainbow nation’ of people of all races, ethnicities and cultures (Soudien 2007). It has been argued, however, that such a ‘rainbow’ has been difficult to achieve and may not have envisaged the inclusion of non-native South Africans (Peberdy 2001).

There is a growing body of scholarly work on migration and education emerging from around the globe (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2001; Adams and Kirova 2007; Urias 2012; Arnot, Schneider, and Welply 2016; Hanna 2020), including in South Africa (Palmary 2009; Hemson 2011; Vandeyar and Vandeyar 2017; Hanna 2021; 2022; Hanna and Kucharczyk 2021). There is also a healthy legacy of methodological innovation within the field of children’s geographies (Young and Barrett 2001; Horton and Kraftl 2006; van Blerk 2012) that has moved with developing understandings of children and childhood as spatially, temporally and socially contingent and emergent, and of children’s rights to be involved in decision-making (Aitken 2018). However, despite some work relating to racial or cultural identities and inclusion and exclusion of youth (for example, Thomas 2009; Radcliffe and Webb 2016), Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou (2015, 647), highlighting the importance of intersectionality, have argued that issues like ‘discrimination, xenophobia and racism are often invisible in migration studies’. I would add that research that focuses on racialisation and racism among primary-school-age children, and that uses methodological and analytical approaches drawing from education and Critical Race Theory, are sparse – including in the field of children’s geographies in general, and in this journal in particular. This is despite the potential of such approaches to enable the understandings of marginalised groups such as migrant learners to emerge (Adams 2009), particularly where value is placed on storytelling deeply rooted in personal experiences, as Critical Race Theorists such as Delgado (1989) propose. This article, therefore, aims to make a contribution to children’s geographies in two ways: first, to understanding of racialisation and White privilege within the spatial context of primary school and the social context of xenophobia that emerges in the encounter between learners racialised as ‘White’ and ‘Black’; and, second, to appreciation of the potential of creative visual methods and storytelling in enabling access to and the sharing of such narratives.

The article will now look in more detail at the situation of migrant learners and their rights in the South African school system. Then it will consider the conceptual framework that draws on the idea of ‘recognition’ and ‘White privilege’. Following this, it will consider in detail the methods and analytical approaches taken in the research, as well as details of the participants and their school. The article then moves on to a presentation of findings, and a subsequent analysis and discussion of migrant learners’ experiences of school, expressed primarily through the accounts of two learners whose racialised experiences come into sharp relief as they encounter one another (and me) in the research space. Their stories expose two related processes: the prizing of White migrant identities and the erasure of Black migrant identities. The article goes on to argue that these are racialised approaches to migrant learners that are reflected in South African society at large, illustrating the legacy of colonialism, apartheid and White privilege that underlie xenophobia and Afrophobia in this context. It ultimately argues that these approaches are discriminatory and limiting in terms of creating an inclusive learning space for all migrant learners, and that they need to change.

Education provision and barriers in South Africa

Since the end of apartheid, education in South Africa has seen multiple overhauls and significant investment in seeking to address historical racialised inequalities (Soudien 2007). School is compulsory for all South Africans aged 7 (grade 1) to 15 (grade 9). Although participation rates are high, performance is lower than in similar countries, sometimes attributed to poor quality facilities and teaching (Spreen and Vally 2010) and a complex school type and fees system that appears to put some schools, particularly those that serve Black communities, at a disadvantage (Motala and Sayed 2012). There is a national curriculum, an extensive schedule of assessment and a range of policies on inclusion in education (Department of Basic Education 2018). Additionally, learners have the right to quality, non-discriminatory education under international and national law (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996a section 29; South African Schools Act 1996b; UNCRC 1989).

Despite these formal rights, however, migrant learners still face discrimination that presents a barrier to accessing this ‘quality’ education to which they are entitled. These include providing the required documentation for admission (e.g. proof of immunisation, transfer card from previous school, proof of age), raising school fees and covering the costs of uniforms and transport (Motha 2005). UNESCO (2018) warns that migrant children risk being turned away at the school gate, and that the curriculum does not address xenophobia or discrimination against migrants.

Research has confirmed that some migrant learners also face discrimination once within the school gates, including being socially excluded due to speaking English in a ‘foreign’ accent or having ‘blacker’ skin than Black South Africans, and being negatively stereotyped by teachers and learners. This is despite the fact that they often illustrate a strong work ethic at school (Vandeyar and Vandeyar 2017). Such experiences fall short of the aim of the official curriculum, which is ‘to ensure that children acquire and apply knowledge and skills in ways that are meaningful to their own lives’, and policy that compels schools to develop a non-discriminatory and inclusive approach to a range of children, irrespective of their country of origin, ability, gender, culture, religion, race or ethnicity (Department of Basic Education 2018). Thus, there appears to be a disconnect between the societal aim of creating a harmonious rainbow nation, and the reality of being a racialised migrant learner in a society where xenophobia and Afrophobia are common. If one assumes that educational settings are a microcosm of wider social processes, then it is conceivable that learners in the school space will be affected by negative attitudes and actions towards migrants that exist outside the school gates. Such effects will become clearer in the findings of this article, and unusually for research in schools in the context of South Africa, will focus exclusively on the experiences of primary-age children (rather than the significant adults in their lives), through creative methods, offering a tentative step towards increasing awareness among those who have the power to influence children’s experiences.

The concepts of recognition and White privilege

The concepts of recognition and White privilege offer an illuminating framework for analysing the primary school experiences of migrant learners in South Africa. These are introduced now, and elaborated later in light of the fieldwork and analysis with migrant learners.

The concept of ‘recognition’ saw a resurgence in the late twentieth century in the context of migration and multicultural and diverse societies, where certain racial, ethnic, cultural or national groups may possess fewer rights, freedoms and opportunities (Taylor 1992). Kymlicka (1995) has written extensively on group-differentiated rights and the concept of multiple identities, whereby the minority is assured recognition and equality with the majority as a way of achieving social justice. Honneth (1992, 1997) is a prominent advocate of recognition approaches, viewing recognition by one individual of another as essential to flourishing as a human being. In ‘Integrity and Disrespect’ (1992, 188–189), he states that:

we owe our integrity … to the receipt of approval from other persons. [Negative concepts such as ‘insult’ or recognition ‘degradation’] are related to forms of disrespect, to the denial of recognition. [They] are used to characterize a form of behaviour that does not represent an injustice solely because it constrains the subjects in their freedom for action or does them harm. Rather, such behaviour is injurious because it impairs these persons in their positive understanding of self—an understanding acquired by intersubjective means.

This lack of recognition of a person – of a migrant, in the case of the present research – especially where their racial identity is less valued may be experienced as an erasure of their identity. In the context of migrant people in post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, this may be a display of active ‘White ignorance’ of Black identities (Mills 2007) and ‘White resistance’ against losing their powerful status as resource-owners, knowledge-bearers and decision-makers. This brings us to the second concept to be considered here, that of White privilege, which can lead to the prizing of White identities. The trappings of Whiteness – the power that White people wield – are therefore still seen as things to aspire to, and this system operates in schools as institutions as much as in wider society. Thus, as Mills (1997) has noted, White privilege and White supremacy are able to continue unabated as part of the ‘Racial Contract’ that means ‘duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis’ (93). McIntosh (1988) talks about the ‘invisible knapsack’ of White privilege, which provides people racialised as White with a ‘package of unearned assets’, advantages that may be taken for granted by White people, so normalised has White privilege become.

Taylor (1992, 25) argues that nonrecognition or misrecognition ‘can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being’. In educational spaces, recognition, in addition to challenging discriminatory approaches (such as those inherent in White privilege and supremacist thinking), forms part of the vision of a socially just education where pedagogical and curricular justice can be achieved through critical pedagogy and empowerment of learners to be fully actualised human beings (Freire and Shor 1987; Giroux 1992; see also Hanna 2020). In this study, it is the encounter between ‘White’ and ‘Black’ migrant learners, racialised within the spatial context of school, a space that shapes and is shaped by wider xenophobic discourses and practices in society, that will highlight the value of recognition and the role of White privilege in the educational experiences of migrant learners.

Creative visual methods, encounter and mosaic-like narratives

The overarching aim of the research project, on the findings of which this article is based, is to explore the primary school experiences of recent migrant children in South Africa, particularly focusing on their feelings of inclusion/exclusion. This qualitative project views as central the subjective understandings and experiences of individuals and groups (Guba and Lincoln 1989) and the power of storytelling for increased understanding and transformation (Delgado 1989). It takes seriously children’s right to be involved in anything that affects their lives, including research (Lundy 2007). The project considers the micro experiences of young people and macro systems that influence these, both of which are considerations within children’s geographies (Ansell 2009), using an innovative combination of visual methods, in response to Dobson’s concern (2009, 355) that ‘more could be done in migration studies to understand ‘the best interests of the child’ by taking account of his or her own perspective’. Thus, this research aimed to foreground learners’ experiences and opinions through employing the visual methods of picturebooks and photo-walks, an approach which is often used to access and share the ‘voices’ of marginalised groups who are commonly underrepresented in research (Kara 2015). The field of children’s geographies has a long history of engagement with methodological innovation, not least among children and youth, consistent with developing understandings of children and childhood as spatially, temporally and socially contingent, and of children’s rights to be involved in decision-making (Young and Barrett 2001; van Blerk 2012). This project sought to build on this foundation, bringing in methodological tools more common in educational research, such as picturebooks, due to their unique ability represent time, space and (sometimes fantastical) experience, in order to enable children to empathise with the characters (see, for example, Arizpe, Colomer, and Martínez-Roldán 2014; Kucharczyk and Hanna 2020; Hanna 2022). It then combined this with methods more familiar to the field such as ‘photo-walks’ around school (Pyrry 2015) that allow participants to represent their environment, as well as non-participant observations of classroom and playground life, and formal and informal group discussions.

The school that is discussed here is one of three schools that have been involved in this research between 2016 and 2019, with different schools involved in three different iterations of the project (see also Hanna 2020, for findings from a linked project in England). It is the first iteration, in 2016, that is the focus of this article. The school is a state-funded primary school in a suburb of Cape Town. The school has approximately 600 learners across eight years of primary education. Classes have, on average, 40 learners. The school is racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse, with most learners coming from ‘Black’ or ‘coloured’³ communities. Most learners are considered by the school as coming from disadvantaged, low-income backgrounds. The school was selected for this study as it enrols significant numbers of migrant children (around 10% of overall enrolment). Due to the sensitivity of discussing race in schools in South Africa, as well as lack of detailed information on migrant learners, statistics on racial/ethnic breakdown of learners at the school was not available to me. A group of 4 participants (‘learner-researchers’) was involved, from Grade 4 (age 9–10 years). Most participants were born outside South Africa, in central and southern Africa, and South America; some had one parent from a country outside South Africa, while others reported both parents were born outside South Africa. It is of note, given the focus of this article on racialised identities, that the majority of teachers at the school were from the coloured identity background, along with a small number of White teachers. There were no ‘Black’ (African) teachers.

As a researcher, I worked for 3 weeks in the school, spending 3–4 mornings/afternoons per week with the learners and/or their teachers. Each session with the learners lasted 60–90 min. Additionally, I observed and accompanied them a number of times throughout the school day, both inside and outside the classroom. The picturebook The Arrival (authored by Shaun Tan 2006), which tells the story of a man leaving his family and travelling alone to a new country, was used to stimulate the learners’ memories of being new at the school. After reading the book, learners focused on certain scenes from the story and came up with ideas relating to how the man was feeling as a new arrival, and how someone could help him (see Hanna 2021, 2022 for more detail on the picturebook activities). We then did a photo-walk around school and the learners explored their own school experiences through taking photographs of school life with digital cameras. Throughout the book and photography sessions, the participants and I were discussing many aspects of school life and what it was like to be new at school. In addition to the work with the learners, interviews and informal conversations were held with a small number of teachers, although these interviews are not the focus of this article.

There were many ethical issues to consider before, during and after this research, not least those relating to the potential vulnerability of the participants and the particular ethical concerns surrounding using photography in research. Appropriate permissions were received from the school, university and educational authorities, and the British Educational Research Association guidance (2011; updated in 2018) was followed carefully. Identities have been disguised.

The data (approximately 13 h of interviews and discussions, 10 pages of formal and informal observation notes, and over 500 photographs taken by both participants and myself) was transcribed and analysed thematically using the four-stage approach of Bryman (2012), using MAXQDA software as an aid to coding and organising the data. The starting point was the concept of recognition described earlier, later deepened by exploring the presence and application of White privilege in the research space.

In terms of reporting on the research, as mentioned earlier, elements of Critical Race Theory, such as the storytelling, have been drawn upon, particularly for their potential to unearth understandings of marginalised groups, to communicate and even transform (Delgado 1989; Adams 2009). Combined with the mixture of creative methods, this offers an approach to research on race and children that is unusual in the field of children’s geographies in general, and in this journal in particular. Moreover, as Walker, influenced by Delgado, states in her work that applies this approach in South Africa, ‘[narratives] are above all socially located, so that telling one story is also telling the story of many lives, and telling the story of the individual in relation to these other lives’ (Walker 2005, 132). Therefore, in drawing on these traditions, the research findings themselves are presented in the form of two narratives of individual participants – one racialised as White (Anna) and one as Black (Gabriel) – providing profiles and my observations and accounts of their actions during the research. These are interspersed with verbatim quotes and commentary on what the data suggests about how migrants are understood in their school and in South Africa more broadly. I argue that such narratives were only able to emerge in the children’s ‘encounter’ (Pyrry 2015; Nayak 2017; Wilson 2017) with each other, and my encounter with them, where their differences were more apparent. Wilson (2017) has noted that ‘geographies of encounter’ has been used as a term within studies concerning social diversity, among other areas, and in the same way it fits well within this study on racialised encounters (see Wilson for a more extensive theorisation of encounter). Therefore, I have chosen to focus on Anna and Gabriel in this article as it was through my encounter with them, and particularly with Anna as the only ‘White’ learner in the research, that it became clear that her experience of school diverged so markedly from that of the other (Black) learners.

In research terms, having this encounter with these two children was quite a unique opportunity as the level of racial mixing in schools in state-funded schools in South Africa remains very low, and, indeed, this was the only opportunity I had during any of the iterations of this research to work with a White child. If it hadn’t been for this contrast – and this fortuitous encounter – then I would not have looked so closely at divergent racialisation processes of migrant learners in the school space. While I only relate two accounts here, and while the aim of qualitative research is never to provide generalisable findings as per positivist approaches, nevertheless, following Walker, these accounts can be taken as suggestive of themes that emerged more widely from the research.

The nature of the fieldwork in terms of combining a number of different activities, extended temporally and spatially, mean that offering more traditional ‘narratives’ such as long, verbatim quotes from learners that might claim to offer the authentic ‘voice’ of participants was not possible; what was possible was only a fragmentary picture – one that was difficult to make sense of when taking each individual utterance or activity in isolation. As a way through, I have tried to mirror Lomax’s (2012) and Pyrry’s (2015) understanding of fieldwork as a series of relational, positional ‘research encounters’ that recognises the construction of knowledge between research participants and researcher (also, in this way, a participant); as Pyrry proposes, ‘reflection happens in practice in encounters’ (151). Therefore, I offer below a collection of fragmentary, mosaic-like narratives that bring together various data sources to build a picture of what school life in South Africa is like for these two migrant learners.

Anna and Gabriel

Anna was a ten-year old girl from South America who had moved to South Africa around two years before the research began. In Photo 1, she is next to me as I walk down the stairs, pausing momentarily to pose confidently in front of the camera – indeed, her confidence shown in this photo is telling. Her parents were from different countries and she had a number of siblings with whom she shared either one or both biological parents. She identified herself – and was identified by teachers – as ‘White’. She was bilingual, speaking both Portuguese and English at home. What she shared of her home life implied she was from a moderately middle class background. Anna was very enthusiastic in her participation in the project, often being the first to assertively offer an answer or an idea, but also to dismiss the responses of others who she disagreed with.

Photo 1. Photo-walk around school with Anna confidently posing beside me and Gabriel alone at the front, taken by another learner.

Gabriel was a ten-year-old boy who had a complex and unclear migration background, not uncommon in research with migrant learners, having lived in both Europe and a number of countries in Africa. He was variously identified as either ‘Black’ or ‘coloured’, although his racial/ethnic background was unclear. He had moved to South Africa at least three years before the research began. He did not live with his parents but was being raised by his older sisters. From what he shared during the research, I infer that he was from a low-income family. Like Anna, he also spoke Portuguese and English at home and at school, although he said that his English was stronger than his Portuguese. Within the research group, like Anna, he was one of the most talkative and most likely to respond to questions or join in with discussions, but also to work alongside others.

Migrant learners, recognition and the continuation of White privilege and Afrophobia

As mentioned earlier, the primary focus of the research was the experiences of migrant learners of primary school in South Africa. This section will present analytical accounts of Anna and Gabriel to illustrate two contrasting racialised experiences.

Anna and the prizing of White migrant identities

There are scenes in the book The Arrival that invite an opening up of discussion. One of those is where the man is shown walking through the ‘old’ country, followed by the shadow of a dragon. When we looked at this scene together as a group, Anna shared that she, too, had moved from a neighbouring area recently due to local unrest. There was a sense here that her family had the means to move to a safer, ‘better’ neighbourhood, implying a higher income background than many of the learners in the school (including Gabriel).

As we discussed the different areas of Cape Town, as well as hinting at their social class attributes, we frequently touched on ideas of race. When I shared my observation that there were not many learners with skin like mine (‘White’) in school, Anna exclaimed, ‘Yes, yes, yes [there are]! Me!’ While in White-majority countries she may have been racialised as ‘mixed race’ or even ‘Black’, in relation to the majority of learners and teachers in the school, she had comparatively light-coloured skin and hair and therefore was racialised as White. At school, she conversed very fluently in English, speaking in what, the learners shared, was considered a ‘White’ accent. Accent is also racialised in this context, where people from different racial backgrounds are assumed to have different accents (see Makoe and McKinney 2014; Vandeyar and Vandeyar 2017), with a ‘White’ accent highly prized and considered as part of White cultural capital.

Anna was keenly aware of her multiple national identities and appeared to regard these with a sense of pride, often mentioning to the group various details from her home life in her country of birth. She was keenly aware of who else in the classroom was also a migrant, providing me with information that the teachers were often unable to give, and many of her friends were born outside of South Africa. She was clearly very popular, often accompanied by a number of friends when I saw her at the school fence, waiting for her father to pick her up after school, talking and laughing loudly, introducing me to her companions. It was also interesting that, unlike some parents, her father had no hesitation in consenting to Anna participating in the research. This is notable because at the time of the fieldwork, there were anti-immigration tensions being reported in the South African media, which meant that some parents were anxious about their children taking part in a project that highlighted the children’s migration status. It is possible that Anna’s Whiteness (as opposed to Black African-ness) meant that her family did not associate their immigration status with that of those who were reportedly under attack; in other words, it was a privilege afforded by her (their) Whiteness. Given the power of White privilege, it is perhaps unsurprising that the idea of Whiteness as a desirable status has been maintained and in this case appears to be being passed on to the next generation through the socialising mechanism of schooling, and developed in racialised encounters in the school space.

When discussing Anna with her teachers, it became clear that she had been chosen to participate in the research project thanks to her English language skills and the feeling that she had the ability to articulate well-developed opinions on her overwhelmingly positive (it was assumed) experiences of life at this school. It soon became clear that she was regarded as a ‘model learner’ (which in some contexts has been shown to be a deeply racialised construction – see, for example, Fránquiz and Ortiz 2017) and was held up as an example when the teachers were trying to inspire other migrant, non-native speakers of English as to what they could achieve with hard work. Indeed, she shared, ‘I love English!’ It should be noted, however, that other aspects of her identity may also have influenced how she was viewed; not only did Anna have Whiteness in her ‘invisible knapsack’ (McIntosh 1988), she also had her middle class background that provided her with the means of investment in education, and the fact that she was a girl, often associated positively with educational achievement, but also the pressure to perform (although this is also contested – see Francis 2010). . Thus, considering intersectionality (Bhopal and Preston 2011), in terms of how multiple identities can come together to (dis)advantage a migrant learner, is also useful – and will become more so when Anna’s case is compared with Gabriel’s. But returning to Anna for now, it was easy to see how, from the school’s point of view, she was a success story.

In working with other research participants, Anna often became impatient with Black learners when they didn’t answer my questions quickly, sometimes correcting them, being insensitive to other migrants who spoke English differently from her and being keen to answer questions directed at others. There was a sense of superiority that caused me to reflect on the extent to which this attitude was tolerated within the school due to her privileged racial identity. Furthermore, Anna appeared to be protected from being scolded by her teachers for what, coming from other (Black migrant) learners, would have been considered rude and inappropriate behaviour, again bringing to mind McIntosh’s (1988) ‘invisible knapsack’ of White privilege (and the intersectional identities of class and gender mentioned above), where teachers may be unaware that they are treating Anna differently from others.

I had the good fortune in research terms of meeting Anna again two years after the initial project fieldwork, while I was re-visiting the school for a second iteration of the project, in 2018. If she was already confident and in receipt of positive recognition as a ten-year-old, then it was little surprise to meet her as an even more confident twelve-year-old. In the intervening years she had apparently grown in popularity with her peers, and I would often observe how she would have a gaggle of followers wherever she went in school, with the charisma to draw her friends into what she wanted them to do. It was clear that the confidence in her multiple identities as a migrant learner that I had observed a few years previously had blossomed, and I would surmise that this was due to the recognition in the form of valorisation that was given to her particularly as a ‘White’ girl and therefore as a holder of something that is still valued – still privileged and aspired to – by both her peers and her teachers. Indeed, she seemed to represent the very ‘embodiment’ of racialisation that other scholars have described in relation to non-White minoritised young people (Nayak 2017), but which here is an embodiment of the related concept of White privilege. It is the ‘receipt of approval from other persons’ (Honneth 1992, 188–189) in positive recognition of her identity associated with her White privilege that led to her flourishing.

Gabriel and the erasure of Black migrant identities

Anna encountered Gabriel in the research space. In Photo 1, Gabriel is in the foreground, striding out alone as the rest of the group saunter slowly down the stairs, or, like Anna, pose for the camera. He mentioned many friends and acquaintances when he talked about school, and when we did the photo-walks together, other learners often greeted him, the photo-walks offering an important opportunity to observe his wider school interactions. He also talked often about the girls in the school that he liked, and the various times he had tried to find the chance to talk with them. For this, he was sometimes scolded by Anna as being ‘naughty’.

Some instances in my encounter with Gabriel in the research group stand out and are reflective of a general picture I built up from working with him and with other learners like him. When analysing the scenes in the picturebook where we were thinking about how the man could be helped, the learners came up with many ideas, but in applying these to school life, it was Gabriel who focused on the advice to make new friends and to stop the bullying at school. Indeed, bullying was a topic that was discussed often by the Black migrant learners (never Anna) in this project, with the break times in the playground clearly emerging as the most vulnerable times in some children’s school day (and it is a common concern among migrant and refugee children – see UNICEF 2016).

Unlike Anna, Gabriel was never the focus of attention from the teachers in their discussions with me about migrant learners, a contrast only noticeable in the encounter between these two individuals. Indeed, he was never mentioned. It was as if he had been ‘erased’ from their memory and not deemed worthy of note. In a sense this is curious, when, to all intents and purposes, his English language skills were exceptional: he was articulate and expressive, his grammar was excellent and his vocabulary wide (much wider than Anna’s). But he had what may be considered a ‘Black’ accent, far from Anna’s much-coveted ‘White’ accent, that also has implications in terms of intersectional identities as it implies lower social class. Indeed, it has been noted that there has been a policy failure in terms of addressing intersectional inequalities in South Africa (Schmidt and Mestry 2019); findings here indicate that there has also been a failure in practice. Gabriel also indicated that teachers saw him as a trouble-maker, an identity that has been shown to be racialised and gendered in other contexts such as the UK and USA, with the fact that he was a boy potentially influencing how he was viewed as a learner – the lack of regard towards or ‘prizing’ of him by his teachers (see also Bhopal and Preston 2011). Yet, in contrast to Anna, he was always sensitive and respectful to other ‘Black’ migrant learners in the research space when they were sharing their experiences, thereby showing an attitude that, ordinarily, many teachers would applaud and hold up as an example to others. Here, then, we see the erasure of Gabriel’s presence and identity as a Black boy from a low-income family with an African heritage from the ‘success’ story that this school was telling about itself.

In contrast to Anna, Gabriel mentioned his home countries and multiple identities much less often, despite the clear focus on this in the picturebook, and the group’s subsequent lengthy discussion of this topic. Indeed, over time, it seemed to me that he was unsure about which countries he had lived in and when. This is perhaps unsurprising given that his parental situation was also unclear, but still it gave the sense that his African migration was of less interest to the school, and that those identities could easily be ignored and thereby erased. On the whole, other ‘Black’ migrant learners were adamant that they didn’t get to talk about their home backgrounds; on the contrary, it felt to Gabriel, among many others, that ‘all we do is write, write, write’ in class, with very little time to just talk with the teacher, or even with each other. Gabriel shared that he and other learners (including Anna) were in fact forbidden from talking about things like skin colour in school:

Helen [Author/researcher]:

In the playground, when you’re talking about each other, do you say these words [White, Black, Coloured]?

Gabriel and Anna:

No!

Gabriel:

it’s like, they will think you’re being racist

Helen:

so if you have to call someone over?

Anna:

you just say their name

Helen:

what if you don’t know their name?

Gabriel:

you say ‘boy’, ‘hey girlie!’

[All laugh]

 

Anna:

yeah that is true

Helen:

do your teachers tell you not to say those words? Do they tell you off?

Anna:

no, it’s racist

Helen:

how do you know that?

Anna:

because we don’t want to be racist so

Helen:

but do the teachers tell you off, I mean, tell you off for saying things in the playground? Like if you said, ‘that Black child’ or ‘that Coloured child’, would they be angry at you, your teachers?

Anna:

yes, they don’t like it and they don’t want to be rude to the children, they think that we like being rude to the children but we don’t mean it, we’re just describing the children

Here, Gabriel and Anna (and their classmates) found themselves in a quandary; they may seek to describe children according to their physical characteristics as a way of facilitating their daily interactions with them in the school space, and yet, they have absorbed the view that to discuss one another’s physicality was racist and would be punished. This is to some extent in line with the ‘non-racial’ approach to building society (see Steyn and Foster 2008) inherent in that most evocative of South African ideals – the ‘rainbow nation’. However, it also implies that if talking about race and racism is forbidden then it will somehow cease to exist, that we have somehow arrived at a ‘postracial’ society (Goldberg 2015), where those ‘duties, rights and liberties [that] have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis (Mills 1997, 93) are now assumed to be distributed equitably in a democratic society, without grappling with racism itself. In Bonilla-Silva’s (2002) view, this can be evidence of ‘color-blind racism’, whereby it is erroneously claimed that discrimination has all but been eliminated. This may be perpetuated by the fact, reported by Ferreira (2016), that young people are reluctant to talk about South Africa’s recent history.

One wonders to what extent this is exacerbated by teachers’ own discomfort and reticence (see also Leibowitz et al. 2010, on ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ as applied to South Africa). Even in the best cases, learners like Gabriel were only vaguely aware of the home countries and languages of the other learners in the research group and some seemed unsure of or shy to share their own, especially in cases where their parents were from two different countries in Africa. It is telling that his teachers also appeared to have patchy knowledge of African geography and it is highly likely that they had never travelled in Southern Africa (while many had travelled elsewhere outside the continent). This recalls Mills’ (2007) work on ‘White ignorance’ that results in Black people knowing more about White people than vice versa, as they have been socialised into a world where being White means holding power, but where Black people are shut out of the White world by a ‘veil’ (Du Bois [1903] 1989). There may be an underlying assumption that Black migrant cultures are to be forgotten – erased – for the sake of assimilation, while White migrant culture may be integrated and included, and even aspired to. This suggests that an Afrophobic, White supremacist model of integration in education for certain migrants continues in practice, despite pro-diversity policies, even in a school in the ‘rainbow nation’ of South Africa, where Whiteness is in the minority but still holds privileged status.

Conclusion

This article offered an exploration of racialised understandings of migrant learners within the educational space of primary school and the social context of xenophobia in South Africa. It was based on small-scale, in-depth research that focused on the perspectives of migrant learners on their school experiences, using a combination of creative visual methods and approaches drawn from several disciplines. Drawing on the concepts of ‘recognition’ and ‘White privilege’, it used elements of storytelling to present the fragmentary, mosaic-like narratives of two learners to highlight two facets of racialisation: the prizing of White migrant identities and the erasure of Black migrant identities. It was these two learners’ encounters with one another in the research space, as well as my own encounter(s) with them, that enabled these understandings to emerge. While focusing on a small number of narratives, I argue that the examples of children’s experiences shared point towards the wider dynamics in schools and therefore indicate how the racialisation of migrant learners may be operating. Thus, in terms of the concept of recognition, the findings reveal that migrant learners racialised as White receive positive recognition, while those racialised as Black do not.

Considering these ideas of recognition, prizing and erasure, we can analyse the cases of Anna and Gabriel in a new and instructive light. If we follow Honneth’s (1992) emphasis on the importance of recognition to human flourishing, we can see the extent to which positive recognition of Anna as a ‘White’ person has led to such flourishing in terms of her self-confidence and ability to achieve. Conversely, then, denying Gabriel recognition due to his Black identity risks ‘impair[ing] … [his] positive understanding of self’ (188). This is illustrative of Taylor’s (1992, 25) idea of nonrecognition as a ‘form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, reduced mode of being’, and inflicting a ‘grievous wound’. Thus, failing to recognise Gabriel’s identities as a Black migrant learner with a diverse cultural and migration background could be considered an act of oppression or wounding. Sadly, however, stereotyping and stigmatising minoritised children and young people through racialisation – or through differentiation according to other intersectional identities such as social class and gender (Bhopal and Preston 2011) – is nothing new, and neither is their struggle to put forward more individualised identities that are ‘hybrid, contested expressions’ (Radcliffe and Webb 2016, 10).

This research reflects not only the school space but also the social context beyond the school walls: the former influenced by – and even having the agency to influence – the latter. As discussed in the literature earlier in this paper, migration is a sensitive issue in the South African context and this has, in part, been fuelled by ‘a tendency to see the rest of the [African] continent as rural, backward, immersed in poverty and politically unstable and corrupt’ (Neocosmos 2006, 78–79). This results, therefore, in an Afrophobic, ‘unwelcoming attitude’ towards migrants, especially those from the continent (Peberdy 2001, 17), but not towards ‘White’ migrants. If the view from the seat of political power is that migrants are an unwelcome and undeserving drain on resources, then it would be unsurprising if this attitude was found to have infiltrated school life, even where a school has the best intentions and does not actively promote this notion. While overt discrimination against Black migrants in schools may be formally outlawed, and while the curriculum content may be in line with the law, I would argue that the silence and erasure of Black migrant identities is in itself evidence of discrimination.

The diverging approaches towards Black and White migrant identities would indicate that the racial differentiations that were so common and engrained in the apartheid era are, unsurprisingly, hard to shift (see, for example, Alexander and Vally 2010). However, I would argue that they are less recognised when considering migrant learners who were born outside of South Africa, and so spatially and temporally removed from apartheid South Africa. While the racialised lens may be unintended, the findings here suggest that it forms a barrier to full recognition of the migrant learner as a fully competent human being with multiple identities that goes beyond their ‘race’ and all that may imply to the onlooker. Crush (2001, editorial note) has described ‘the new apartheid of xenophobia’ based on citizenship. The old colonial, apartheid categories and stereotypes, then, are being reproduced in a ‘colour-blind’ educational environment that refuses to acknowledge its role in the reproduction of inequality, preferring to cling to the laudable but challenging aim of creating the ‘rainbow nation’.

As a way forward, all migrant children’s identities must be shown positive recognition as part of a social justice approach to education that is essential in a society still struggling to address its long legacy of racial division and inequity. In such cases, critical pedagogical approaches (Freire and Shor 1987; Giroux 1992) that employ ‘pedagogies of discomfort’ (Leibowitz et al. 2010) which acknowledge the power of Whiteness and the existence of Afrophobic ‘White ignorance’ (Mills 2007) are essential training tools for those involved in educational spaces. Just as educational research is concerned with the relationship between adults and children and how exploration and communication can be enabled, and Critical Race Theory underlines the right of minoritised individuals to tell their stories, the field of children’s geographies, as Aitken (2018, 19) reminds us, ‘is about how children show up, and make and remake space and therefore themselves, and how we, as adults, enable or constrain them in the process of making the world anew’. Therefore, the potential of research approaches common in education (picturebooks) and Critical Race Theory (storytelling) to enable the racially differentiated stories of migrant children to emerge, and the understanding of racialised, spatial encounters to make a contribution to children’s geographies, is great and ripe for further exploration.

Acknowledgments

I am incredibly grateful for feedback on early drafts of this article, as well as for huge encouragement, from Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Dr Rebecca Loader.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number SG162248]; National Research Foundation (South Africa).

Notes

1 The term ‘migrant’, while imperfect, is used in this article for brevity to denote people who have moved between two or more countries. Ordinarily, I find the term ‘person who migrates’ or ‘person with a migration background’ more accurate and less suggestive of the negative stereotypes often attributed to ‘immigrant’ or ‘migrant’ in the media and political sphere.

2 ‘Apartheid’ was a White supremacist form of state governance that focused on keeping different ‘races’ separate in all aspects of daily life. While it became the official government policy from 1948, White people had held power and privilege since the area was colonised as early as seventeenth century. See Motala and Vally 2010, for a more detailed explanation.

3 While problematic, these identity markers are commonly used in writings on South Africa. I have followed Hammett 2010 here, as well as for an explanation of the complex and non-unified category of ‘coloured’ in the South African context.