Title: SA too passive about racism
Author: Mandla Seleoane
Category: Culture
Date: 12/11/2014
Source: Herald - South Africa
Source Website: paywall - n/a
African Charter Article# 8: Freedom of conscience and of religion shall be guaranteed.
Summary & Comment: Multi-racism or multi-culturalism are proper policies against racism in some situations, like Canada perhaps,where the law may punish, but Multi-racism or multi-culturalism are proper policies against racism in some situations, like Canada perhaps, where the law may punish, but given the history of South Africa they are too passive as campaigns and ongoing policy. Antiracism is needed, with everyone ready to pick up and challenge it anytime racism rears its ugly head, no matter who is showing or committing it. JK
Last week I was driving through Rooihuiskraal (Centurion, Pretoria) with a friend. A young white man was standing under a tree outside what I assumed was his house. I was not thinking anything serious-I was just driving. I remarked to my friend who was with me in the car that I sometimes get the feeling, the way white people look at us, that they might be thinking: "at the right moment I will even up with you."
I got home that day to find that another friend had sent me an edited version of a talk given by Sisonke Msimang, titled: Should we be mad at Mandela? What caught my eye in the piece were the incidents of "race-based" violence.
And then I received my daily dose of Politicsweb and there was a piece in it where DA leader Helen Zille was bemoaning white racist attacks on black people in South Africa. I thought maybe I should do a search on the issue just to get a sense of how widespread this might be. Well, what I found was not flattering and was, in fact, quite frightening.
I recalled, however, that whilst working on a publication last year, I came across Censorbugbear and how it detailed, almost on a daily basis, attacks on white people (farmers, for the most part) by black people. I remembered asking myself why, if these reports were true, they were not finding their way into mainstream media. I remembered asking myself why our courts were not flooded with murder trials around these incidents.
Going back to the stuff on attacks by white people on black people, I noticed that many of the pieces expressed concern that such a thing might happen 20 years after the ushering in of democracy in South Africa. One part of me found that, indeed, to be puzzling. But another part of me thought well, that is not surprising at all.
You see, during the liberation struggle there was a rift between, broadly, two components of the liberation movement. One component argued that non-racialism is both a method of struggle and the end towards which the liberation struggle is directed. The other component was divided on whether non-racialism could at once be the end and the method of struggle.
The one issue it was not divided on was that the concept of non-racialism is far too passive. It argued that what was needed in South Africa both in the input and in the output phases was anti-racism - in other words, activism against racism at all times.
It is history, of course, that this component of the liberation movement was outclassed. But the ideology which has won the day is reflected in the way we go about our political business in South Africa: we are "non-racial" and complacent. We are happy that we have passed laws against racism and we don't feel that we need do anything more. 2
If people transgress those laws, we deal with them, if ever, on the basis that they have transgressed this or that piece of legislation. There are two obvious limitations about this. The first is that before we can deal with them on that basis, we must detect and apprehend them. I think we all know how poorly we are doing the job of detection and apprehension. The result is that there is a well-founded sense of impunity in South Africa and we are, as a result, where we are.
The second obvious limitation is that law-enforcement, even if it works well, and in our case it doesn't, can only ever be a piecemeal method of dealing with social problems. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether racism is something we should be dealing with piecemeal. I don't think so.
I am not saying we don't need laws proscribing racism: we do. But we should at all times ask ourselves why laws ever become necessary. Law becomes necessary when public morality is no longer enough to yield the required behavioural patterns. If this is understood, the puzzlement is not that we have all these incidents of "race-based" attacks 20 years after democracy.
The puzzlement is, rather, that 20 years after the demise of racial forms of social organisation which subsisted for centuries, South Africa does not have visible strategies for producing a public morality which might negative racism. How does such a thing happen? It happens, I suggest, because we chose a worldview which condemns us to passivity where we are happy to be non-racial passively and do nothing more.
When one considers the sacrifices which have been made to get us where we are, our complacency is truly surprising. But perhaps it is not. Perhaps this notion that we are a miracle nation has gotten to our heads and we believe that by miracles we can get by. In time we shall pay the price.
Thursday, 11 December 2014
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