Coloured. How Classification Became Culture by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel

Coloured. How Classification Became Culture, by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Johannesburg, South Africa 2023. ISBN 9781776191499 / ISBN 978-1-77-619149-9

Coloured. How Classification Became Culture, by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel, is for Coloured people, by Coloured people, a book of Coloured and colourful stories from varied corners of the South African vista, past, present and future.

One of the foremost sentiments that colours my childhood memories can be encapsulated by the word wrong'. My first education as a racialised person taught me that I was wrong in a world that balanced itself on the tightrope of absolute differences. For better or worse, being a full-something was always better than being a half-nothing. Inadequacy became a way to define my existence: for being Coloured, for being a waterslams, for being queer - never quite right and never quite enough. 'What are you?' is a question that has assaulted me many times throughout my life, and the search for the answer set me off on my own journey of academic inquiry. Though I have somewhat relented in trying to answer the question, not least because of its dehumanising phrasing, I can say I have found one answer to a different question: 'Who are you?' Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel offer me an answer with Coloured. Despite our histories of collective trauma and colonial wounding, South Africans genuinely do not know much about each other. Our social literacies are overwhelmingly informed by party politics that dominate our social imagery. Alienated from each other by colonialism and apartheid, and now distracted by politricks, we have not taken the time to get to know each other beyond the essentialist caricatures we have been mesmerised by. However, this book loudly disrupts this damning trajectory. Coloured does not miss a single opportunity to remind us of an important truth: White supremacy lied to us all and none of us has escaped its conditioning, but we can reclaim our histories. When we say we are Coloured, we are not bound to a reductive definition of the positionality as a colonial invention created for the purpose of lubricating the apartheid states terror machine. We are Coloured because of a specific wounding and historical trajectory that birthed circumstances necessitating survival. Out of that need to survive, we created cultures that don't enjoy uniformity, but most certainly overlap with the histories of other racialised people in South Africa. Though we reclaim and celebrate our pride in being who we are, we can never shy away from our complicity with the harm and oppression meted out to other Black people who share our histories. Despite also being acted upon by an oppressive system, we can never understate the agency Coloured people have always had to make different choices when called upon to show solidarity towards other Black people. With utmost compassion, Coloured calls us all to account for our complicity and anti-Blackness while offering us facts that confront the epistemologies of ignorance in which we have been incentivised to participate. Colouredness produces a highly politicised existence, the mechanics of which can be attributed to South Africa's particular form of racecraft in which a buffer race was created to attenuate the reaction of a numerically preponderant Black population to violent oppression. However, in spite of this, Coloured people also live in a beautiful banality that is unaffected by the bigger politics that hope to define us. There are things that are just frivolously Coloured, that we understand and internalise as us'. We are by no measure monolithic and, in fact, engage in healthy contestation about how we express our ethnic identities, but it is in the crevices of the overlaps that we meet each other. [...]

This is an excerpt from Coloured. How Classification Became Culture, by Tessa Dooms and Lynsey Ebony Chutel.

Title: Coloured
Subtitle: How Classification Became Culture
Authors: Tessa Dooms; Lynsey Ebony Chutel
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg, South Africa 2023
ISBN 9781776191499 / ISBN 978-1-77-619149-9
Softcover, 15 x 23 cm, 210 pages, several b/w images