HACkers blog

It's the time of year when parents of prospective students from the polite suburbs are muttering to each other over civilised sundowners about their children's chances of acceptance for the course of study of their choice. Most times, the overheard conversations run along these lines:

"Jessica is doing really well and looks set to get at least 7 As. What a pity her chances of getting into Law / Medicine / Film and Media are going to be thwarted because, well, she's not an affirmative!" At which point all sets of eyes swivel towards Sipho, hanging out with Jessica a little distance off. Her classmate, with marks nowhere as good as hers, whose future beckons bright and shiny like so many ripe apples on the tree, hoping to be picked by his blessed hands. Tongues click, heads shake in disbelief at the unfairness of life, and eyeballs silently ooze sympathy for Jessica's mother and the short straw she drew by giving birth to a child with a white skin.

In amongst the dinnertime debates on the evils of affirmative action, the memory of their own benefit seems to dissolve like the grease on the plates Mavis is washing in the kitchen. But for some of us, for whom the past is perhaps more recent, that reality can't be denied - we were beneficiaries, in our time, of affirmative action. We carry those benefits with us still, and the cultural capital we pass on to our children ensures that they are still relatively advantaged, even without the legislated benefit of affirmative action to underline it.

I attended a white school. It was a dreadful school, with a deeply flawed understanding of "education", but it had sportsfields and photocopiers and OHPs in all the classrooms - as well as windows, working toilets and a full complement of qualified teachers. Many of the pupils went on to university - mostly here - financed through teaching bursaries or bank loans. The scholarship which paid my way would not have been available to me had I been black - nor would the university place, the residence place or, in all likelihood, the A-aggregate which won me the scholarship. In all respects, I was an affirmative action student.

Nor did it stop there. The benefits of having had a university education provided me with work, a social circle of engaged and interesting people, the theoretical tools to locate the struggles we forged on the political front, the cultural capital... Like my grandfather, picked up from the cul de sac of the Great Depression and dusted off and set to work on the Railways - which in turn took in my father too - I can see in very direct ways how I benefitted from the legislated affirmative action of my day. Through the private schooling it has enabled for my son, I can see how it continues to benefit the next generation, despite the removal of that legislated benefit from his "due".

Jessica's mother and her clutch of clucking cronies don't. They see only the removal of that unfair privilege, and they see it as unfair. And so, over the next few weeks as marks become available and places get assigned, the phones will start ringing in outrage as the historically advantaged demand the perpetuation of that advantage, steadfastedly refusing to see the bigger picture, the structural dimensions, their place in The System... and forgetting everything that they once learned at university, when they were affirmative action students too.

(As a first generation university student, studying in a language not my own, located in an institutional climate I found "foreign" and hostile, I can relate to the students who come here and flounder. The difference being, until I opened my mouth, my "difference" didn't leap out and assail people; if I kept quiet I could have passed as the norm - a strategy successfully employed by most of the "andertaliges" but beyond my ability! Our "different" students lack this invisibility cloak. Whereas I could choose the extent to which to acclimatise or to maintain the differentiation, the visibility of their difference requires them to work much harder at attempts to deny, diminish of obfuscate the difference.)