INTERNALISED MISOGYNY IS SELF-HATRED

Sir,

After I’d finished my first year of university, I stayed at home for two months because I could not do internship yet. So instead of staying at home for that long, I decided to look for something to do in those two months. I got a job as a teacher in one of the preschools in Mbabane. One of the class teachers was away, so I filled in for her until I had to go back to school. It was an experience. Now, the story is – each class had two teachers, a class teacher and an assistant. The class teacher was white, and the assistant black. I was the only black ‘class teacher’. Each time a parent came before classes ended to collect their children, I was told to ‘hide’ because I wasn’t white, and the parents wanted white teachers for their children.

Twist

Now, get this, 95 per cent of the children in the class were black, meaning the parents I had to hide from were black. Here’s even a bigger twist – only one of the ‘white’ teachers spoke English as a first language. None of it got to me at that time, I was young and conforming. Okay, let’s look at this other story: A while back two women were arrested for wearing mini-skirts and crop tops in Pigg’s Peak. A newspaper reported public opinion from six people who were interviewed on the street, five of them were men and only one was a woman. All five men, including a pastor and an elderly men, felt a violation of human rights to arrest people based on a non-existent law. The one woman whose opinion was published said what the cops did was good; it served as a reminder of morals. What morals are in the length of a skirt? Who goes around carrying a moral-gauge? Rhetoric questions, of course.

Racism

Both these scenarios have one thing in common - internalised hatred. The former is internalised racism, and the latter is internalised misogyny. I cannot begin to even try and comprehend why black people believe anything from a white-skinned person is always better than anything from a black person. Internalised racism can be defined as ‘an individual’s conscious and unconscious acceptance of a racial hierarchy in which whites are consistently ranked above black people. The same way I cannot understand why a woman would ‘okay’ any kind of oppression over her own body, as if women aren’t already faced with violence and discrimination. I honestly would not be surprised if the same woman who thinks it is ok to arrest women for wearing mini-skirts, is the same woman who blames survivors of violence.

Allowing

What we, as women, should understand is that when we allow such things to happen to other women, we are allowing them to happen to us too, it’s only a matter of time. Internalised racist and patriarchal attitudes in individuals present barriers towards achievement of racial and gender equality, as somebody with internalised racism may believe that they are inferior to people of other ethnic groups and that equality is therefore not a logical goal. This is how inequalities come to life - when our judgments reflect a belief that race and gender account for differences in character or ability and, especially, that a particular race or gender is superior to another. The government, in collaboration with many organisations, is working towards ending these inequalities, but this cannot be achieved without a great deal of change in toxic beliefs, which will in turn influence change in behaviour. And challenging opinions that destroy rather than make a nation is a good start.

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