An Examination of The Relationship between Black Consciousness and White Liberals in Biko’s Essay “White Racism and Black Consciousness”, compared with Fanon’s elaborations in the last two Chapters of Black Skin, White Masks.
This essay seeks to examine the relationship between Black Consciousness and White Liberals in Bantu Biko’s Essay “White Racism and Black Consciousness” whilst comparing it with Frantz Fanon’s elaborations in the last two chapters of his book “Black Skins, White Masks” on “The Negro and Recognition”. To fully grasp the assertions Biko makes, this essay will take a close look at the historical period in which Biko lived and wrote and furthermore make note of the historical contexts of this period, in order to understand what informs his views on this relationship. This will also help us understand the concepts; “Black Consciousness” and “White Liberalism” paradoxically. In order to efficiently and effectively compare Fanon’s elaborations with the assertions of Biko, this essay cannot disregard Fanon’s influence on Bikonian thought and philosophy, which is also why a comparative elaboration is not only helpful but also necessary.
Stephan Bantu Biko was born 1946 right before the implementation of the racially segregationist Apartheid government system. He was immersed into the system of Bantu Education, a system designed to give blacks in South Africa an inferior education. The reasoning behind the purpose of this system was that it prepared blacks for the lives that they were going to lead, implicitly this meant that Bantu Education was designed to teach people how to be inferior, how to cultivate them for a life of subjugation. Apartheid was an institutionalised attack on a people’s identity, subjecting them to servitude and oppression. The Apartheid system was highly effective because it employed tactics that affected people psychologically, by excluding them from the wealth, limiting the kind of jobs people could get, barring them from higher institutions of learning and restricting their rights of movement and property rights were non-existence. Steve Biko was one of the activists against such a system. Steve Biko’s approach was a concept he adopted from Frantz Fanon “Black Consciousness” which is an approach of self-awareness as resistance.
In a country where the state of the nation during the period in which Biko wrote was a state of staunch separation politics, where blacks and whites were differentiated and segregated by skin colour, privilege and opportunity. Biko writes in his essay about The Relationship between Black Consciousness and White Liberals, which also talks about the involvement of whites who enjoyed privileges of Apartheid, in the Anti-Apartheid resistance movement.
In the introduction of his essay Black Souls In White Skins, Biko makes an observation of the South African white community’s homogeneity and makes the inference that “it is a community of people who sit to enjoy a privileged position that they do not deserve, are aware of this, and therefore spend their time trying to justify why they are doing so. Where differences in political opinion exist, they are in the process of trying to justify their position of privilege and their usurpation of power.” (Biko, 1987, p. 19).
Biko makes reference to the Separate Development Policy also known as Apartheid “whereby each of the nine African (Bantu) groups was to become a nation with its own homeland, or Bantustan.” (The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 2012) Under this policy movement was strictly regulated, Biko mentions the ideology that was used to justify this was a “theory of “separate freedoms for the various nations in the multinational state of South Africa” the Nationalists (Government) have gone a long way towards giving most of white South Africa some sort of moral explanation for what is happening. Everyone is quite content to point out that these people—meaning the blacks—will be free when they are ready to run their own affairs in their own areas.” (Biko, 1987, p. 20).
Biko is quick to assure us that the focus of his essay is not on the nationalists but with those he feels are in fact acting in “Bad Faith” whose involvement he claims can only be or has been defined in “negative terms” and these are your White Liberals who according to Biko “are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country’s “inhumanity to the Blackman”. They are the people who claim that they too feel the oppression just as acutely as the blacks and therefore should be jointly involved in the black man’s struggle for a place under the sun. In short, these are the people who say that they have black souls wrapped up in white skins.” (Biko, 1987, p. 20).
Biko is not hesitant in questioning the relationship between white liberals and black consciousness and he is just as candid in displaying his suspicion of them by calling their role in black man’s history as “curious”. We assume that because of Fanon’s influence on Biko he is using Hegelian definition of “History”, where it is the “development of consciousness.” Biko notes this relationship as a hindrance to the development of the black conscious because it is more of a guardianship than a mutual level of respect and autonomy. He is very suggestive that these white liberals more than anything else are arm chair politicians and coffee shop intellectuals who fail to renounce their positions of privilege.
Biko makes an attack on the liberal ideological approach which calls for an inclusive attitude towards South Africa’s political change during the time; he calls the insistence for “integration not only as an end but also as a means” arrogance on the part of the White Liberals. This attack continues; “The integration they talk about is first of all artificial in that it is a response to conscious maneuver rather than to the dictates of the inner soul. In other words the people forming the integrated complex have been extracted from various segregated societies with their inbuilt complexes of superiority and inferiority and these continue to manifest themselves even in the “nonracial” set-up of the integrated complex.” (Biko, 1987, p. 20).
Biko posits this arrangement in a Sartean context of Bad Faith when he compares it to a slave working with the slave masters son to achieve his own freedom. This is in Bad Faith because the Liberal cannot really hope to contribute to the consciousness of the black man because he sits from a point of privilege and therefore can by no means be able to identify or relate, especially in a country where the context of the time meant that the freedoms and privileges of the white community had always been at the “expense” of their black counterparts. Biko also feels as though because there can be no “solid identification” by these people who are first different in colour and then unequal in social and economic standing, already the struggle towards a common cause is foiled by these disparities between the people who are fighting for this cause especially because for the Black man it should be liberation and the white liberal is already enjoying the privilege of being able to exercise their liberties.
The only way in which according to Biko a social integration can come to be amongst these groups is for each group, namely; the blacks who are to achieve consciousness and for the white liberals is for each to be able to assert themselves “within their respective communities” and once they have been able to determine themselves, they will be able to have a mutual respect in an equal position of freedom. He continues to claim that in a society where blacks have not entered as black conscious beings they will always suffer from an “inferiority complex—a result of 300 years of deliberate oppression, denigration and derision.” And without this “black consciousness” blacks cannot claim their own freedom.
How Biko posits this argument is that the liberals who adopt a nonracial approach are in fact “claiming a “monopoly on intelligence and moral judgment” and setting the pattern and pace for the realization of the black man’s aspirations.” (Biko, 1987, p. 21). He makes the inference that these liberals are actually on the fence and do not benefit anyone but in so much as comfort their own guilt by claiming that they are both against white domination and black domination calling for social cohesion on the grounds that they do not relinquish the privileges that they already cannot live without. Biko makes the statement that “their protests are directed at and appeal to white conscience, everything they do is directed at finally convincing the white electorate that the black man is also a man and that at some future date he should be given a place at the white man’s table.” (Biko, 1987, p. 22).
By design Biko claims that there is a problem with the scenarios for this integration citing that “the black-white circles are almost always a creation of white liberals. As a testimony to their claim of complete identification with the blacks”, the issue the also becomes the fact that it is not all blacks who are welcomed in these circles and these circles are usually the result of blacks going into white communities instead of the other way around. This is a hindrance in itself to the black conscious and its development and even worse he suggests that the white liberals can even go as far as to subconsciously block the advancement of the Black Conscious because they are not only privileged but also comfortable and therefore these white liberals might even sneer at the development of black consciousness and the liberation of the black people begging the questions of what could happen to the comfort of the white liberal if this does happen – a threat. But Biko claims that there is something which separates white liberals with the blacks that they are claiming to help. “The liberals view the oppression of blacks as a problem that has to be solved, an eye sore spoiling an otherwise beautiful view. From time to time the liberals make themselves forget about the problem or take their eyes off the eyesore. On the other hand, in oppression the blacks are experiencing a situation from which they are unable to escape at any given moment. Theirs is a struggle to get out of the situation and not merely to solve a peripheral problem as in the case of the liberals. This is why blacks speak with a greater sense of urgency than whites.” (Biko, 1987, p. 22). This clearly displays Biko’s attitude towards the inclusion of white liberals in the struggle for black conscious.
Biko observes the effects of oppression by whites on the blacks and the negative implications to their community claiming that “they have been made to feel inferior for so long that for them it is comforting to be in the presence of whites who seem to treat them as equals.” He continues by assuming that “this serves to boost up their own ego to the extent of making them feel slightly superior to those blacks who do not get similar treatment from whites.” (Biko, 1987, p. 23). Biko feels these blacks who make an acquaintance with their white counterparts are impeding the great progression to the enlightenment and emancipation of their own people stating that “these dull-witted, self-centered blacks are in the ultimate analysis as guilty of the arrest of progress as their white friends.”
Fanon applies Adler’s analysis of individual psychology to elaborate on this relationship “Whenever the White man comes into contact with someone else, the question of value, of merit, arises, they have no inherent value of their own they are always contingent on the presence of the other” (Fanon, 1986, p. 163) and reliance on the dependence of diminishing the value of the other. Fanon’s most explicitly cited problem with the black-white relations on the colonial slave island of Martinique, was that the blacks were not promised emancipation and liberation that would be their own and own their own terms but all they could hope to be or hope to achieve is in fact to gain French citizenship. This awarding of French citizenship created a culture of outlining the limitations on the aspirations of blacks in the colonies, all they are allowed to hope for is to be assimilated into the white community earning a “seat at the table”, this yearning or wanting of recognition by the proverbial master goes against all true virtues of achieving consciousness and in fact supports Biko’s argument that any relationship between the white liberals who pretending to be accepting of a few blacks into their communities hinders the ultimate goal of a greater black consciousness, independent and mutually exclusive one.
In closing, this essay has delivered its promise to examine the relationship between White Liberals and Black Consciousness using Biko’s essay Black Souls in White Skins as an analysis and as a tool of reference. With Biko as the yard stick and bar, we also look at how the historical periodization influenced Biko’s claims. With this view of the literature based on the conditions on the time and the physical environment of Apartheid South Africa at the time, the essay also looks at the government policies and how they affect these two individual groups and their own specific trace. Heading to the end of the essay, we linked Biko’s thoughts with the patriot saint of Black Consciousness, Frantz Fanon and his view of this relationship with Martinique as his lens and we come to understand that Black Consciousness or any consciousness of any group for that matter needs to be established by that groups own understanding of themselves.
Bibliography
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (6th ed.). (2012). Columbia: Columbia University Press.
Biko, S. (1987). Black Souls In White Skins. In A. Stubbs, I Write What I Like: Steve Biko. A selection of his writings. (pp. 19-26). London: Bowerdean Press.
Fanon, F. (1986). Black Skins, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
Gibson, N. C. (2008, November). Upright and Free: Fanon in South Africa, From Biko to The Shackdwellers’ Movement. Social Identities, 14(6).
Habibi, A. (2014). Steve Biko: The Intellectual Roots of South African Black Consciousness. National Conference on Undergraduate Research. New Hampshire: University of Kentucky.
Early Engagements 