Abstract
“Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in terms not of our own choosing. The site to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential. That any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions is a testament to the beauty of human spirit.”
Isabel Wilkerson (2020). Slavery, colonialism, apartheid and patriarchy are aspects of South African history that have coded our current social interactions. It is due these histories that there is “the assigning of meaning to unchangeable physical characteristics.” (Wilkerson
2020: 27). Nearly three decades into the ‘post-apartheid’ era, South Africa is still grappling with the legacy of a deeply entrenched
system of categorization. The abolition of apartheid has not yielded a non-racialised society. As a white woman, my interests are rooted in questions about whiteness, our relationship with ‘other races’ and the hierarchies that that are prevalent in our post-apartheid society. Today
there exist unspoken, veiled occurrences that racialize our country. Can we give language to this phantom? The “Black Lives Matter”
movement in 2020, made international headlines and ignited conversation and action around racial tensions, across the globe. This was a pivotal
point for me in realizing the prevalence, heaviness and everydayness of race issues in our seemingly post-apartheid country, through vulnerable,
personal conversations with my non-white friends. Seeing some of the realities that my friends face daily, I couldn’t help to
imagine some of the situations my 15 year-old, black adopted brother will have to deal with as he grows up in Johannesburg,
South Africa. Whiteness means; possessing unconscious encoded power when put in relation to dark-coloured people (black people).
‘Other race’ implies that ‘white’ is also a race. This is important to state, because “As long as race is something only applied
to non-white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm.” (Dyer
1997). Richard Dyer explains that whiteness is able to operate in a vacuum and does not immerse itself in the everydayness
of the marginalized. “Being individual or being human outside of a racial group is a privilege only afforded to white
people.” (DiAngelo 2018). Race is primarily a socio-political construct rather than having biological grounding. “The most
important thing about race is the boundaries between them.” (Spickard 2015). This was vital to maintain dominance of a
higher group. W.E.B Du Bois’s double consciousness theory looks at nationality and race. It is about people of colour, a marginalised
group, having to constantly adapt and act differently in different spaces. There is a performing of race and we are constantly code-switching as a
result, living racialised lives in a seemingly post racial society. This performance is called code-switching. Code-switching speaks of the spaces we
occupy, the audiences of those spaces and who we are as a result in those spaces. It is a means of elevating your social standing, wielding power,
a survival tactic or appropriate behaviour according to “The cost of code-switching” and the cost is that you cannot truly be yourself.
Mable O. Wilson mentions the importance of understanding how architectural historical discourse is racialized. She says that disciplines have silenced blackness. I am interested in how architecture and architectural terminologies could be changed to become sensitive to
racial tensions as well as playing a part in developing new spaces for relationships to shape and shift. Mpho Matsipa talks about
what decolonisation means in
terms of architectural practice.
Whiteness becomes Custodians
of landscapes while her relationship
to land is one of racialised
dispossession as a result
of apartheid. Ghettos are mentioned
and referred to as a “terrible
beauty” as intimate life unfolds
in the streets where black
people live. Wandile Mthiyane
explains how his designs might
never be experienced by his
community and thus feels dispositioned
as a contributor of
space making. He says; “Architecture
is never neutral; it either
heals or hurts.”. Can we de-racialize
architecture? In what
way can my project respond to
racialised architecture especially
in terms of whiteness?
The Mouseion of Code-Switching
is a platform in which cartographies
of the invisible (yet
very tangible) networks of racism
in post-apartheid South Africa
are constructed into a dictionary
of sorts, the purpose of
which is to capture (or release)
a language to this ‘phantom...’ It
will become a library of which
this phantom can be spoken of
and referenced as tangible evidence.
The dictionary will consist
of artefacts (a tangible item
relating to cultural interests)
such as a set of behavioural
tones, material palettes and a
lexicon of terms and conversations.
This work is important
as we occupy the space of
post-apartheid where there are
ripple effects and consequences of the past still lurking among us. This language seeks to give agency to the user by legitimizing the phantom of current racial issues.