At any given moment an identity's borders may shift and blur according to prevailing attitudes and political realities. Those who were black, Jewish or British yesterday may find themselves differently designated tomorrow. The recent case of South African sprinter Caster Semanya illustrates even sex is not as definite a category as many assume. It is precisely in those borderlands - the margins - that the mainstream is defined. Gatekeepers, both official and popular, attempt to police these frontiers. But humanity, ever dynamic and evolving, finds ways to evade their grasp. So what is marginal and what is mainstream are both relative to each other and in a constant state of change within themselves. This presentation was part of The Sackler Conference for Arts Education - From the Margins to the Core? - An international conference exploring the shifting roles and increasing significance of diversity and equality in contemporary museum and heritage policy and practice held at The Sackler Centre, V&A;, 24-26 March 2010. The Margins Define the Mainstream Gary Young, (Journalist, The Guardian) I want to start with a tale of two white girls. Sandra Laing from Mpumulanga in South Africa and Bliss Broyard who was raised in the blue-blood world of Connecticut's twee suburbs and private schools. Broyard’s racial identity was ensconced in the comfort of insular whiteness that had always known there were 'others' but never really considered them. 'I'd never had a conversation about race,' she confesses, in her book One Drop. 'In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject. Although I grew up within an hour's drive of three of the poorest black communities in the United States those neighbourhoods seemed as distant as a foreign country.' But in early adulthood Broyard would discover that on one level she had a greater connection to those neighbourhoods than she imagined. For on his deathbed her father, Anatole, confessed that he was in fact a black man who had been passing as white throughout most of his adult life. Initially she was thrilled at the news. It was, she wrote, "as though I'd been reading a fascinating history book and then discovered my own name in the index. I felt like I mattered in a way that I hadn't before." But then came the heavy lifting. The family her father had left behind, many of whom lived in the South, and her relationship to those poor black communities that she had known of but never actually known, forced her to reassess everything she had once thought about herself. "I felt unsettled: I'd already experimented with describing myself as black on a few occasions and it hadn't gone over well." The other white girl, Laing was born to two white Apartheid-supporting Afrikaaner parents in the small town of Piet Retief near the Swazi border. Her grandparents were also white. Blood tests proved she was her father's daughter. Yet Sandra emerged dark-skinned with afro hair - a black girl. And under the strict segregationist laws of Apartheid the fact that she had two white parents could only mean so much. Sandra was removed from her whites-only school and reclassified as "coloured". Sandra's parents fought the reclassification hard. "Sandra has been brought up as a White," her father explained to the Rand Daily Mail. "She is darker than we are, but in every way she has always been a White person. If her appearance is due to some "coloured blood' in either of us, then it must be very far back among our forebears, and neither of us is aware of it. If this is, in fact, so, does it make our family any different from so many others in South Africa?" Eventually Sandra would be reclassified as white. But in a country where segregation was rigid and nobody accepted her as white, this legalistic change was more than a technicality but less than an objective reality. Eventually she decided that since black people were prepared to accept her literally on face value while whites were not that she would reclassify herself back to coloured. Two white girls in two nations founded in no small part on racial classification and segregation, discover that they are both in different ways black. These we might broadly agree are two marginal tales. In all likelihood we know relatively few people who have these racial experiences. But for the purposes of this contribution, and I would argue this conference, they are instructive because they shine considerable light on how the relationship between the margins and the core is understood, misunderstood, assumed, accepted and all too often unacknowledged. There are 4 specific ways in which this plays out in society in general that are illustrated here that I want to dwell on in the rest of this talk. First, that the margins in no small part define the core. They establish the boundaries within which the core can be understood. Without the margins there can be no core, just as without borders there can be no nation. The two concepts are not

• published: 18 May 2010
• views: 5931

At any given moment an identity's borders may shift and blur according to prevailing attitudes and political realities. Those who were black, Jewish or British yesterday may find themselves differently designated tomorrow. The recent case of South African sprinter Caster Semanya illustrates even sex is not as definite a category as many assume. It is precisely in those borderlands - the margins - that the mainstream is defined. Gatekeepers, both official and popular, attempt to police these frontiers. But humanity, ever dynamic and evolving, finds ways to evade their grasp. So what is marginal and what is mainstream are both relative to each other and in a constant state of change within themselves. This presentation was part of The Sackler Conference for Arts Education - From the Margins to the Core? - An international conference exploring the shifting roles and increasing significance of diversity and equality in contemporary museum and heritage policy and practice held at The Sackler Centre, V&A;, 24-26 March 2010. The Margins Define the Mainstream Gary Young, (Journalist, The Guardian) I want to start with a tale of two white girls. Sandra Laing from Mpumulanga in South Africa and Bliss Broyard who was raised in the blue-blood world of Connecticut's twee suburbs and private schools. Broyard’s racial identity was ensconced in the comfort of insular whiteness that had always known there were 'others' but never really considered them. 'I'd never had a conversation about race,' she confesses, in her book One Drop. 'In the world I was raised in, it was considered an impolite subject. Although I grew up within an hour's drive of three of the poorest black communities in the United States those neighbourhoods seemed as distant as a foreign country.' But in early adulthood Broyard would discover that on one level she had a greater connection to those neighbourhoods than she imagined. For on his deathbed her father, Anatole, confessed that he was in fact a black man who had been passing as white throughout most of his adult life. Initially she was thrilled at the news. It was, she wrote, "as though I'd been reading a fascinating history book and then discovered my own name in the index. I felt like I mattered in a way that I hadn't before." But then came the heavy lifting. The family her father had left behind, many of whom lived in the South, and her relationship to those poor black communities that she had known of but never actually known, forced her to reassess everything she had once thought about herself. "I felt unsettled: I'd already experimented with describing myself as black on a few occasions and it hadn't gone over well." The other white girl, Laing was born to two white Apartheid-supporting Afrikaaner parents in the small town of Piet Retief near the Swazi border. Her grandparents were also white. Blood tests proved she was her father's daughter. Yet Sandra emerged dark-skinned with afro hair - a black girl. And under the strict segregationist laws of Apartheid the fact that she had two white parents could only mean so much. Sandra was removed from her whites-only school and reclassified as "coloured". Sandra's parents fought the reclassification hard. "Sandra has been brought up as a White," her father explained to the Rand Daily Mail. "She is darker than we are, but in every way she has always been a White person. If her appearance is due to some "coloured blood' in either of us, then it must be very far back among our forebears, and neither of us is aware of it. If this is, in fact, so, does it make our family any different from so many others in South Africa?" Eventually Sandra would be reclassified as white. But in a country where segregation was rigid and nobody accepted her as white, this legalistic change was more than a technicality but less than an objective reality. Eventually she decided that since black people were prepared to accept her literally on face value while whites were not that she would reclassify herself back to coloured. Two white girls in two nations founded in no small part on racial classification and segregation, discover that they are both in different ways black. These we might broadly agree are two marginal tales. In all likelihood we know relatively few people who have these racial experiences. But for the purposes of this contribution, and I would argue this conference, they are instructive because they shine considerable light on how the relationship between the margins and the core is understood, misunderstood, assumed, accepted and all too often unacknowledged. There are 4 specific ways in which this plays out in society in general that are illustrated here that I want to dwell on in the rest of this talk. First, that the margins in no small part define the core. They establish the boundaries within which the core can be understood. Without the margins there can be no core, just as without borders there can be no nation. The two concepts are not

• published: 18 May 2010
• views: 5931