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Exclusionary internships

DOES magazine Marie Claire deserve to be hammered for what it pays interns (R30 a day)?

Justine Cullinan, 5FM station manager, weighed in on The Media Online with a common response: “Internships are opportunities for young and passionate people to cut their teeth in the real world, build connections that are valuable and make a memorable mark on the powers that be so that hopefully they are noticed and first to come to mind when new hiring decisions are being made.”

Yes, but who gets the chance to take advantage of those opportunities? Who is getting the head-start and who’s got weights on their feet, through no fault of their own?

Cullinan pointed out that famous first-black-newscaster-on-SABC Khanyi Dhlomo “ran around with clothing samples on photoshoots as an assistant for quite a while before she became a news reader, Harvard Business School Graduate and the philanthropist and entrepreneur we know her to be today.”

But Dhlomo was no ordinary township kid. She was the daughter of a school principal and one-time KZN education minister, an Inkatha high hiedyin (Scots for high-ups, to those who’ve never read Ian Rankin) so I doubt this fashion-shoot gofer was schlepping home via two taxis and a four-kilometre walk to an RDP house.

And that’s the point; we are not all starting on a level footing. For the young graduate living with mom and dad in Plumstead, R30 a day might cover the cost of public transport to and from work, and the parents will chip in if it doesn’t; for the promising youngster living in a shack on the Flats, the cost and time demands of the transportation logistics might mean going without food. Or opting to piddle away your promise in a job stacking merchandise at Grocers-R-Us.

In any event, Marie Claire apparently requires ‘your own car’, a not uncommon demand in ads for internships or volunteer positions (or entry-level jobs). Where would a township youth get that from?

And that, my friends, is what privilege – aka structural racism – means. A friend of mine recently said, “structural racism is what happens when a society is constructed in such a way as to systematically benefit people from a particular group far more than others.” So (mostly, but not always) white kids get to the start line not even realising the simple reality of their geographic advantage; whereas to take advantage of that opportunity the (almost always black) kid has to, in many cases, sleep rough or travel expensively for two or more hours. The demand for a decent stipend is aimed, not at scoring funds for the beginner, but at setting that right.

Structural racism is one of the major factors driving anger in this country. The Penny Sparrows of this world are ignorant bigots who should rightly be called out every time they air their bigotry – but it wouldn’t cause quite so much burning if the vast majority of South African blacks weren’t still labouring under the severe disadvantages of structural racism.

I think of the undeserved luck that being white brought me: I was a genuinely poor kid, but despite that, I got a bursary to attend a university which, thanks to the benefit (for me) of apartheid geography, was less than ten kilometres from our rented flat, where I lived with both my parents, as well as electricity, running water, and an active police service down the road which only became scary once you were outed as a ‘langharige opstoker’.

In contrast, consider the undeserved disadvantages my young friend Mbali labours under (very undeserved – she’s a far more conscientious student than I was!). Thanks to the self-same apartheid geography, which settled black people in dormitory townships far from town centre, she grew up more than 30 kilometres from the educational action – without running water and electricity. Like the children of migrant labours (a feature of colonial/apartheid South Africa), her father was largely absent.

I’ve no doubt Mbali’s mother was bright enough to have achieved academically and scored a decent-paying job, judging by her children’s intelligence, but she hadn’t a hope in hell of getting beyond matric – thanks to apartheid education, the effects of which echo down through the generations.

Mbali often went hungry to school (which was under-resourced and had poor teachers). She excelled despite all of that, got hugely lucky in finding a private sponsor to cover basic university costs (she still ate poorly, as she had to skimp and scrape) and did her BSc. She wanted to do Honours, but there were no funds, so she’s looking for work. She’d love to volunteer in her field, or be an intern, but she has little money for basic food, let alone the long commute that would be necessary.

Mbali has battled to get together enough money for lessons (since she has no parent to teach her) and to take her driver’s licence. Her own car? There’s a laugh!

An internship may, as Marie Claire’s statement says, “empower participants through mentoring from industry heavyweights, helping them to build a portfolio of work and content, and facilitating crucial relationships within the industry”. But as long as it, and other similar internship programmes, have features like low stipends and car requirements that put them out of reach for poorer graduates, they are serving as an exclusionary mechanism and reinforcing current norms which buttress and strengthen inequality.

*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.

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