Race Erasure?

I took a bus into Cape Town last week, which ordinarily is a fairly peaceful experience, but which this week was disrupted by accusations of racism. A passenger asked the driver to stop at an atypical spot, and the driver refused. The passenger retorted that he was a racist, because he always used to stop at her requested stop for another passenger, who was of the same race as the driver. The driver reacted in anger, saying that this was untrue, and that this had never happened. The angry passenger through a couple more insults at the driver, before getting off at the next planned stop, where insults continued to fly at the driver as the doors were closing.

The remaining 20 or so passengers, including myself, remained quiet during the entire episode. We remained quiet as the driver loudly tried to verbally villify himself all the way to the bus terminal. Nobody came to the driver, or the passenger's defence. Nobody smiled sympathetically at either one. Everyone took the opportunity to gaze out of their dirty windows and examine the street that had never before seemed so interesting.

This issue has niggled at my mind for a week now and I'm sure it is because of my own experience of being labelled a racist. During a lecture at University, a discussion arose about giving back to the community after ones degree. A presenter from Cuba had told us all about how community service was compulsory there, and many people literally went out into the fields to share knowledge upon receiving their degree. I raised the point that this sounded great, but that in a country with as many official languages as South Africa, that this may not be the best way to share knowledge , as most people with tertiary degrees were educated in English. So perhaps alternate avenues could be pursued by people only speaking one language, and other people who spoke in a different official language could work on the on the ground training. The result of my statement was a branding my a fellow classmate as an unhelpful racist. I was left in a stuttering and stammering mess, imploding and wondering how my comment on practicality had been translated into a racist remark. Like the situation on the bus, nobody said a word. Classmates faced forward, eyes directed for the first time at the board, awaiting the lecturer's response. Nobody looked at me, or my classmate. Nobody defended either of us. The lecture was adjourned early, but the issue clearly was not one that could be confined to lecture banter.

After the lecture a few people came to me and stated their outrage at what had happened, they expressed disdain for the lecturer's poor handling of the issue and were unhappy that I had not had a chance to compose myself and respond properly. They noted that my classmate had her own issues with race and that this was clearly a misinterpretation. But come the next class, eyes turned forward again and silence prevailed.

So what was my classmates problem then, and my own problem on the bus. What were we all afraid of that forced us to stand down and avoid dealing with the issue of race? In the race to avoid being raced, it seems that rather than confront the issue we look to distance or other ourselves from people involved in a conflict that is seen as racial so that we are seen as apart from or above it? We fear that the eyes of others will turn on us and judge us at face value. We don't want to be involved, because debates like that remove us of any other standpoint than the colour of our skin.

And were these two incidents examples of racism on the part of the bus driver and myself? Do we have a predisposition to be more helpful to those who are 'like us' in race/class/gender terms? Or are these simply easy stereotypes to fall back on when our expectations of humanity in other people are disappointed?

I still wonder what myself or the bus driver could have said to convince those on the attack that we were not attempting to be unjust. Is there anything?