If ‘the sexual superiority of the Negro’ is not really ‘real’, as Fanon (1986:159) is at pains to show in his work on black and white sexual desire and fear, what propels or pulls questions about the bodies, skins, buttocks, penises, vaginas, and lips of Africans as interesting into our presence? Fanon’s question—“is the sexual superiority of the Negro real?”—is the incitement for this chapter. In addition to this question this chapter asks whether issues of sexual superiority are actually worth our serious attention or whether they should they be left to women’s and men’s magazines, the back pages of newspapers, and living rooms. If questions about sex deserve any seriousness, even if it is only because many people around the world still find inter-racial, inter-cultural, inter-religious, or inter-ethnic coupling irritating or at best titillating, should critical scholars and activists not come out and advocate inter-group sex education as part of gender-conscious antiracism, multiculturalism, or religious and ethnic tolerance?
These questions are treated by examining discourses mobilised by young heterosexual African men in accounting for their own and others’ sexual and racial identity practices within the changing cultural and political landscape of South Africa. The chapter is focused by a purposive selection of essays written by three part-time male students in the psychology of racism class of 1999 at the University of Western Cape. Students were asked for permission to use their writing for research purposes. Part-time students generally are older than the traditional university student by a few years as well as likely to juggle their studies with other life commitments such as a full-time job, marriage or other kinds of steadier relationships, and other activities. One of the requirements of this class has been that students write essays focusing on an event in their lives characterized by what they would define as racism. The essay task for the class from which essays used in this chapter are taken was the same, but, in addition, a student’s work had to trace the colour line to where it connected to sexuality, without losing critical theoretical distance.
It is perhaps important to make a note of some of the objectives of this class. It is intended to expose students to the racism of the discipline of psychology; to sensitise students to the fact that as South Africans our lives and identities are intimately influenced by race and racism; and to bring students to an understanding of race and racism as they intersect with other discourses and practices of power and oppression. Furthermore, it should be noted that at the time of writing their essays the students who wrote the essays used here were supposed to be familiar
Arnfred Page 140 Wednesday, March 3, 2004 2:38 PM