MICHAEL MORRIS: US ruling rekindles conversation about race - Business Day
I often think of Neville Alexander’s warning almost two decades ago — I touched on it in this column a few years back — about what he called the “disastrous mistake” of race-based affirmative action and BEE (“We were warned affirmative action was a bad idea”, June 28 2020).
“(We) will rue the day,” the late Marxist and Robben Islander declared in that 2006 lecture, “that the people of SA were willy-nilly brought to accept it.”
One concern (a very liberal one) was the risk of “superficial differences... (becoming) a lever for marginalisation or exclusion of any individual or group of people”, when, instead, “we should use every opportunity to bend our people towards the realisation of the nonracial values (in the) constitution”.
At the same time, it was at once possible and desirable to “rethink... historical redress (without perpetuating) racial identities”.
Hardly a week goes by without SA politics — or, not to put too fine a point on it, joblessness and despair — triggering a recollection of Alexander’s largely ignored warnings. Then, last week came the US supreme court decision on race and university admissions.
What happens in America is felt — however vicariously — to be meaningful everywhere. It seldom is to the same extent, but I was struck last week by how the language we use on both sides of the Atlantic shapes the conversation, sometimes precluding the argumentation Alexander recommended.
I am increasingly persuaded, for example, that for all the virtue it seems to project, as a term “colour-blind” is not helpful. As a claim, it is almost always untrue, and as an objective it is of doubtful value. It misses the point. The point is not to reduce humans to some imagined equivalence, shorn of this or that feature, but to see them — each of us, one another — as distinctly human (and, for that, equivalently worthy).
Instead, we need to sharpen our questions about how and why people’s lives and opportunities are so legibly aligned with race.
Real sources of disadvantage
As Alexander argued, SA needed to “identify the real sources of disadvantage”. Using “the shorthand of ‘race’ (would) entrench — avoidably — the very racial categories that undermine the possibility of attaining a truly nonracial democratic SA”.
I was prompted to reread Alexander last week by the closing phrases of US chief justice John Roberts’ opinion, arguing that “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite ... (concluding), wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learnt, but the colour of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice”.
Alexander certainly didn’t quibble about the “principle of historical redress” remaining “the lodestar” of SA’s transformation. Yet, tellingly, he could have been making the Institute of Race Relations’ case when he argued that an empowerment policy “would be equally effective and more precisely targeted at the level of individual beneficiaries if class or income groups were used as the main driving force of the programme. The ... overlap between ‘race’ and ‘class’ in SA makes this approach possible. In addition, it would make it possible for all economically disadvantaged individuals, irrespective of colour, to benefit from the programmes that derive from the strategy”.
The lesson is perhaps that for our own sake our thinking needs to be not only more sophisticated than the biting memes and wounding rhetoric of the culture wars, but more dependable — more relevant, in a phrase, to our lived experience.
Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.