Bearing Whiteness: A pedagogy of compassion in a time of troubles

Abstract

This paper focuses on the trauma of loss and transformation for white South Africans in the wake of the demise of apartheid. It draws on seven years experience of working with white students, staff and senior managers of a university as the first black Dean of Education. Using post-conflict pedagogy, the paper illustrate that the lines between victim and perpetrator begin to blur, as part of a process of making sense of how to live together in the shadow of a shared history and with the prospects of a common future. Teachers in this pedagogy not only bring-in their own identities, they also carry their own knowledge of the past. It is proposed that in a post-conflict pedagogy, teacher's intervention has to go beyond acknowledgement and embracing the victims of racism, thus empowering them to confront such behavior from a position of strength. This paper contends that the post-conflict pedagogy would dissuade/obviate the apocalyptic understandings of the young Afrikaner males from catastrophic events.

Keywords:

• racism
• Afrikaner youth
• whiteness
• blackness
• post-conflict pedagogy