William Makgoba: A SECOND LOOK
“Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: `Now you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say: `You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom, but opportunity; not just legal equity, but human ability; not just equality as a right and theory but equality as a fact and as a result.” – Lyndon B Johnson, 1965
This quotation sums up the nature of tensions, contestation and debates currently in vogue within our society. We have entered the realm of new racism in the new South Africa.
Racial ideologies throughout history have undergone transformations in their context, content and internal forms in terms of the role they play in policy formation, power relations and the organisation of social relations. Racism is a socio-historical construct that emerged from the West and continues to evolve in the context of unfolding social relations in modern societies and, surprisingly, in the so-called “liberal” societies of Britain and the United States.
Race and racism are constantly adapting to change, evolution and technology. White racial attitudes remain, by and large, contradictory, the commitment to the abstract principle of racial equality coexisting with opposition to the implementation of these very same principles.
The classic strategy of new racists is to exploit white racial anxieties while remaining committed to the abstract liberal goals of equality and rights. Indeed, the most profound differences between old and new racism is that the latter operates by selectively drawing upon and reworking liberal principles for illiberal ends.
In our country today, racism is being championed by conservative liberals. These individuals or organisations have placed a conservative re-interpretation on liberalism.
The Democratic Party has moulded its approach to political discourse along Thatcherite and Reaganite lines. The DP has used the egalitarian and liberal principles to rework, repackage and champion the new form of racism, like the British Conservatives and US Republicans, by playing on the anxieties of the white minority and their apartheid- privilege gains.
The new racists talk progressive and thank God for the Nats. The National Party megaskirt behind which they hid for so long is on fire and crumbling. No longer can the pseudo-liberal hide behind the Afrikaner. The true racists are joining the DP because it operates in stealth.
Because racism is a complex system of symbols and meanings that modifies as a consequence of structural and political struggle, it continues to elude us as the root cause of much of our current contestations. Some have likened racism to an onion because it has so many layers.
Sociologists would want us believe that, because of its socio-historical nature, racism can be eliminated. Another interpretation is that by its nature of evolving and adapting, racism is a powerful mirror against which humanity can see how it treats and relates to each other.
As Professor Stuart Hall put it: “Racism is always historically specific. Though it may draw on the cultural traces deposited by previous historical phases, it always takes on specific forms. It arises out of the present – not past – conditions. Its effects are specific to the present unfolding of its dynamic political and cultural process – not simply to its repressed past.”
Translating this into our society, one can begin to understand the nature and breadth of racism in present-day South Africa. Because race and racism are unstable and decentred complexes of social meanings constantly being transformed by the nature of the political struggle of the day, our understanding of race and racism is and should be fluid and ever-changing.
The new form of racial ideology in South Africa is characterised by: sanitised, coded language that adheres to, rather than departs from, generally accepted liberal principles and values, and is mobilised for illiberal ends; avid disavowal of racist intent and the circumvention of classical anti-racist discourse for potentially exclusionary ends (for example, new racists say their views do not represent racism but realism, or that affirmative action is “reverse racism”); and a shift from focus on race and biological relations of inequality to concern for cultural differentiation and national identity.
In this new terrain there is a broad conservative re-interpretation of the liberal legacy. New racists ironically define racism as an irrational and prejudiced attitude. Power and its role in social relations is removed. A false assumption of symmetry in social relations is created and it justifies the notion that blacks, for example, are practising reverse racism. Because racism in this new definition is defined in individual terms, the state can play very little role in addressing the phenomenon. Instead, the liberal state is criticised as harming the natural functioning of society by trying to intervene.
Because new racism is couched in the vocabulary of equal opportunity, colour- blindness, race neutrality and, above all, individualism and individual rights, it has managed to escape the experts and the general public.The new racists have played on the emotions of minority populations to promote instability, social disharmony and lack of focus and common purpose. By repackaging slogans such as “let’s not judge people by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” to defeat the genuine redressive effects of affirmative action, new racists are out to protect their ill-gained power and fan the flames of new racial disharmony.
As Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter wrote: “Given this flexibility of the enemy, and the way the debates move on, it seems sensible not to commit oneself to one exclusive characterisation of racist claims. There is a danger of being silenced when racism discourse continues to oppress but no longer meets the main characteristics of social scientific definitions of racism.”
One way to approach new racism is from the dominance-hypothesis perspective described by Dr Amy Ansell in New Right: New Racism, which emphasises the process by which meaning (of an idea or ideology) is mobilised to serve power in society. Any project or discourse that “establishes, justifies and/or sustains practices that maintain systematically asymmetrical relations of racial domination” should be classified as racial. This approach avoids the conception of race as something fixed and outside of history; it challenges the attitudinal conception of race; it highlights the function of racism in the establishment and sustenance of relationships of domination.
In our country, many institutions of civil society – the judiciary, universities, media, research councils and the Reserve Bank – fulfil this criteria and are thus racial projects. Is it possible that by their very nature and history these institutions are not transformable?
Unfortunately, all these projects are taking place under a Constitution whose central pillar is non- racism. The challenge for us is to resolve the racial question of our time and our society.