Life in a world of ‘Coloured People’

In my misspent youth (misspent because I was far too responsible and wellbehaved, whereas adolescence should entail at least a dose of recklessness, rebellion and sheer stupidity) I went through a phase of listening to Christian rock. It was anodyne stuff, often crossing over into the mainstream charts, and rarely concerned with the finer points of theology or politics or history.

Much of it was forgettable, but some songs occasionally earworm their way up from the recesses of memory into my consciousness. One of these is Coloured People by multiple Grammy-winning trio DC Talk.

In retrospect, the song might seem like a kind of antiracism lite, a variation on that bland universalist question: why can’t we all just get along?

Yet, revisited about three decades after its release, the song’s basic conceit — that we are all “coloured people ”— can be appreciated in more nuanced terms.

In the US, for example, clumsy white-normative attempts to respond to Black Lives Matter still see race as something that happens to people who are not white.

Recognising whiteness as a raced phenomenon itself, rather than a standard or “neutral” point of reference, is a prerequisite for productive conversations about how race continues to shape US society in the same way that it has arguably been the primary determinant of the country’s history.

By appropriating and subverting the term “coloured” — formerly used pejoratively to describe black Americans — the haloed bros from DC Talk also foregrounded the importance of the language we use to discuss race. It is awkward and inconsistent, but we cannot do away with it (as some of your favourite liberal humanists would like us to do) because the socioeconomic realities of race were entrenched precisely through such language.

This does require some careful navigation across different national and cultural contexts. “Coloured” in the US doesn’t mean the same as “coloured” in SA. The phrase “people of colour” is an attempt to be more inclusive, but is rejected by many black South

Africans as an alien import into our already dense lexicon of race.

Likewise, while “Indigenous” has come to replace “Native American” as a descriptor in the US, “native” in SA has a very specific colonialand apartheid era stigma, and the discourse of indigeneity is tricky because it has been invoked to suggest that black people and white people were equal migrants to (and therefore settlers in) a geographical region from which the “first peoples” were expelled.

Notwithstanding this sort of slippage — in fact, precisely because of it — I am an advocate of leaning into rather than eschewing the difficult language of race. An awareness of the etymology of the terminology reminds us of the absurdity of racialisation but also of its ongoing power, warning us against accepting inherited hierarchies associated with skin tone. While racism might be decried, the evidence that we have all internalised colourism lies in the global demand for skin-lightening products and in a measurable correlation between the wage spectrum and the skin tone spectrum.

I caught myself humming Coloured People after visiting Solomon Omogboye’s Resurgence (at Lizamore Gallery in Johannesburg until June 30). The exhibition might tempt the viewer into an easy categorisation: in the style of other artists who have exhibited at Lizamore over the years — one thinks of Patrick Seruwu and the late Benon Lutaaya — Omogboye produces largescale, close-up portraits.

In Resurgence, the subjects are black children. They are not, however, simply representations of the generic “African child”.

Though Omogboye does not name his subjects, and though he explicitly treats them in symbolic terms, he presents a subtle challenge to the homogeneity so often ascribed to blackness in an aesthetic sense. He reinscribes the individuality of each subject through a technical choice to which the exhibition catalogue draws our attention: the artist’s deliberate use of “grey tonal

values” offset by “a light colour palette”.

For Omogboye, this is intended to suggest a balance between recognising our sombre present moment and anticipating a future inspired by youthful resilience; three of the works have the word “hope” in their titles. Viewers of the exhibition may not share this upbeat mood, but Omogboye’s rendering nevertheless insists on the complexity of “black” African children as “coloured people”.