Of Riots and Rainbows: South Africa, the US, and the Pitfalls of Comparison

Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations about Difference in the United States and South Africa. By Alison Bernstein and Jacklyn Cock. University of Illinois Press, 2002.

When Whites Riot: Writing Race and Violence in American and South African Cultures. By Sheila Smith McKoy. University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

Not long after the African National Congress's electoral victory in 1994, an educator charged with designing a new history curriculum for South African schools interviewed a group of standard three (fifth-grade) students about their views on their country and their knowledge of its past. Some of the answers to her questionnaire were unintentionally comical. In response to the question, "What would you teach American pupils about South African history," one boy wrote: "I would tell them that we have a Rambo Nation" (Attridge and Jolly 5). This error is the kind of thing that intellectuals—myself included—cannot resist making hay of: it exposes, in all its innocence, the threat of violent crime and of a brutal machismo, which must check any unduly optimistic assessment of South Africa's liberation. But the phrase Rambo Nation also captures something of the difficulty of forging a national culture in an age of globalization. The iconography of Hollywood creeps into what might otherwise be a proud assertion of a new South African identity: political heroes like Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela seem to morph into Sly Stallone. Even if the boy had spelled "rainbow" correctly, one could still have traced in his response (and inthe question he was posed) the pervasive influence of the US on South African politics and culture. After all, when Mandela called in his inaugural address for the creation of a "Rainbow Nation," he was echoing Jesse Jackson's 1988 appeal for a "Rainbow Coalition."

But the rainbow metaphor has almost antithetical implications in South Africa and the US. In the US, as Jacklyn Cock and Alison Bernstein argue in Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations about Difference in the United States and South Africa (2002), the rainbow has served as an emblem of multiculturalism, the predominant ideology of US race relations since the 1980s. As such, it continues to have considerable appeal to progressive politicians and citizens. The reason for this is readily grasped. In the US, the politics of race can be hidden and covert, and since it is "synonymous with the subordination of minorities," it can be ignored with relative impunity (24). In this situation, the rainbow metaphor serves a useful symbolic purpose: it reminds the white mainstream of the existence and the interests of other ethnic groups. But the celebratory rainbow can also become a means of ignoring disadvantage: its celebratory figuration of cultural difference runs the risk of obscuring the starker, more intractable divisions of class.

In contemporary South Africa, the official ideology of race relations is different: the ideal is not a multiracial democracy—for the prefix multi calls to mind apartheid's divisive rhetoric—but anonracial one. The rainbow with its separate bands of color is not really an ideal emblem in this context. Nevertheless, it was deployed at the moment of transition to express a vision of a single national identity built on cultural diversity and equality. Like the new South African constitution, the image (now replaced by Thabo Mbeki's equally vague and upbeat notion of an African Renaissance) is aspirational. No one would claim that racism—or class divisions, or sexism—has been erased without a trace since 1994. But as Cock and Bernstein point out, the interests of "people of color" cannot be ignored in South Africa, since they are the majority of the nation's citizens and since no myth of meritocracy has obscured the historical fact of racial disadvantage. For all the airy-fairyness of the rainbow image, the South African ideal of unity-in-difference is based on pragmatism and historical necessity: the nation's...