White South African school girls and their accounts of black girls at school and cross-racial heterosexual relations outside school

Abstract

The post-apartheid era has generated opportunities for cross-racial mixing and socializing among young people inconceivable under apartheid, and this perhaps is no more apparent than in the formation of racially mixed public schools. In this article we draw on an interview study that seeks to investigate Grade 11 (16—17-year-old) young people and their lives and identities in different schools near Durban. We concentrate on interviews conducted with a group of middle-class white girls in a formerly white school and we examine whether and if so how they draw on whiteness when asked to reflect on themselves and their relations with others in and outside the school. While we begin with how these girls spoke about themselves and their relations with others in the school, we focus mainly in this article on these girls’ accounts of cross-racial heterosexual relations outside the school. In their accounts of schooling whiteness was constructed in opposition to versions of blackness associated with racial essentialism and intransigence. What was very striking was how positively they presented (heterosexual) desire when directed to boys of other races, associating this with free will and agency as against ‘constraints’ imposed by their parents, peers and culture. In these accounts their sense of whiteness seemed much less assured and taken for granted than in their accounts of their relations with black girls in school. Whereas, we argue, white girls drew on versions of whiteness (and blackness) in school that reinforced racial divisions and hierarchies, despite presenting themselves as non-racial, their interest in cross-racial heterosexual relations and expressions of cross-racial desire subverted racial essentialisms even if, in some cases, this was extremely limited.