Race & Class

It was expected and inevitable.
We had a welcome Braai (a traditional celebration barbeque with lots of meat!) to start off the winter programme at Wits. Our chefs were hanging about the seating area after having cooked and set out the spread of food. I loaded up my plate and looked to find a seat.

"They come from all over the world," said one of the chefs to the other. "Australia, America..."

I walked by the group.

"...and South Korea!"

Mind you, there are no students from South Korea in our programme. I looked up in surprise at the speaker.

"Yeah! South Korea!" he repeated, nodding, smiling, and pointing at me.

"I'm not from South Korea!" I exclaimed with an incredulous smile. I don't think he was convinced.

I found out from the Wits law student who sat at our table that I'm actually black :)
It turns out that are typically 3 categorizations of people: (1) black, (2) white, and (3) coloured. The first two are probably obvious. The "coloured" category refers to people who resulted from interracial unions, typically between blacks and whites.

Evidently, Chinese people don't fall into any of the aforementioned categories and are simply refered to as Chinese. That works. However, under the new laws which were passed to redress the wrongs of apartheid and disparity in treatment, Chinese (as well as some other groups) have been classified as "black" in order to receive the governmental benefits.

This was confirmed by my South African classmate. According to him, during apartheid, Chinese people were categorized as "white." With the end of apartheid in 1994, Chinese were classified as "black." He told me that this was the result of the efforts of Chinese businessmen. Although the Chinese had not suffered oppression under apartheid since they were "white," after apartheid, a group of Chinese businessmen filed a lawsuit against the South African government to get status as blacks in order to gain the same restitution/benefits as blacks. My classmate viewed this as quite a business move. Interesting.

The effects of apartheid still seem to linger. The bunch of us students walked across the Wits campus to get our ID cards. It was a handful of us American students (all white, with the exception of yours truly) and a Liberian-Canadian student. While we were obnoxiously chatting away, a couple of black Wits students started talking to our Canadian counterpart. Later, she told us that the Witsies were asking her if she was okay and why she was with us. She assured them that she was fine and that we were her friends. We surmised that 16 years after the death of apartheid, there is still very little crossing of race lines in friendships. Granted we have had few and limited experiences here in the past couple days or so; but still, interesting.

Last note for today. One of the courses I'm taking here is called Cross-Cultural Legal Communication. Our reading broadly discussed the differences between Western (referring to Europe, UK, and the US) and East Asian (referring to China, Japan, and Korea) ways of thinking. According to our source, Western minds tend to categorise and think about things in an isolated manner while Asians tend to think holistically and consider relationships.

We each took a mini self-assessment which included a few questions including the following:

(1) Consider the following two arguments. Is one more convincing than the other?
1. All birds have ulnar arteries.
Therefore all eagles have ulnar arteries.

2. All birds have ulnar arteries.
Therefore all penguins have ulnar arteries.


(2) Which of the following two groups of proverbs most appeals to you - the first three or the second three?

Half a loaf is better than none.
One against all is certain to fail.
"For example" is no proof.

Too humble is half-proud.
Beware of your friends, not your enemies.
A man is stronger than iron and weaker than a fly.


We discussed which school of thought our personal tendencies leaned more toward. Which style of thinking is dominant for you?