Race, Place, and Self in the Experience of a Bystander

Abstract

My work on race grew from the realization that my young life in apartheid South Africa was impacting on my role as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Sydney. In this article, I attempt to join in the conversation of deconstructing the impact of a South African past. This article describes just one instance of racial interaction set in South Africa in 1970 during apartheid. It is taken from the first interview for my Ph.D. thesis, “Race, Place, and Self.” It illustrates multilayered themes in relation to bystanding. In particular, it shows how bystanders, often referred to as innocent, could feel so bad. I show how memory, politics, and context come together and influence what is known and not known, what is valued and not valued, what is visible what is invisible. I provide background showing how the system of apartheid was represented in the microcosm of everyday lives.