New York City is often considered the archetypical melting pot where people from all nationalities, cults and creeds can mix together to produce a vibrant new identity.
New York City is often considered the archetypical melting pot where people from all nationalities, cults and creeds can mix together to produce a vibrant new identity.
The harmonious melting pot metaphor does not however, always hold up to scrutiny. Sometimes its diverse ingredients stubbornly refuse to blend.
There are many neighbourhoods in New York that continue to be dominated by specific ethnic groups. You can cross the road from Little Italy to buy Peking Duck in China Town or you can go uptown to do the Harlem Shuffle – but only if you’re black. There are neighbourhoods where Spanish is the only language understood and others where every restaurant serves exclusively Polish fare.
The point is that yes, there is a strong New York identity where people still think it is cool to wear a Big Apple T-shirt, but huge social and cultural gaps continue to exist.
So why does this matter to us?
It means that we need to get some perspective on how we approach next year’s 20th anniversary of democracy in South Africa.
We are going to hear many stories about how we are failing to integrate our various cultures and race groups to form a unified South African identity.
There will be much hand-wringing and angst about how we are still a divided society, and it is undeniably true that vast divisions still exist. Most white people in Grahamstown would feel more comfortable interacting socially in London than they would in Joza, but this does not mean that all is lost.
We are making important progress in some key areas. In certain sporting codes, racial integration has come a long way and harmony achieved on sports fields must inevitably lead to progress in the social scene.
But it is arguably in local schools where the most significant strides have been made, and this is particularly true of the “so-called former Model C schools” – in some circles the pariahs of education.
Many South Africans detest these Model Cs because they are remnants of the apartheid education system that showered vast resources on government schools catering to the white population. Yet in spite of this baggage, these schools are incubating future generations of people who speak the same language and spend many hours together studying, playing, fighting and socialising.
The Model Cs in Grahamstown have student bodies that come close to representing the racial makeup of this town. While the teachers at these schools prepare lessons on many subjects, perhaps the most important learning experience is the one that teaches pupils to learn and live together.
At the Model C schools, pupils build loyalty to their school – they have an identity as a pupil of the school. Then, in the afternoon, they go back to their ghettoes.
