Race, Gender and “Personal” Pedagogy: Emotional Encounters in the Post-Apartheid Classroom

In this chapter, two acutely emotional, personalised, and extremely challenging pedagogical moments in which race was encountered, negotiated and problematised in the post-apartheid media studies classroom are explored. In the interdisciplinary, dynamic field of media studies, educators are fortunate to have access to a constantly changing set of case studies that can be used to invite students to develop critical thinking and a more engaged social consciousness. As educators who are fully committed to the project of education for liberation, the authors both take pains to introduce challenging material linked to questions of inequality to their courses and teaching plans. Because of the enduring inequalities of post-apartheid South Africa, race often explicitly takes centre stage in our teaching. In two separate courses that were convened for the same group of students, one focusing on consumer culture and the media, the other focusing on digital media and society, both authors found themselves faced with an extremely challenging pedagogical moment in which white students were forced to encounter privilege, oppression and equality in extremely personal ways. The first was a moment in class in which the topic of discussion was the apartheid-era skin-lightening industry in which a scholarly article about how two white entrepreneurs had made billions from manufacturing and marketing such products to black South Africans was read. In the classroom discussion that ensued, a white student revealed that the two billionaires were her uncles, and a black student shared the fact that her late aunt has used skin-lightening products, and had formed a dependency on them which fundamentally compromised her sense of self her entire life. The second moment was a group work assignment in which students were required to create a Tumblr account about a social media theme as a basis for critical argumentation. A group of white students chose to discuss the #FeesMustFall movement and argued in their write-ups that a post-racial society could be possible, as long as people stopped “complaining” about race. In feedback to the students, it was very difficult to provide adequately conceptual critique while trying to educate the students about how to “check their privilege.” These two experiences were extremely challenging for us as educators, for a combination of reasons: our own positionality as white South Africans teaching in a university still unsatisfactorily “transformed,” the potential volatility of the topic amongst students from wildly different backgrounds, and students’ extremely personal connections to the issues under discussion. As well as explicating in detail the pedagogical moments and how we tried to resolve them, this chapter also critically assesses our responses and considers other ways in which we might have used the opportunities to engender greater reflexivity, critical awareness and care for the other in the classroom. The chapter concludes by sketching out what we see as future challenges for encountering race in the classroom, and the unique possibilities afforded by critical media studies to address a transformative agenda in that regard.