Barriers
By Laura
The physical walls that tell you to worry, and the invisible barriers that tell you what you’re allowed to choose.
One of the first things I noticed about Johannesburg was the walls. There are walls around all the houses and fences in front of all the buildings. Spikes topped all the iron gates and barbed or electrified wiring reached over top of the walls. The hostile design across the urban area is clear. Unless you’re known and invited, you will not get past those walls.
The physical barriers are for safety, but also communicate that you have reason to fear. Safety is not a given. As we drove through the high end neighborhoods of Pretoria, walls surrounded the first floor of the luxurious homes we passed and security companies advertised their home alarm and armed response services. People walked on the sidewalks outside, but it illustrated a concern for what could happen, what the owners maybe expected to happen.
I learned that Johannesburg has a mall culture because once you’re inside a mall, you know you’re safe to walk around. Some of the better restaurants are in shopping malls. Security guards stationed at the entrances allow shoppers to feel safe to browse.
The urban landscape echoed the invisible barriers we also saw in Johannesburg through our company meetings and tours. Our white tour guide kept repeating that after the end of Apartheid, everyone had “freedom of choice” for where they wanted to live. No one was officially segregated into neighborhoods. She suggested that some black families had moved to white areas, but decided to move back to the formerly officially segregated area of Soweto because they missed knowing their neighbors. Very few white people had chosen to move to Soweto, which still features corrugated metal houses clustered together. We didn’t discuss how choices can be limited – by finances, by opportunities, by culture. You may choose to live in a nice house with electrified fencing around it, but there is a lot of history that put you in a position to make that choice.
I kept thinking back to Arc of Justice by Kevin Boyle, one of the books I read for an American history course in undergrad. Boyle examines the life of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black physician who moved with his family into a white section of Detroit in the 1920s. Soon after the Sweet family arrived, a mob surrounded their house. Someone fired into the crowd, and soon Dr. Sweet was on trial for murder. It’s a fascinating history that explores the Great Migration and interwar race relations in the north. Several years later, I attended a lecture Professor Boyle gave. He spoke about his parents, who lived in Detroit and watched their neighbors start to move to the suburbs as part of white flight from the city. In my memory – it’s been almost five years at this point, so this is not a direct quote – he said that what drew him to Dr. Sweet’s story was the decision his own parents made to sell their house and move. He wanted to understand what made people make the wrong choice.
Barriers remained a theme for me during our week. When we visited a research institute dedicated to HIV prevention and treatment, we learned that many young people avoid getting tested for HIV because they don’t want to face the judgement of the nurses. Especially people in their late teens, who will be shamed for engaging in sexual activity, or young men, who will be stigmatized for assumptions about their sexual activity. Even if they know that they should get tested, people are reluctant to knowingly deal with that shame. When we learned about efforts to end TB, the researcher noted that stigma surrounding the disease also keeps people from wanting to get tests and treatment.
As we drove past the walled homes and businesses around Johannesburg, and later as our AirBnb host in Cape Town showed us the house’s multi-level security system, I kept thinking about those barriers. The physical walls that tell you to worry, and the invisible barriers that tell you what you’re allowed to choose.