The case of a white law student at Stellenbosch University breaking into the room of a Black student and urinating on the latter’s possessions and objects is one more episode in an ongoing story of racism’s resilience in South African social life. Of course, Stellenbosch University has a peculiar recidivist streak when it comes to these kinds of incidents (as a former student at the university, Simone Cupido, capably elucidated in this article). Those of us Black academics—I am a faculty member in the English department—who are positioned in a relationship of proximity to the event must diagnose what it means to be Black at such an institution. Diagnosing this event gives meaning to the sense of being caught up in something ugly, by allowing us to assign it to a certain pattern and category of behavior.

We are by now familiar with the way a racist incident generates its own language of understanding; the inclination to think of it in terms like “outbreak” and “larger issues.”  It rapidly becomes a scene in which we flail about for meaning. Racist incidents that happen in large institutions that have a strange, doubled life have seen, in the aftermath of this event, expressions of impatience proliferating on social media: “What do you expect from Stellenbosch / Why are we surprised that this is happening at Stellenbosch/Stellenbosch has always…” etcetera. From the outside, this incident at Stellenbosch University is a self-evident case study of something that has always been there.

Internally, the gestures and statements tend to be ones of disavowal. Accompanying the anger at the actions of the individual student, one perceives a gathering sentiment along the lines of “well, of course, racism happens everywhere … / well, obviously it is unacceptable and does not reflect our values …”; statements in which racism is an inconvenient disruption of the work we are all doing. The brusque tone of these renunciations has the consequence of making those of us who want to dig beneath the surface of the event feel as though we are part of the inconvenience because we want to ask what is being taken for granted, rather than rushing to formulate palliative answers that make the problem go away. Our departments and faculties rush to issue assurances of our bona fides, more for the sake of the students than for the academics, who are meant to take it for granted that the space they work in is not actually a harbor for racist ways of being in the world. This assumption of our own criticality is how academics shield themselves against having to examine their own implication in “incidents” like this. But if we understand ourselves as being implicated in what goes on within the institutions where we work, then we understand our proximity to the problem in a different way.

I have worked at Stellenbosch University for 13 years and seen the different ways in which the university sustains and generates harmful ways of engaging with the world among its white students. It is a campus where I have repeatedly had white students bump into me on the sidewalk, or obliviously almost run me over as I walk onto a pedestrian crossing, only to express confusion at my presence, since their world is ordered according to the expectation that Black people will move aside for them. It is a campus where the Black nod is a ready acknowledgement among staff and students of the daily microaggressions that happen here. I have been here through language policy debates where white people needed to be convinced that Afrikaans, as it is used here, is frequently exclusionary. I have been here through residence policy debates where white people needed to be told that not wanting to share a room with a Black person is not simply a cultural preference. I have been here through Open Stellenbosch and the reactionary backlash that followed, and I was here when a white student decided to stick up posters with Nazi iconography on them, calling for white students to unite to preserve their culture. To the outside world, the frequency of these episodes generates an obvious question: “Why is nothing being done?” It is a question that proliferates in many variations because there is a perception of institutional lethargy or intransigence before incidents of racial violence.

I want to unfold this latest deployment of racism as what I term a history of bad relation. I define “bad relation” as a public interaction in which negative behavior occurs because the perpetrating party has sentimentalized attachments to ways of knowing that are harmful. At Stellenbosch University, the on-paper facticity of the university’s efforts at transformation exists simultaneously alongside an enrooted resistance to decisively confronting the problem of cultural and racialized parochialism. The university is an ongoing scene of intractability, in which the resilience with which racism resurfaces episodically is enabled by the university’s tendency to treat racism as an issue that must be soft-soaped to avoid alienating white people.

It seems almost a banal observation that the resilience with which racism persists at this university is due to the conditions which enable it to play out. I think that understanding what transpired in this way moves it beyond the logics of problem management, where the aim is to provide symptomatic relief: make the incident go away, and the problem is solved, goes the logic. Of course, there are many ways to tell the story of racism at Stellenbosch University. Some of them are divergent: some open up routes of questioning, while others close those foreclose those routes.

The late affect theorist Lauren Berlant coined the term “genre flailing” to describe a kind of crisis management that usually arises after a moment of disruption that intrudes on our confidence about how to understand the world. While I think it is necessary to talk about what has happened at Stellenbosch, I worry that in our flailing for a form of recognition, we risk departing from the scene of injury towards a more comforting abstract space where we shift the discourse to the enduring meta-problem of racism in South Africa. If these problems resist unseating, it’s because the premises are wrong. By insisting that we give our attentiveness to individual scenes of racist action, we move away from considerations of the embeddedness with which racism circulates here, the ways it finds new paths of renewal with each cycle of students, the way these intractable people attach themselves to the institution.