NADINE DOLBY - The Shifting Ground of Race the Role of Taste in Youth’ s Production of Identities

Race Ethnicity and Education, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2000

The Shifting Ground of Race: the role oftaste in youth s production of identitiesNADINE DOLBYCentre for Research in International Education, Faculty of Education, Monash

University, Wellington Road, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia

ABSTRACT The production of racial identities is situated within the play of history,politics, the economy and culture. For students at Fernwood High School (a pseudonym)

in South Africa, `race is undergoing a transformation. No longer legally bound by

apartheid racial categorisations, the formation of race rotates around new axes. Based on

a 1-year ethnographic study of Fernwood, the author argues that students construct race

through, in Bourdieu s terms, a discourse of taste. Racial identities are produced through an

engagement with both local material forces and the global space of affect. Taste, speci cally

differences based in global popular culture, is a critical factor in the racial con ict and

tension at Fernwood. However, taste s exible and changing borders also allow for instances

of border crossing and hybridity. Educators committed to multiculturalism and progressive

change must engage with questions of youth, difference and power through acknowledging

and working with this rearticulation of race.

The concept of `race rests on ground which is inherently and historically unstable.Simultaneously full (note the thousands of academic and popular articles each yeardevoted to some aspect of race) and empty (as Kwame Appiah [1992] argues, raceis an illusion), race continues to be a critical site of both voluntary and involuntaryidenti cation. Yet despite its tenacity, it is abundantly clear that the universe ofpotential r`aces shifts, both through historical time and across global space as racetakes on varied and multiple forms, both material and discursive (Bartolome &Macedo, 1997).At the end of the twentieth century the meaning and import of race is greatly

impacted by numerous global conditions, including: the rise and dominance oftransnational capital on the world stage; the changing role of the nation-state; thegrowing economic and political force of post-colonial societies; the ascendance ofwhat Arjun Appardurai (1996) refers to as `scapes , or the global (though uneven) ow of people, images, ideas, nance and technology; and of particular importancefor this article, the prominence and in uence of the global popular.The objective of this article is to consider how youth at an urban, multiracial high

school in Durban, South Africa imagine and construct race within these changingmaterial and discursive conditions. Common views of race, or what Fazal Rizvi

1361-3324/00/010007-17 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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(1993) refers to as `popular racism , do not determine, in a mechanistic fashion, howindividuals (in this case, youth) make meaning of race. Race is instead rearticulatedwithin a speci c historical moment, and constituted through everyday practices.Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1984), I argue that youth s racial identitieswithin the context of a multiracial school are constructed largely through a discourseof taste which relies on the racialisation of global popular culture emanatingprimarily from the USA and Europe [1]. These racial taste codes work in tandemwith the residue of apartheid to create and maintain racial division at FernwoodHigh School, a pseudonym for a predominantly working-class, urban, co-educational, multiracial high school. At the same time, however, taste s instability, uidity and ability to rapidly transform and mutate leads to moments where racialborders are challenged, disturbed and transformed.In the balance of this article, I introduce my use of `race , particularly focusing on

its speci c history in South Africa, and recent shifts in the racial composition offormerly white schools in South Africa, particularly Fernwood High. I then discussidentity and contextualise processes of identi cation within a global milieu. Throughthe use of ethnographic examples from a year-long case study of Fernwood, Idemonstrate how race becomes coded as taste (Bourdieu, 1984) and simultaneouslyworks to erect and disrupt racial borders. In conclusion, I brie y suggest some of theimplications of this research for multicultural education.

Race and Schooling in South Africa

Perhaps nowhere on the planet in the contemporary world has the question of `racebeen so suddenly thrown into question as in South Africa. Though apartheid wasnever hegemonic, in the Gramscian sense, it still asserted tremendous force instructuring lives. As it unravelled through the 1980s and was dismantled at fullthrottle in the 1990s, race became unhinged from its previous incarnation as apredominant instrument of state power. This is not, however, to suggest that `racewas one enduring, unchanging, monolithic concept under the apartheid state.Instead, as Kathryn Manzo (1992) argues, the apartheid system was fuelled not bya consistent application of population categorisation, but by inconsistency, whichwas `an imperative, not an oversight (p. 38). To maintain political and economicdomination the apartheid state had to deploy `race in multiple and contradictoryways, which allowed for the maintenance and consolidation of white power andcontrol. Apartheid s domination of `race was also challenged by the Black Con-sciousness Movement (BCM) of the 1970s, which rejected the ethnic categorisa-tions of African, Indian and coloured, and instead embraced a unifying `blackness ,and the African National Congress (ANC) of cial policy of non-racialism, whichdisavowed racial or ethnic categorisation completely. In moves paralleling shiftselsewhere on the globe, r`ace has been recast as biology, as culture, as nation, andrecently as ethnicity, a construction common to the discourse of the rainbow nation.Consequently, race as a discursive construction (with material consequences) inSouth Africa has a history of instability and ux [2].As apartheid waned in the early 1990s, white government schools, which had

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previously staunchly refused to admit black students, drew up complicated formulaswhereby they would desegregate but white students would remain in the majority (atleast in most instances). Formerly white schools would be reclassi ed as `semi-private (known as Model C schools), and thus would gain the ability to institutefees, set their own admission standards and control their population. Much of theresearch on desegregated or `open schools in South Africa explores the experiencesof formerly white schools whose black student population remains the minority(Christie, 1990; Nkomo et al., 1995; Freer, 1991; Penny et al., 1993; Soudien,1994) [3]. The school in which this research was conducted, Fernwood HighSchool, had in 1996 a student population that was signi cantly different from mostother Model C schools that year, as black students constituted the majority [4].Fernwood High, a largely working-class, academically weak, and relatively poor

white school of approximately 600 students, was forced to desegregate more quicklythan other white schools in Durban, which could count on their lofty reputations tocontinue to attract middle-class white students. Fernwoods population thus shiftedfrom 11% black in 1991, the rst year of desegregation, to 66% in 1996, the yearof this research. Fernwoods black students in 1996 are largely African, with a smallnumber of coloured students (approximately 7%) and a minuscule (less than 1%)Indian student population. Fernwood is not among the elite, exclusive, formerlywhite schools in Durban who routinely groom students (including, now, a smallnumber of black students) for entrance to South Africas upper economic strata.Instead, Fernwood students, of all races, are lower middle class, working class, andworking poor, and come from all corners of the Durban metropolitan area to attendschool.Racialised identities and class are not coterminous at Fernwood, nor do African

students share a common class background, though in general terms there are moremiddle-class African students in the upper grades, while younger students tend to bepoorer. This trend re ects Fernwoods policies in the early 1990s, which strictlycontrolled black student intake these quotas have been relaxed, though not elimi-nated, by 1996. Though there are some middle-class white students at Fernwood,poor whites are not uncommon Fernwoods relatively low academic and be-havioural standards make it a haven for white students who are rejected or expelledfrom other white schools in the area. Coloured and Indian students class back-ground is predominantly working class, though a smaller number of youngercoloured and Indian students are from upwardly mobile families who have moved tothe formerly white, lower middle-class neighbourhood surrounding the school.During 1996, I collected data on race, racial identity and change in South Africa

through a participant-observation case study of Fernwood High. My role at theschool was loosely de ned: I attended classes, school events and extra-curricularactivities, spent time with students before, during and after school, and during theweekends and school holidays. I conducted interviews about race, racial identity andchange at Fernwood and in South Africa with over 100 students (of all races presentin the school and both genders), both individually and in groups, three-quarters (23)of the teaching and management staff, and a small number of parents and governingboard members. Fifty students in two upper-level (grade 11 and 12) English classes

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were also asked to write essays in which they discussed how they de ned their racial,ethnic and national identities. The majority of students studied as part of thisresearch were members of the matriculant, or graduating class. As a researcher, Ihad greater access to older students, who had more freedom (real or perceived)within the school, and who were also more comfortable establishing peer relation-ships with an adult who was not a teacher.Fernwood in 1996 is turbulent and chaotic. An almost exclusively white teaching

and administrative staff is unwilling and/or unprepared to teach a majority blackstudent population, and there are no attempts by the school to mediate the racialcon ict among students, or between students and staff. Race, continues to be anever-present and ever-divisive factor in the school, whose racially tense and some-times explosive atmosphere ensures that discourses such as the new South Africaand the rainbow nation have little resonance for students. Racially based ghts areless common than in previous years, though racial slurs, comment and incidents areepidemic. At times, the racial groups at Fernwood seem to simply go their ownway a stony silence which is punctuated by ery though short-lived are-ups ofracial antagonism. Tanya [5], a coloured girl, relates an incident in which a whiteboy spits at her from the top of a staircase:

So he actually spat on me, so I went to the top [of the stairs] and I said,`What the hell did you do that for , and he said, `Oh, and he pushed me.So I pushed him back. Because he s stronger than me I was going to hithim back. Then Ms. Randele came outside, and she made me take all theblame for that.

In a similar vein, Simphiwe writes about his experiences on the white-dominatedschool rugby team:

One of the things that I did not like in the team was that sometimesteam-mates were talking abut me as if I was not there or as if I did notunderstand what they were saying. Sometimes they were calling me in anyZulu name and that drove me mad.

Despite the intensity and impact of these incidents on black students experiences,Fernwood students do not merely re ect and replicate previous generations battlesand antagonisms. `Race after apartheid is not simply a matter of discarding orembracing already formed racial positions, but of renegotiating it in a new context.One of the most signi cant present circumstances which serves to anchor theformation of race at Fernwood is global popular culture, which becomes a key site(Foucault, 1972) of affective investment and identity for youth at Fernwood andsubsequently an important aspect of their discursive construction of race.

The Global Context of Identity

Globalisation is not a new phenomenon: the voluntary and involuntary movement ofpeople, colonialism, imperialism and the slave trade are all examples of globalrelationships over the centuries. Cultures, ideologies, ways of life, and economic and


political systems were not shared but were generally imposed and enforced. Thepost-colonial world of the late twentieth century bears the scars of this history asglobalisation takes on new, varied and more complex characteristics.Thinking about the effects of globalisation on identity is particularly relevant when

looking at youths identities. As Henry Giroux (1994) argues, `No longer belongingto any one place or location, youth increasingly inhabit shifting cultural and socialspheres marked by a plurality of languages and cultures (p. 288). Of particularconcern for this article is the expanding in uence of global popular culture becauseof its potential to supply youth with new sources for identi cation (Cvetkovich &Kellner, 1997) and emergent categories through which to view the world [6].For Fernwood students, global popular culture is a key site of affective invest-

ment, consuming large amounts of energy both in and out of school. Notebooks andpencil boxes are plastered with pictures of musical groups and movie stars, conver-sation is dominated by the latest dance craze, and on the eld at lunchtime,enterprising students sell sips of their Coca Colas (and their CDs, jewellery, andanything else they can nd) to raise money to go to a concert. Students desire tomodel their lives not on Nelson Mandela (who arguably is a pop icon on hisown but perhaps more so outside of South Africa), but on the lives of MichaelJordan, Oprah Winfrey and the cast of New York Undercover. Given that popularculture consumes substantial amounts of students time and affective investment,identities, as Lawrence Grossberg (1989) and Henry Giroux & Roger Simon (1989)argue, are largely determined within this space, albeit shaped and constrained bylocal realities. For example, Themba, an African student, writes:

Because we are a unique race, I feel proud. Here I am stressing out mypride about my race not only in South Africa, but internationally. We allseem to be acting and behaving the same and that shows we all havesomething in common. We play the same music with rhythm and themajority will wear the same fashions and that you can easily notice. We alsoprefer the same sports, e.g. soccer and basketball.

Leaving aside Thembas overgeneralisations about African similarities and hismistaken belief that soccer is universally an African-dominated sport, it is apparentthat his sense of what it means to be African is multifaceted, and derived as muchfrom global cultural symbols and forms as from the material conditions of his life.A similar construction of self is evident in Vusi s essay:

Our race is unique we are multitalented because we can participate in allsports. There are many superstars who are of a black race for exampleMichael Jackson, Michael Jordan, etc. These are the people who arededicated to their particular activities and most of all they are black. We aredifferent the way we speak. We always seem to use slang no matter whatlanguage it is. For example, in South Africa we use tsotsi [gangster]language and in America they use slang.

Like Themba, Vusi looks to global markers, particularly global popular culture, tode ne self. Many of the cultural forms that Vusi identi es with his race do not

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originate on the continent of Africa, but instead in the cultural practices of African-Americans (see Gilroy [1993] for a discussion of black global cultural ows).Identity, for Themba, Vusi and other students, is not circumscribed by the bordersof the nation-state of South Africa or any narrowly de ned race or ethnicity. Insteadthey locate themselves within global ows (Appardurai, 1996), particularly that ofglobal popular culture.

The Role of Taste

As the global popular weaves itself into the fabric of life at Fernwood, taste functionsas part of what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) refers to as a `habitus , which he describesas:

systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predis-posed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles whichgenerate and organize practices and representations that can be objectivelyadapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming atends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attainthem. (p. 53)

Bourdieu s notion of habitus does not preclude individual and collective agency, nordoes it overdetermine the effects of structures on practices. Instead, habitus allowsfor a freedom within particular parameters; it assures that structures will perpetuate,but never exactly replicate. Unlike rules, habitus does not presume consciousmastery of behaviour, but allows for the adaptation of practices that in the end areproductive of a new, yet enduring, habitus.In Bourdieu s scholarship (1984), taste is a fundamental component of a habitus.

Taste does not stand outside of social, economic, and political structures, nor is ita neutral matter of individual desire. Instead, taste functions as a `mediated prefer-ence , which re ects and produces the class distinctions and economic structures ofa society. As Bourdieu uses the term, a particular taste in music and art, for example,`is an expression of an individual s objective location in systems of socialclassi cation and difference (p. 417). Taste is not peripheral or secondary to classreproduction it is constitutive of the process.In a somewhat similar manner, taste becomes one of the primary mechanisms

through which race is produced and reproduced at Fernwood. Taste does notoperate alone it functions within a matrix of other factors, including economicrealities, the remnants of apartheid and the new context of white resentment. Noris taste necessarily a wholly new way of imagining identities in South Africa orelsewhere. For example, as Blake Modisane (1965) describes, taste was an import-ant component of self-identities in Sophiatown in the 1950s. Yet taste takes on aheightened signi cance within the realities that structure Fernwood students lives inthe 1990s: the disorganisation of the South African nation-state, the increasingintensity of the global ow of popular culture; the proliferation of discourses thatframe race. Race can no longer be `explained through the logics of apartheid, andcultural, ethnic, religious, and other differences weaken and mutate, though at times


they reassert themselves. The instability of this moment leads to a somewhatdifferent mapping of taste than Bourdieu charts in his large-scale, quantitativeproject, where taste remains a relatively static and enduring expression of social andeconomic location (within the temporal and spatial parameters of his study). AtFernwood, two properties of taste emerge. First, taste serves as one of the anchorsof race s rearticulation within Fernwood. But taste can also be imsy, changing andunstable. In these instances, taste ceases to be reproductive; instead taste helps toilluminate the breaks and changes in the racial construction of selves at Fernwood.Fernwood students tastes are not formed in isolation, but are part of a larger

pattern of racialised youth identities in the Durban metropolitan area. Thus, theprecise and complex dynamics that govern how and why Fernwood students chooseparticular commodities to consolidate racialised identities are beyond the scope ofthis article and this research. Here, I am concerned primarily with examining howtaste, once constituted, functions within a speci c site.

De ning Identity and Difference

At Fernwood, collective racial selves are actively constructed by students throughthe selection, arrangement and presentation of clothing, and an individual s taste inmusic [7]. Amanda, a coloured girl, comments:

You know if you meet a coloured boy because he wears a certain type ofpants, a certain type of shoes, he dresses in a certain way, he acts a certainway He ll either wear Levis or Collies or Dickys, instead of wearing ourschool pants. Shoes youd see a lot of the coloured boys wear All-Stars,Converse, Nike, Reebok, Sebago, like that.

The speci c commodities enumerated by Amanda as signifying `coloured do notexpress an intrinsic, naturalised coloured identity, but instead act to consolidate andproduce a particular pattern of `goods in their assemblage (Douglas & Isherwood,1979, p. 5), which are then marked and deployed as coloured within Fernwood.Signi cantly, this production of r`ace is located within global cultural ows. Thecommodities that are labelled as coloured (and similarly, as white, African andIndian) are not connected to any trajectory related to coloured politics, history orculture in South Africa; they are not produced by nor do they re ect indigenous,settler or national cultures or communities in a straightforward manner. In mostcases, their lines of origin are non-existent. Instead, commodities are plucked fromglobal circulation and given a speci c racial l`ife within Fernwood.A similar dynamic is at play for African students. For example, African girls are

more likely than coloureds to bypass American jeans and identi cation, insteadpreferring European names such as Giorgio Armani and Daniel Hechter. Zola, anAfrican girl, comments on this phenomenon, explaining that whites don t dress instyle, they:

buy jeans that are R50 [8] or something. But when you are black [African],you are wearing R50 jeans, people are going to say, mmm, that s ugly. We

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are looking for labels and names. We just look for the label and the labelcounts and it costs as well.

African girls taste also gravitates towards elegant silk shirts and expensive goldjewellery; taste which marks them racially and also differentiates them sharply fromwhites. As Jill, a white girl re ects:

Often well nd that whites will go out and they wont even buy something,they ll just pull out something from their cupboard and they just slap iton They [Africans] wear very fancy clothes. Silk pants and silk tops,that s what weve often found. The girls mainly. Boys wear jeans, baggyjeans, and T-shirts generally, or baggy button-up shirts.

Taste as a discursive construction becomes as valid, as forceful, and as natural away to conceptualise difference as lineage, biology, culture and nation have been atvarious moments both within world and South African history. As Dumisani, anAfrican student, observes in reference to taste in music:

Our music is not the same as most of the white people. Most of the whitepeople listen to like rock and heavy metal and their music; but we don tlisten to them, and theres nothing you can do about that. That s just theway it is.

The Politics of Taste

Within Fernwood taste becomes more than simply a preference, which an individualcan choose to follow or discard. Instead, taste becomes part of a collective, structuralway for students to imagine and produce race. Students create and vigilantly policethe rules governing the production of racial identities. For example, Jill, a white girl,relates what happens to an African girl who turns up at school on a `civvies (i.e.non-uniform) day in clothing which is perceived as white:

Last year we had a civvies day, I think for Valentine s Day, and this oneblack [African] girl came to school in tights [stirrup pants] and a baggy top,and she was laughed at. It was so funny, it was like the whole school burstout into this laughing stock and none of us [the white students] could gure out why We spoke to some of them and they said you can t justlike rock up in tights like that. But we all said, you wear them around thehouse, it s just civvies day, it s not like youre in a fashion parade.

Jill s observations about the behaviour of African students on an civvies day re ectthe active policing of racial taste codes by African students. Because the girl s choiceof clothing did not fall under the rubric of what was collectively deemed `acceptabledress for African students, she was ostracised. Muriel and Tanya, two coloured girls,comment on similar dynamics which function to police and rein in coloureds:

Tanya: Like weve got a style of dressing, and every coloured wants toconform to that style of dressing. But I want to be unique. And the minuteyou are different

Muriel: You re persecuted.


The politics of taste also serves as a springboard for white resentment, whichfurther fuels racial antagonism. Through the practices of resentment (McCarthy etal., 1997), white students at Fernwood construct identities through the `strategy ofnegating the other and the tactical and strategic deployment of moral evaluation andemotion (p. 84). White students use taste to express growing anger about theirincreasingly marginalised (at least from their perspective) position at Fernwood, andmore generally in South Africa. The feelings expressed by the white students arecertainly similar to a `discourse of Whiteness which, as Giroux (1997) comments inthe case of the USA, `signi es the resentment and confusion of many Whites whofeel victimized and bitter, while it masks deep inequalities and exclusionary practiceswithin the current social order (p. 287). While in the example of the USA Girouxlinks this whiteness to a reassertion of an exclusionary national identity, whiteadolescents at Fernwood break ties with a nation-state that they now feel excludesthem, and instead assert a whiteness which looks outside the bounds of South Africafor its identity. Janice, a white girl, comments on the music and fashion preferencesof African students:

If they are in the shop, and they hear music playing, they ll just start theirlittle dances in the shop there, and I nd that very uncultured, you re inpublic Another thing, if you are going to the beach for the day, and theywear their long, smart pants and their silk tops, and their fancy shoes,instead of takkies [sneakers], baggies, T-shirts. Thats what irritates me.Whites wear what is comfortable, they always dress up smart, smart, smart.If you look on break-up day, if we still had civvies on break-up day, youwould be hysterical. One girl came in a bridesmaid s dress last year.[Nadine: Why s that?]. Ive got no clue. I think they are trying to act betterthan whites. I don t think they are purposely trying to do it, but in theirsubconscious they are.

Here, clothing takes on very speci c and charged race and class connotations. Janiceinvokes a discourse of primitiveness to describe African students ways of dancing,to con rm white superiority. She does this, in part, because she is threatened by thefact that some African students are wealthier than she is. Janice does not express thisfeeling directly, but instead frames her unease through a discourse of taste that thenquickly turns into an assertion of racial superiority. In this case, Janice moves quicklyfrom expressing irritation at African students clothing choices, to charging themwith t`rying to act better than whites , a scenario which clearly makes her uncomfort-able as it reverses her naturalised racial assumptions.Other white students, who are perhaps a bit less hostile, also express puzzlement

over African students choices of clothing, and again, blend comments about theirclassmates clothing with their perception that whites are in a disadvantaged positionin post-apartheid South Africa. For example, Rosa comments:

We have civvies day at school, and you notice the white people come inbaggies and T-shirts, but the black pupils get dressed up in nice larnypants, nice shoes, they think theyre going to some fancy party instead ofcivvies day.

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Later on in our conversation, Rosa adds, `The only thing that I can know that schanged is about the jobs now. The blacks can go in rst, and the whites get takenafterward I just think that s very wrong . These two statements encompass mostof what Rosa claims she knows about Africans, marking complementary ways inwhich she feels displaced in South Africa as a white. Blacks are asserting theirpresence both through control of the job market and through their choice ofclothing, which is fancier than that preferred by whites. Like Janice, Rosas racialantagonism is expressed through a discourse of taste, and is intimately linked to herunease over the shifting of what she had assumed were naturalised and enduringclass positions.Sometimes other commodities become a site for this resentment. For example,

Mark tells me about the `Indian guy who lives next door and has six Mercedes, andmany white students remark on the fancy cars they see parked at squatter campssome students making the assumption that Africans choose to live in squatter campsso that they can save money on rent and instead buy fancy cars. When I ask Jackie,a white student, what was the most confusing or dif cult thing about living in SouthAfrica, she replied:

Looking at a really, really interesting car, and thinking, geez, its so cool,and looking inside the tinted windows, and it s hard to get used to seeingso many black people now having big cars, now having good clothing. It sjust nothing weve seen before.

Running through it all is the white fear of marginalisation and the sense that thisgeneration is being forced to compensate blacks for past mistreatment. As Benwrites:

Why do sports teams have to have Africans in them, why do Africanshave to be made leaders? They should not get the position because theyhave the right skin colour, it should be because they deserve it. Italso makes me angry when Africans throw the struggle up into every-body s face, yes it was sad, but it s over now, leave it where it belongs inthe past.

Music, fashion and other commodities function to fuel white resentment, as hostilityover black taste categories merges with white fears about their prospects for jobs anda nancially secure future in South Africa. Thus, the borders which cause con ictat Fernwood are overtly racial, but also overlaid with the dynamics of class con ict,as pockets of middle-class blacks meet working-class whites. White, working-classFernwood students, who previously enjoyed advantages because of their whitestatus, nd themselves losing their grip on control of the school and their futures inSouth Africa. White students can no longer easily dismiss blacks for being primitive,less modern, or less intelligent, though as I have noted, some of those discourseslinger. Instead, white students now confront black students within a new reality, andlash out at black students who they perceive have nicer clothes, fancier cars, andmore promising lives.


Ruptures and Breaks

Taste, in tandem with other forces, structures how students de ne themselves andhow they construct racialised others. Yet, a strict geography of taste and race is oftenhard to map; as much as students erect borders through taste, they also simul-taneously rework, change or discard them. The struggles of students who cross racialtaste lines exemplify the tensions and contradictions of negotiating race in acon ict-ridden atmosphere. The two students pro led here are unable to change thestructural dynamics of the school or larger society, which makes their practicespotentially dangerous (Lipsitz, 1994). Yet these ruptures in the general fabric of lifeat Fernwood are compelling for the possibilities which they enable [9].

Charmaine

Charmaine, a Grade 11 student at Fernwood, resists the idea of racial classi cation,wishing that such identi cation would disappear in the new South Africa. Shewrites:

As a result of my father being Indian and my mother coloured it is dif cultfor people to distinguish my race. I am often asked about my race andthis aggravates me as I believe that in the New South Africa race isover-emphasized.

Charmaine nds race to be a limiting category, one which she wants to escape. Butas she explains her racialised identity more fully, she uses taste categories, located inthe global popular, to elaborate on her changing sense of self. Before transferring toFernwood, Charmaine attended a more prestigious, predominantly white girlsschool, and notes this impact on her identity:

Its changed so much for me. I went to a mixed school. I listen to what istermed white music. I like techno and stuff like that. It s because I go to awhite school, and I mix with white people, so it does change your identity.

In this observation, Charmaine never argues that she has become white, but that heridentity has been transformed through an experience in a predominantly whiteschool, which changed her taste. Her preference for what she terms white music, i.e.techno, indicates that she is no longer solidly located as a coloured, which shede nes primarily through taste preferences. Because of these differences, she cannever totally identify with other coloured students at Fernwood racial solidarity isfractured through a shift in musical taste.Yet, neither is Charmaine white; even if she desired to enter into that af liation

through changing her taste, the racial polarisation of the school and society prohibitsit. Commenting on her feelings towards her white friends, Charmaine says:

I know that even though I have white friends, they still look down on mein a way now, deep down inside. They wouldn t say it but sometimes youoverhear them talking.

Charmaine occupies a third space (`The third space , 1990); one that both mixes

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and blends aspects of different racial identities, but at the same time embodies thetensions of trying to cross borders.Charmaine s racialised self is created in spaces which elude the nation-state, but

at the same time, are constrained by its history. While her story shows how raceleans on taste for its construction, it is not an open, celebratory discourse ofdifference a la Benetton advertisements. Race is not something which one choosesto have or discard, or which one can change at will. Instead, race encapsulates thetensions inherent in many sites of identi cation, and the insertion of the practices ofthe global popular into races local expressions ensures that it is not static andeverlasting, but shifting and recon guring. Charmaine cannot change her race, buther practices change the constitution of what race is, how it is expressed, and howit is lived. She opens up the possibilities of `coloured playing with its borders andits imagination within the contemporary conditions of South Africa. That she usesthe global popular to do this does not necessarily imply that the global popular inand of itself is liberating or an inherently democratic space. Instead, it is simply afacet of identity that is an important component of the mapping of selves, virtuallyanywhere on the planet, at the end of the century.

Shirley: transgressing borders

At the centre of the controversy about race, racial identity, and border crossing atFernwood sits Shirley. Fourteen years old, blonde and freckled, Shirley typi es inmany ways the average white student at Fernwood: she struggles with academicwork, often looks dishevelled, and is not afraid of a ght.However, unlike virtually every other white student at Fernwood, Shirley refuses

to respect the spoken and unspoken borders between races. Her closest friends atFernwood are a group of coloured girls and her transgressions are the talk of boththe students and the staff. As Shirley explains:

Last year we used to have a lot of ghts. All because I was with differentraces. So girls used to pick on me. Once there was a big ght. I almost hitthe prefect. The girls said that coloureds are sluts and bitches, and thewhite people rule and everything. I ve got a reputation in school, and ifsomeone tells me something, and I know it s not right, Im going to go andtell them and I will ght them.

Despite the uproar and disapproval that Shirley s friendships cause at the school,students display varying reactions. Some are angry with Shirley. For example, Rob,a white boy, comments, I`t makes me mad why does she have to act coloured?But others are accepting of her behaviour and see her as part of an emerging trendin which whites adopt coloured taste in fashion and music. Sina, a coloured student,remarks on this trend, `I ve noticed there are a lot of white pupils, in Fernwoodespecially, who want to be coloured. I think you know . When I asked Sina what shemeant by they `want to be coloured , she replied, `The dress, you know, most of thecoloureds have a style of dressing, the Dickys. Most of them are changing to thatway . Rena, a coloured student, commented speci cally on Shirley, `She doesn t


know how whites dress, she dresses like us. She listens to our music, follows ourmusic. Our jeans, not theirs . Sina and Rena mark racial lines clearly through tasteand indicate that Shirley s taste leaves her with an identity, an af liation, which isambivalently coloured. When Shirley herself describes her behaviour, she invokestaste categories to signal her border crossing:

If I go out with a boy whos white we don t like each others music, wedont like how each other dresses. He goes to here, I go to places here. Hedont like the places we go to. With a coloured boy I know what he likes,he knows what I like.

From the students perspective, Shirley s behaviour cannot be adequately de-scribed as simply imitating or copying coloured students. While some students (likeRob) say that she `acts coloured, she is also accepted as coloured (though in acon icted way) by many of the students because of her adoption of the practices ofcoloured identity. The seriousness of Shirley s transgression lies in her aunting ofaccepted racialised taste divisions. By crossing these lines, Shirley is expressing morethan a wish or a fantasy; instead, she embodies tangible, material aspects of colouredidentity. In doing so she confounds the racial common sense that exists at Fernwoodand tries to lock students into solid racial identities through regulating their clothingand musical tastes. Shirley s behaviour exposes the constructed nature of thesecategories.Charmaine and Shirley are certainly not representative of Fernwood students,

most of whom remain securely within the established parameters of racialisedidentities and taste codes. Yet Charmaine and Shirley s practices, their irtationswith what Gloria Anzaldua (1987) refers to as the `Borderlands , demonstrate thatrace is not a constant. Even within racially divided sites such as Fernwood, there arebreaks. Youth who venture into these spaces experiment with the possibilities for thesigni cance of race in the world to come.

The Future of Race and Educational Practice

In South Africa and elsewhere around the globe, race persists; and against theweight of history, politics and society, educators committed to multiculturalism andprogressive change try to dislodge, disrupt and undercut its power to create tensionand turbulence, con ict and hatred. Yet, many of the common approaches tomulticulturalism are awed, as they rely on an overly simplistic notion of race anddifference, which fails to take into account races intricacy as a social force. Forexample, as Cameron McCarthy (1995) has argued, race cannot be adequatelyaddressed through paradigms that assume it is xed, stable and essential, or analysesthat ignore races articulation to class and gender (see also McCarthy, 1990; Rizvi,1991).These theoretical interventions in the constitution of race and racial identity in

educational discourse suggest that empirical researchers need to investigate and mapexactly how `race evolves as a meaningful concept for youth. As McCarthy, Rizviand others have shown, we cannot assume, a priori, that we `know what race is and

20 N. Dolby

how its dynamics play out either globally or in a particular locale. In the case ofyouth at Fernwood, race does not, and cannot, operate in an identical manner to itsmanifestation under apartheid. Though there may be lines of continuity, there arealso most de nitely breaks, which re ect changing local, national and global circum-stances. Race at Fernwood becomes rearticulated largely through a discourse oftaste, which serves to structure how students de ne both `self and òther. Taste isreproductive of race, and also allows moments and spaces of rupture as racialborders are crossed and rede ned by individual students. Also, as other empiricalresearch has suggested, the signi cance of taste to youth may not be limited to SouthAfrica (Hall, 1995; Yon, 1995; Wulff, 1995).Taste, of course, interacts with and is part of larger societal structures, which may

remain untouched by the dynamics which play out at Fernwood. Yet, youth sengagement with race is not simply re ective of societal patterns their practicesalso have to be understood as productive of both the present and future terrain ofsociety. In this light, taste, and the af liated world of affect located in the globalpopular, may play an important role in the alignment and realignment of racialidenti cation both present and future. Meaningful interventions in the ways inwhich youth imagine race, act upon its signi cance, and work to change itsembeddedness in global dynamics need to be grounded in an understanding of theraw materials that youth bring to their sense of place, belonging and identity in theworld. Further investigation of and engagement with the signi cance of taste in theconstitution of youth s racial identities may provide a unique and useful window onthe possible futures of race.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the staff and students of Fernwood High School, and to two anonymousreviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. This research wassupported by a Fulbright grant.

Notes

[1] Certainly other contexts, such as students homes, neighbourhoods, families and churchesin uence their production of identities. See Dolby (1998, especially chapter 5) for adiscussion of some of these factors. The discussion in this article will be limited to the siteof the school.

[2] The history of race and its signi cance in South Africa is obviously more complex than canbe adequately presented here. See additionally Dubow (1994), Goldin (1987) and Marks &Trapido (1987). Ethnicity may be emerging as a particularly salient contemporary discoursefor schools (see Carrim, 1995), yet as Dubow (1994) details, èthnic has been used as analternative to biological notions of `race in South Africa since the 1930s.I will use `black in this article as an overarching term which encompasses Africans,

Indians and coloureds. However, because the particular identi cations of apartheid stillhave meaning and resonance for Fernwood students, the categories of African, Indian andcoloured will be used as necessary to demonstrate the ways in which they still structure dailylife at the school. Furthermore, it should be noted that in common usage in South Africa,`black is equivalent with Àfrican ; thus, `black in quotes from Fernwood students shouldbe read as Àfrican .


[3] There is a signi cantly smaller body of research on desegregation in black schools. See, forexample, Carrim (1992), Naidoo (1995), Soudien (1998).

[4] Fernwood was chosen as a site for this research because of its multiracial student popu-lation. While certainly atypical of South African high schools (most of which are, and willbe, exclusively African), Fernwood was the most appropriate environment for studying howyouth of different races interact and engage with the concept of race. See Robert Stake(1995) on the issue of case study selection.

[5] All names are pseudonyms.[6] For the purposes of this article, I have chosen to focus on the in uence of global popular

culture because youth consciously recognise and engage with it as a meaningful sourcefor the construction of identities. However, I do not mean to diminish the impact ofother global dynamics such as economic and political structures. Clearly, the realities ofFernwood students lives are shaped by their positioning in multiple global realities.

[7] Fernwood, like the vast majority of South African schools, requires that students wearuniforms daily. Despite this policy, clothing remains a particularly salient and memorablemarker of identity. Students could often recall for me what classmates wore on a `civviesday (when they are allowed to wear street clothes to school) several years ago. There wereno civvies days in 1996 as the management had decided they were too disruptive to thegeneral functioning of the school.

[8] R50 was equivalent to approximately US $11 $12 at 1996 exchange rates and wasconsidered very inexpensive for a pair of jeans. In contrast, Levis ranged from R250 to R400and the jeans preferred by African students, such as Giorgio Armani, ranged from R500 toR1000.

[9] Here I pro le two individual students. For ethnographic examples that analyse themovement of collective racial identities at Fernwood, see Dolby (in 1999).

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Documents

NADINE DOLBY - The Shifting Ground of Race the Role of Taste in Youth’ s Production of Identities