T HERE is something ironic about the fact that the first census to be conducted in the new South Africa – a society born out of a commitment to end racial discrimination – should include a question about the respondent’s race.
No one, of course, is suggesting racial categorisation in this instance is motivated by any intention to victimise. The contrary is true: the intention is to count the victims of past racial discrimination, to assist society in making amends to them.
Our Bill of Rights makes specific provision for such an exercise, declaring that “to promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.”
But, however worthy the intention, does it warrant the dilution of principle ?
Evidence before the Myburgh Commission of Inquiry into recent violence on Gold Fields’s mines (see PAGE 5) provides a graphic example of the way in which “good intentions” where racial and ethnic classification is concerned can result in victimisation.
On the basis of absurd stereotyping – Shangaans are “good” with machines, Tswanas “good” at drilling – Gold Fields’s management seemingly maintains its own categorisation system, including entries on workers’ shift cards denoting their ethnic “identity”. When violence broke out on the mines, these labels were apparently used to identify targets for murder.
Exactly 100 years ago, in the famous case of Plessey v Ferguson, a member of the United States Supreme Court, Judge John Marshall Harlan, delivered a dissenting judgment in which he said: “Our Constitution is colour- blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”
Affirmative action in the US, as in South Africa, makes that glorious statement more of an aspiration than an attestation of fact. But is it not time that we gave effect to it, by declaring ourselves uncompromisingly colour-blind and intolerant of classes among citizens ?