Race is here to stay

(This is an excerpt of my soon-to-be-release book South Africa Explained: why your intuitions about the country are right)

Apartheid categorised people into four racial groups: black/Bantu, European/white, ‘coloured’ and Asian/Indian. These were sufficiently viable categories for most people to know which group they belonged to. The exception here is the designation ‘coloured’ which – as the word suggests – was a useful catchall to apartheid planners when they didn’t know where to put people. But it also referred to an established society which is some mixture of Asian slave, African slave, European, Khoisan and black African.?

?Although apartheid discriminated against blacks (including coloureds and Indians) it was primarily aimed at oppressing the indigenous African population, who have always been the majority. In the racial hierarchy of apartheid (1948-1994), Africans were on the lowest rung, with coloureds and Indians somewhere in between.

During the Struggle many coloureds and Indians identified with their oppressed African brothers and took on black identity in solidarity. The ANC government has returned the favour by initially including Indians and coloureds in their black empowerment policy. I tend to use the term ‘black’ the way our government does. But the term is misleading for describing our current political situation. The main political contestation in this country is between indigenous Africans on the one side and the three minorities on the other.

In South Africa, like everywhere else, we express our socio-political group belonging in who we vote for. Africans vote overwhelmingly for the ANC and minorities vote in even higher percentage for the official opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA). Even coloureds have turned their backs on the ANC. Although they have African indigenous heritage and were also on the wrong end of European colonial conquest and of Apartheid, they overwhelmingly support the DA in its battle against the ANC. ?

Our race problems here are like other European-versus-indigenous matchups. We can learn from countries in South America and elsewhere, where people of indigenous ancestry share a country with those of European stock. But in those countries descendants of European colonists dominate the political scene. By contrast, in Africa indigenous rule has prevailed. South Africa’s 1994 transition was the last leg in a journey of African decolonisation that had started around mid-century.

Why did I write this book? Because I believe our situation in South Africa is so ugly people would rather change the subject than niggle at the truth. By avoiding the monster we let it grow bigger and if we carry on avoiding it, then it’s the end of the country. ?

Am I liberal, progressive, conservative, racist…or what? I am a bleeding-heart liberal who – like many of my fellows – is deeply disillusioned by African rule in South Africa. I grew up in the world’s last white supremacist state. No fun for the sensitive kid that I was. Now I live in what is surely the world’s only modern industrial country run by indigenous Africans. Do I still believe in liberalism? Yes, I am inspired by the spirit of Alan Paton, who described liberalism as “…a generosity of spirit, an attempt to comprehend otherness, a commitment to the rule of law, a high ideal of the worth and dignity of man, a repugnance for authoritarianism and a love of freedom.” This is the ideal that I try to live up to and, God knows, time enough fail to live up to in this challenging country.

But not everyone shares this liberal attitude. This book is also for conservatives, those who believe in authority and common decency, who feel society needs proper boundaries to keep us from tearing apart the hard-won gains of our civilisation. Whose civilisation?

Folklore has it that Gandhi said of Western Civilisation, “It would be a good idea”. I disagree. I reject the idea that all cultures are equally appropriate modes of living for our modern world. There is something called Western Civilisation and we should not take it for granted; we must not undermine the foundational traditions on which the West has built its liberal humanist ideology. These foundations include the Judeo-Christian project – with influence from the Ancient Greek and Roman civilisations. Western Civilisation also includes The Enlightenment in Europe, which itself was influenced by the Scientific Revolution, which began in the 17th century and persists to this day. I am not an unquestioning fan of Western Civilisation. In fact I would much rather be sitting in a truly Western country, safe and secure enough to criticise all that is wrong with Western culture. Alas, I write this from the frontier of Western Civilisation, feeling beleaguered and alienated as the anti-Western forces overwhelm.

And here lies another tricky term. What is the West? I would define it as being primarily North America, Europe, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. But there’s also a diaspora to Western Civilisation, those of ?European descent who draw meaning from their Judeo-Christian heritage and who act like and think like those who live in the core Western countries. White South Africans fit this category. Western Civilisation is not the world’s only civilisation but it’s the most important one for South Africa, given our colonial history. And further, we have been particularly influenced by the Anglo American (Britain and America) example. It’s surely not a coincidence that ‘Anglo American’ is the name of South Africa’s most famous corporation. From the Afrikaans side there is influence of Dutch-German philosophy; and South Africa’s legal system was founded on Roman-Dutch law.

Western Civilisation is being undermined by the new religion of anti-racism or wokeism.[1] This religion says racial oppression is at the heart of Western Civilisation and therefore the West cannot lay claim to having developed a uniquely appropriate ethic of living in our modern age. According to this thinking racism is the evil of Western Civilisation and ridding the world of racism should be the central task of social actors. And if that means blowing up the moral foundations on which the West was built, then it’s worth it.

‘Racism’ used to mean an irrational hatred of black people, a (negro) phobia at being close to a black skin or touching African hair. ‘Racism’ is also used interchangeably with ‘white supremacism’, the belief that whites have a special destiny to dominate blacks. Few thinking white people would want to be associated with either of these positions. The ideological battle to defeat this type of racism has been won. Anyone who argues that there is value in ‘negro-phobia’ and white supremacy would be shamed out of polite society. In the wake of the Holocaust, racism became taboo in the West, a taboo that eventually broke the spell of white supremacy in Africa. ?

Yet today, with actual racism on the decline, ‘racist’ has become a slur to defame your enemies. According to the anti-racist religion, ‘systemic racism’ is evidenced by a general fact of unequal outcomes between the races, be it in prison numbers, board level representation or mortgage approval. By this definition there is indeed still a lot of racism in the world and will be for aeons to come.

The neuroscientist and podcast host Sam Harris explains why our new catchall definition of racism is so troubling: ?

"…human populations that lived apart for thousands and thousands of years, so they’re going to differ genetically. Then you have differences of culture layered on top of that. Take Norwegians and Japanese. You can look at people and tell that they didn’t come from Norway or didn’t come from Japan. These people are different, they have different cultures, different languages. It would be an absolute miracle if everything we cared about were at the same mean level in those groups…to say mere discovery of difference is a sign of ethical pathology or needs to be politically catastrophic – that just sets you up for an endless round of conflict."[2]

Sam Harris would prefer we call off the search for the Holy Grail of racial equity. In the meanwhile perfectly decent people who’ve never harmed a black person (or have even sacrificed themselves to help them) are painted with the ‘racist’ brush for not owning up to their race privilege. And perfectly decent black people are shamed for not being sufficiently politicised according to their racial identity.

If you’re one of these people then this collection of essays will give you heart. ?

[1] Renowned linguist John McWhorter makes a similar point

[2] From a YouTube talk