Racial Encounter

The Social Psychology of Contact and Desegregation

Kevin Durrheim, John Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135648398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The political and legislative changes which took place in South Africa during the 1990s, with the dissolution of apartheid, created a unique set of social conditions. As official policies of segregation were abolished, people of both black and white racial groups began to experience new forms of social contact and intimacy.

By examining these emergingprocesses of intergroup contact in SouthAfrica, and evaluating related evidence from theUS, Racial Encounter offers a social psychological account of desegregation. It begins with a critical analysis of the traditional theories and research models used to understand desegregation: the contact hypothesis and race attitude theory. It then analyzes every day discourse about desegregation in South Africa, showing how discourse shapesindividuals' conception and management of their changing relationships and acts as a site of ideological resistance to social change. The connection between place, identity and re-creation of racial boundaries emerge as a central theme of this analysis.

This book will be of interest to social psychologists, students of intergroup relations and all those interested in post-apartheid South Africa.

1 Introduction

A trip to the apartheid museum, Gold Reef City, Johannesburg, is a disconcerting experience. At the entrance, the visitor is classified arbitrarily as either white or non-white¹. You then enter the museum through the gate relevant to this classification and, in the first part of the exhibition, enjoy a racially specific experience. The problem with segregation, as you soon realize, is that you don't have the same view of the exhibition as the other group. You are perpetually excluded and held apart. This experience helps you to remember the past by reliving, for a moment, the segregated perspectives, exclusions, and desires created by the geopolitical system that was known as apartheid.

Of course, this can only be a partial remembering of apartheid. At least three significant features of real-life segregation are impossible (and unethical!) to foist onto the unsuspecting museum patron. First, there is nothing really at stake in this random division of non-whites and whites. Segregation in contexts like post-colonial Africa and post-reconstruction USA, by contrast, has always implemented economic advantage and disadvantage (Cell, 1982; Goldberg, 1993, 2002). The topography of racial segregation has mapped almost perfectly onto the topography of material inequality; and indeed, segregation has been the primary means of securing such inequality. This brings us to our second point, namely that segregation in the museum influences your life only in the confines of the exhibition, whereas real-life segregation tends to pervade all aspects of social existence. Segregation in residence is mapped onto segregation in schools, which in turn is mapped onto segregation in employment, which is mapped back onto segregation in residence. For this reason, Pettigrew (1979) once labelled segregation the ‘structural linchpin of modern American race relations’ (p. 122). Finally, the museum offers a temporally truncated vision of life under apartheid. It is a short-lived snapshot and visitors are soon released from the constraints of their arbitrarily assigned ‘races’. Consequently, one's experience there does not convey the grinding persistence of segregation, its capacity for transference from one generation to the next.

These three features of segregation – its materiality, its pervasion and its persistence – are encapsulated in the history of South Africa, whose system of apartheid has become a global icon of segregation. Racial separation in South Africa dates back to the arrival of European settlers, who built a hedge around their early settlement in the Cape to partition themselves off from the surrounding natives. The latter were classified primarily in religious rather than racial terms, as ‘heathens’ rather than ‘blacks’. Later, during the period of European expansion into the interior, separation began to be grounded in racial terms and was arranged around the frontier, the symbolic and geographic ‘meeting point between savagery and civilization’ (MacCrone, 1937, p. 99). Segregation proper was only invented in the early twentieth century, around the time when white expansionism reached its zenith. In this light, Cell (1982) argues that it was essentially the product of modernization, the process that brought people together in cities and factories, and into a single economy and nation state. The ideology of segregation ‘was created on the whole by well-educated and comparatively moderate men as an apparently attractive alternative to the more extreme forms of white supremacy’ (p. x).

By the time the National Party came to power in South Africa in 1948, segregation in employment, education and residence was already well entrenched. As a form of governance and social regulation, it served numerous functions related to the production of privilege and inequality. For example, the system of migrant labour and segregated housing ensured a stable working population for mining and, later, industrial development; and segregation in schooling was proposed in the 1920s as a means of addressing the emerging problem of white poverty. The laws and policies of apartheid formalized and extended existing structures of segregation. By means of its policy of separate development, the Nationalist Government sought to enforce racial division in all aspects of public and private life. From the 1950s to the 1970s, over a hundred laws were passed to ensure a segregated society. These included: (1) the Group Areas Act (No. 41) of 1950, which created race-based areas of residence; (2) the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (No. 55) of 1949, which prohibited marriages between white people and people of other races; (3) the Bantu Education Act (No. 47) of 1953, which established a black education department and a curriculum that suited the ‘nature and requirements of the black people’; (4) the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (No. 49) of 1953, which legislated segregation in all public amenities, public buildings and public transport with the aim of eliminating contact between whites and other races; and (5) the Industrial Conciliation Act (No. 28) of 1956, which enabled the Minister of Labour to reserve categories of work for members of specified racial groups.

A distinction was developed between grand apartheid and petty apartheid. Grand apartheid was a macro policy, which sought to create independent ‘tribal homelands’ (Bantustans), comprising 14% of the surface area of the country. These homelands were to became the official country of residence of all blacks, leaving South Africa with a majority white ‘democracy’. Petty apartheid sought to regulate racial contact in public space, providing ‘separate amenities’ for whites and non-whites in terms of such facilities as park benches, public toilets, beaches, swimming pools and graveyards. Although apologists for apartheid, like their American counterparts, passionately believed the slogan ‘separate but equal’ (e.g. Rhoodie, 1969), it was palpably clear that the resources apportioned to blacks were vastly inferior to those apportioned to whites. Throughout the twentieth century, and in all aspects of life, segregation secured white privilege.

The decade of the 1990s in South Africa was much like the 1960s in the USA, witnessing victories by the black liberation movement and the civil rights movement in the two countries respectively (although the victory in South Africa was primarily political whereas that in the US was primarily legal). Even before the African National Congress (ANC) took power in 1994, the government had stopped enforcing its apartheid policies. As Saff (1998) has observed, the politics of ‘the transition’ led the state to soften its customary tactics of repression in favour of a more diplomatic and conciliatory approach. Within the period of a few years, state-sanctioned segregation came to an end as apartheid laws were scrapped. One of the first acts of the new government was to pass the Human Rights Commission Act (No. 54) of 1994, which established a state institution to guard and support constitutional democracy and serve as an antiracism watchdog. Soon after, in a major reversal of hundreds of years of policy, practice and legislation, racial discrimination and segregation were outlawed via the passing of the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (No. 4) of 2000, and the Employment Equity Act (No. 55) of 1998. In place of the policy of separate development, the new government established policies of redress, including affirmative action, and enforced desegregation and quotas, which were to be applied in institutions across society. South Africa seemed set for a shining future of racial equality and integration; the promise of a ‘rainbow nation’ beckoned.

This book originated as an attempt to understand the social psychological implications of these processes of social change. It is at once the product of a period of radical transition and an attempt to grasp some central aspects of that transition. As psychologists who grew up in the ‘old’ South Africa, we were acutely aware that the historical impact of racial isolation was manifest not only at the level of political and economic structures. It also found expression within everyday relationships in our society, shaping the nature of ordinary encounters and exchanges. A large volume of research on racial attitudes under apartheid, for example, had consistently documented a pattern of extreme racial prejudice. White South Africans in particular seemed to harbour negative feelings and stereotypes about other groups (see Foster, 1991; Foster & Nel, 1991) and were wary of coming into contact with others. By establishing a ‘taboo on intimacy’ (Bloom, 1971), apartheid had given rise to a psychology based on racial distance, division and fear.

Part of the promise of the new South Africa, we anticipated, was that this psychology was about to undergo a radical transformation. Whatever obstacles remained in the path of social change, the fall of apartheid seemed to herald a profound challenge to personal, collective and institutional racism. After all, now that its legal foundations had been dismantled, its material structures of segregation eroded, and its ideological justifications discredited, might not the social psychological ‘distance’ between South Africa's ‘race’ groups also be reduced? This question guided the research programme that eventually resulted in the present book.

The social psychology of contact and desegregation

The idea that desegregation generates social and psychological change is supported by a rich psychological literature that dates back to the middle years of the last century. Inspired by the writing of scholars such as Allport (1954), Clark (1953) and Pettigrew (1969), generations of social psychologists have sought both to understand and to promote desegregation. Two distinctive traditions of work can be identified here. The first has been concerned with measuring attitudes towards desegregation in contexts as diverse as neighbourhoods, housing projects, schools, universities, churches, industry and the armed forces (Clark, 1953; Farley et al., 1994; Greeley & Sheatsley, 1971). From its outset, such work pursued the goal of advocacy as much as description. Seeking to promote racial integration, psychologists surveyed social attitudes to desegregation to discover the conditions under which ordinary people tend to embrace or reject its implementation. As it turned out, the lived experience of desegregation in itself proved to be an important determinant of attitudes, for as Clark (1953, p. 59) anticipated in his influential summary of the early evidence, ‘when desegregation takes place it is generally evaluated, even by those who were initially sceptical, as successful and is seen as increasing rather than decreasing social stability.’

The second, and more substantial, tradition of work on desegregation has been conducted under the rubric of the contact hypothesis: the idea that regular interaction between groups tends to reduce prejudice and is therefore a precondition for a more tolerant society. Building on Allport's (1954) classic summary, researchers have studied how, when and why contact produces this kind of social psychological change. The emerging consensus is that it works primarily by decreasing intergroup anxiety, increasing perceptions of outgroup variability and building more positive emotional responses to others (cf. Pettigrew, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000). However, these consequences tend to occur only if contact unfolds under facilitating conditions (see Chapter 2).

Much of the discussion in our book is designed to build on, and engage critically with, these interlocking traditions of psychological inquiry. Our aim is to explore their adequacy as frameworks for understanding social psychological change in South Africa and, closely related, to develop new perspectives on the psychology of contact and desegregation. This aim is developed in two ways. First, we offer a series of conceptual and methodological reflections on research in the field. As will become apparent, these reflections are indebted to recent work in discursive and critical social psychology, both internationally and in the South African context (Billig, 1991; Franchi, 2003; Levett et al., 1997; Painter & Terre Blanche, forthcoming; Reicher, 1986; Wetherell, 1998; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). Although this work informs different sections of the book in different ways, a central argument recurs throughout. Social psychologists, we suggest, need to pay far closer attention to the situated, variable and highly consequential practices through which ordinary people construct the meaning of contact and desegregation. Such practices are enacted through the everyday language we use to ‘make sense’ of our relations with others – indeed, to classify them as ‘other’ in the first place – and render accountable our conduct towards them (see Chapters 4 and 6). They also find expression within the ‘ecology’ of social relations under conditions of desegregation (see Chapters 3 and 8); that is, the bodily and spatial regulation of intimacy. Ultimately, as Chapter 9 of the book demonstrates, they may inform individuals’ and groups’ sense of place (and of sharing a place with ‘others’).

It should be apparent that this kind of approach to contact and desegregation demands that psychologists respect their contextual specificity. Indeed, we shall argue that the tendency to detach desegregation from its historically particular circumstances and to express ordinary peoples’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, contact in terms of generic, contextually abstracted categories are central weaknesses of social psychological research. Our own work, by contrast, is built around the detailed analysis of the ‘working models’ of contact that participants themselves apply as they evaluate, in situ, their encounters with others. This point brings us to the second way in which we attempt to develop the book's central arguments, which is in terms of a detailed empirical case study of social change. The case study concerns the transformation of social relations in an unusual, but we believe highly revealing, social setting: the beach.

The desegregation of beaches in South Africa

Beach segregation has a similar history to segregation in other domains of life in South Africa. Although it was informally practised throughout the twentieth century, under the apartheid system it was legislated by stricter policies of division than at earlier periods. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Amendment Act (1960) empowered local authorities to implement beach segregation; the Separate Amenities Amendment Bill (1966) empowered any person in charge of ‘public premises’ (defined so as to include the sea shore) to reserve such premises for racially exclusive usage; and finally, the Sea Shore Amendment Act (1972) empowered the Minister of Agriculture to confer control of the beaches to local and provincial authorities. Although beach segregation was not uniformly implemented throughout the country, political pressure from central government, among other factors, ensured that by the early 1970s beach apartheid had become widely entrenched. Signs were placed on beaches along the South African coastline notifying the public of the racial status of the beach. Figure 1.1, for example, depicts the signs erected on a beach near Cape Town. Compliance with this racial topography was enforced and police had powers to arrest individuals who contravened municipal bylaws regarding beach segregation. The net effect was that the beaches were clearly and totally segregated (Fig. 1.2)

The situation in Durban, South Africa's other major coastal city, was similar to that in Cape Town and elsewhere. The ideology of non-contact was manifest geographically in barriers separating beaches allocated to different races. Although the idea of fencing beaches in urban areas was mooted on many occasions, this was deemed ‘impractical’, and instead ‘natural’ barriers such as rock outcrops and breakwater piers were exploited. Among these natural barriers were ‘races’ themselves, as the map of beac...