Excerpts from Jonathan D. Jansen’s Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past, Stanford University Press, 2009.

Preparing to work in South Africa, I’ve read a fascinating book written by Jonathan Jansen, the first black South African dean of the University of Pretoria, the center of traditional Afrikaans institutions. This is a dense and academic book on the different knowledges that we carry around with us – such as internal, historic, and embedded.  As he says, “The problem with embedded knowledge is that it is not there; it is the claims, silences, and assumptions about knowledge concealed in the belief and value systems of those who teach and learn. Changing curriculum without changing the curriculum makers is especially difficult under conditions of a sudden and radical social transformation.”  

"For the ordinary white South African, and Afrikaners in particular, the transition remains a traumatic experience. For a psychotherapist’s perspective: ‘South Africa is an intensely anxious society, living with many unresolved fears and collective fantasies, much repressed anger, guilt, and shame. Many black-white relationships are unstable and ambivalent. The necessary collective healing will have to go far beyond the superficial political processes of reconciliation, reparation, and truth-seeking about the past – urgent though those are.’ To understand why this is so, it is important to recognize “the reserves of social knowledge” on which the memories and identity of the Afrikaner are built.” (pg 45)

In the South African experience the victims and the perpetrators had to live together and together make sense of the experiences of defeat and victory.  (pg 57)

"The problem with embedded knowledge is that it is not there; it is not easily read off the outer coating of a public curriculum. It is the claims, silences, and assumptions about knowledge concealed in the belief and value systems of those who teach and learn; concealed behind the classroom door, they influence and direct the substance of what counts as the actual knowledge transactions among participants in the learning process….Changing curriculum without changing the curriculum makers is especially difficult under conditions of a sudden and radical social transformation…What the teachers of the new university curriculum were struggling with was knowledge in the blood." (pg 179)

Notes how we have just exchanged the sensitive word “race” for “culture,” from how blacks are to how they behave.  Race-essential understandings, tensions between deep change and mandated change, and how this is reflected in new curriculum that actually affirms racist narrative are a part of the problem: “Ubuntu’s problem [the new curriculum at UP] is not that it peddles this offensive knowledge on a university campus; the dilemma of this curriculum is that it makes explicit what is often concealed in white understandings of the Other and what is less evident in the knowledge, values, and beliefs that underpin the supposedly neutral scientific knowledge presented across the institutional disciplines.” (pg 194)

"The problem with South Africa before and after Apartheid is that we insist on collapsing race and economics into the same face; whites are rich and privileged, blacks are poor and under-served. This may be true of blunt averages as a national measure of social status, but it conceals the thousands and thousands of poor whites and the struggling classes among them who barely make it. Apartheid was as much a racial system of oppression as it was a capitalist system of exploitation; among the victors, the nationalists want us to believe only the former, and the Marxists only the latter. But it was both…" (pg 215)

Change: Observations from historical inquiry (post WWII Germany):

•        “Perpetrators and beneficiaries of evil systems do not change even in response to direct confrontation with horrific knowledge.
•        The reversal of attitudes is unlikely to come from the participating generation – that is, those directly involved in atrocities whether as known perpetrators or as complicity bystanders. However, not only the passage of time allowed a critical consciousness to emerge; there were also changes in the surrounding environment [compelling writings, etc.]
•        The capacity for the perpetrators to change arose after the political elites recognized more than one pain and ‘the link between the suffering of victims and perpetrators’ was established…not recognition simply of dual sufferings but of their connection as ‘causally related and inextricably intertwined,’ without the danger of sliding onto the quicksand of moral relativism.
•        Crucial role of educational knowledge in this process of reorientation…for the understandable impulse to launch ‘teacher training’ in a new history in post-conflict societies fails to take account first of the cognitive constraints and second of the emotional loyalty to a fallen regime of truth.
•        How adults change recognizes the impossibility of bringing everyone into common knowledge…and resting with the knowledge that insisting on the one great unifying story in not a prerequisite for nation building even though it might be the pipe-dream of the nationalist impulse.” Excerpted from pgs 251-254

Acknowledgment of brokenness   "The origins of brokenness come from the spiritual world of evangelical faith. It is the construct of brokenness, the idea that in our human state we are prone to failure an incompletion, and that as imperfect humans we constantly seek a higher order of living. Brokenness in the realization of imperfection, the spiritual state of recognizing one’s humanness before the forgiving and loving power of God. But brokenness is more; it is the profound outward acknowledgment of inward struggle done in such as a way as to invite communion with other people and with the divine.  Brokenness compels dialogue." (pg 269-270)

The Necessity of Establishing Risk-Accommodating Environments                           

"White students do not rush into pedagogic spaces confessing guilt or acknowledging racism; nor do white parents suddenly own up to years of privilege at the expense of black citizens. Even when such compulsion is felt, it is extremely difficult for human beings to unburden themselves in private or public spaces… When I do such workshops on risk accommodation within the classroom, invariably a teacher becomes adamant: there can be no reconciliation without truth. People need to acknowledge their racism and their privilege as a very first step, or there’s nothing to talk about. This is a particularly Western way of thinking: “fess up,” as if this were an involuntary reflex to some central command. The explosion of talk shows in American public culture in which the most personal and bizarre behavior is displayed without restraint to live audiences strikes many in the Third World as disgusting. This is not the real world. Guilt and shame are more common responses to burdensome knowledge than the apparent reveling in extreme and obnoxious behavior.  It is essential that the teacher create the atmosphere, and structure the teaching-learning episodes so as to reduce the risk of speaking openly about direct and indirect knowledge. Students must be able to speak without feeling they will be judged or despised for what they say. To repeat, this creation of a risk-accommodating environment does not mean that “anything goes” and that a student can spout offensive words about another group without consequences. Long before the pedagogic encounter, the atmosphere should have been set, the terms of engagement explained, the rules of dialogue shared. Such difficult dialogues can take place only if trust in the teacher-leader is already ensured through demonstration of an example of conciliation within and outside the classroom. The notion the ‘the lesson’ starts in the classroom is misguided." (pg 275-276)