Can old racists change? Book tracks seven years in a South African nursing home

God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End is a beautifully written and intimate book about the characters in an old age home in South Africa. To write it, anthropologist Casey Golomski spent seven years travelling between South Africa and the US. Both countries are grappling with implementing universal healthcare, which, for older adults, is notoriously under-resourced.

He wanted to hear providers’ perspectives on these care plans, and if there were similar racial overtones in both places amid stereotypes that older (white) adults are more racist in general. Given South Africa’s turbulent history of apartheid, the book poses a pertinent question 30 years into the country’s democracy: do old racists change – or do their views continue to haunt society? We asked Golomski about his study.

Where is the home and what is its history?

Luck in field research can lead you to meet some extraordinarily welcoming people. I found myself working long-term with the staff and residents of a very special old age home I call Grace.

Grace is in a small, mostly white town. The town is surrounded by large citrus and macadamia nut farms and, beyond those, underdeveloped black townships. This is near the world-famous Kruger National Park game reserve.

The home was founded by a white women’s charity in the 1950s. Today it has about 50 residents (most of them white) and 15 staff (most of them black) and mostly takes residents who can pay out of pocket or use private pensions.

These racial, spatial, and economic differences reflect South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, a system that whites first put in place in 1948 to strictly separate people by race and ethnicity in all aspects of life, like where they lived, worked, went to school, and got healthcare.

Before and during apartheid, whites forcibly removed many black people from their homes in rural and urban areas, but they also built industries and organisations – like Grace – that required black people’s (underpaid) labour. This created massive inequality and massive protests in response. Apartheid formally ended in 1994, with Nelson Mandela being elected as the country’s first black president.

The people of Grace lived through all this. They taught me – and can teach all of us – important lessons about what care is and can be, despite the odds.

How do racism, sexism and ageism play out in your study?

There are many incredibly diverse people you’ll meet in the book. Even if the mostly white residents could represent a generation of apartheid oppression, their unique personal journeys and interpersonal relationships as individuals show how care creates close connections between its givers and receivers.

This is despite the odds, but also because of them. The history and legacy of apartheid cannot be erased, but people make do, through jokes, friendships, conversations, and something very important: grace, which I’ll talk more about later.

What did you learn from the residents of the home?

Since apartheid ended, homes like Grace are supposed to be race-blind in admissions, yet their residents are still mostly white widowed women.

But there were exceptions.

Formal plans for long-term care homes by and for black South Africans have existed since the 1970s. Despite beliefs that homes like this were “not part of African culture” as some told me, upwardly mobile black families regularly applied to Grace as a care resource for their older relatives.

Jane was one black resident at Grace whose family had been forcibly removed from their home during apartheid in the 1970s. Her daughter could afford to pay for her stay in Grace by working at Kruger National Park. Jane had a white roommate and the two were good friends.

Another exception was Andrew, a white gay man among these mostly straight women. He moved to Grace with his husband Dickie, whom he had secretly married during apartheid in the 1960s – homosexuality was illegal then. Staff and residents adored them. Sadly, Dickie passed away, but with his usual wink, Andrew would often slyly tell me, “Nobody knows about us here,” referring to himself and his husband as if still “in the closet”.

What did you learn from the caregivers?

As for staff, most caregivers were local, younger black women of the post-apartheid “born-free” generation. Many experienced poor care at public facilities or saw their own older relatives’ critical care needs, which inspired some to become nurses. The one male caregiver, Bethel, bravely shared his gender identity journey, which older white men in his care also wished to learn about and accepted.

Noeline, a white nurse, turned out to have been the first woman in the Department of Correctional Services to work at Robben Island Prison. During apartheid, the prison was a brutal, isolating place where many black political activists were sent and tortured. Former president Mandela spent 18 years there. Noeline remembered helping to care for him and other prisoners who became major businessmen and political figures after apartheid ended.

Prison nursing is sort of a contradiction in terms – keeping people healthy who live in unhealthy conditions – but both Grace’s staff and residents admired her compassion, work ethic and leadership, something she says she also learned from Mandela.

How did this compare with the US?

In the US, there are more than 50,000 similar care homes with 2 million residents compared to around 1,000 homes in South Africa, but there are similarities.

Homes are not well subsidised as part of universal healthcare and staff caregivers are mostly women of colour who are underpaid and face discrimination by residents and management. Researchers argue that US long-term care is rife with systemic racism. Homes’ residents are mostly white in both countries, but in the US, whites are the demographic – and privileged – majority. In South Africa, they are a privileged minority.

What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

One of the biggest takeaways I learned and reflected on in the book is that grace matters. In this case, grace was acceptance of another person’s presence or situation when that person also might be radically different from you.

South African author Sisonke Msimang wrote that white people won’t die if they don’t get the love they believe they deserve from black people. But here staff and residents gave something like it – grace – to each other daily.

Practically, dealing with each other ranged from acts of tenderness to resignation, to tough love. And from wherever they drew inspiration to do so – be it God, their ancestors, or professional ethical mandates – it empowered them to go on living and working together or die trying. In other words, to co-exist.

So, do old racists change?

All people, all of us really, can change, especially when we find ourselves up close and personal with others who are unlike us.

We should flip the script that assumes older adults are unchanging racists and look at the ways we might be blinded rather by our own ageism, and who we might want to otherwise become. DM 

This story was first published in The Conversation. Casey Golomski is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire.