Diversity Day, St. Joseph's Style

Acker car rentals seems to have an issue with cars breaking down as of late, because our American coworkers also had their car and their backup car break down.

Today we had what was essentially a “diversity day” workshop for our staff. Although we did not walk around with index cards and have to get people to guess what ethnicity our card had based on imitations and stereotypes, it was quite a learning experience. Led by a woman who worked for SA Petrol, it was 3.5 hours of cultural awareness training.

There were a few cultural tidbits I picked up from it that I had never known before.

- Most Xhosa names have some sort of meaning behind them

- In Afrikaans culture, daughters are named after their grandmother, their grandfather, and their mother in that order

- Xhosa and Afrikaans people tend to be really loud. Really loud.

- During apartheid, stores in bantustans/homelands could only sell 27 types of products, so many items are now referred to by the one brand that was sold (e.g. Colgate toothpaste, plastic bags being known as Checkers). Even in the townships, those specific brands are still painted on the fronts of the take aways

A breakdown of the racial hierarchy

1) White

2) Honorary white

a) Chinese (because of trade) (although other people I’ve talked to have said that Chinese were thought as either black or colored)

b) Japanese (because of trade, especially stuff like Kawasaki and Hyundai)

c) Important black people (e.g. black entertainers, so that they could get rushed treatment at hospitals. Dave Chappelle’s racial draft would have made Tiger Woods white anyways)

3) Indian (because they had spices and money and could afford more land)

4) Colored

a) Cape Colored

b) Bastas

c) Griqua

d) Mixed

e) Cape Malay (though they tried to claim Indian descent)

f) Colored (yes, colored colored. From the Eastern Cape which was mainly Xhosa)

5) Black

Every day tends to be another lesson about apartheid. That’s how much a part of their lives it was (though I’m sure it was the same for most oppressive “regimes”). Entire colored families could all have different races on their identity documents if the mother and father weren’t the same race, and thus have children removed and placed elsewhere if they looked too white.

Talked with Mrs. Patterson. Got edits for our 11 page paper and we’re almost done. 2 more days of work.