Pallo Jordan CROSSFIRE
Jeff Greenfield, an American journalist, relates his grandmother’s response to the Rosenberg “atomic bomb spies” trial.
As someone who had grown up in Tsarist Russia, where the framing of Jews on trumped- up charges was a byword for the authorities, Greenfield’s granny always believed that the Rosenbergs had been framed and were innocent of the charges of which they were convicted.
Was she being unreasonable?
A middle-aged single woman who lives with her young niece in a two-storied semi-detached always checks all the doors and windows and inspects indoor cupboards to make sure they will pass the night in safety. Is she just a paranoid spinster fearful of imaginary rapists?
Greenfield’s grandmother, it turns out, was right. The Rosenbergs were framed! There never was any plot to steal “the secrets of the atomic bomb”. Her doubts, though, were based on gut feeling born of experience.
In a city like Johannesburg or New York, she would indeed be a careless woman who, living only with a younger woman, did not ascertain that their home was secured against potential attackers before going to bed. The collective experience of single women, not necessarily her own, is the operative factor here.
Both these instances demonstrate how experience necessarily colours people’s collective view of the world. The constant refrain of representatives of the historically white political parties is to trivialise the experience of the black majority or dismiss it as a defence erected for self-preservation.
African National Congress politicians have regularly been accused of “playing the race card”. These charges were repeated by a Democratic Party MP during Minister of Sport Steve Tshwete’s budget debate and, even more absurdly, during the parliamentary debate on reconciliation initiated by Deputy President Thabo Mbeki.
This is a particularly damaging charge because it suggests that the politician in question has run out of arguments and has had to fall back on a form of cheap racial blackmail to silence opponents and critics.
That race remains the most visible line of fracture in South African society was borne out once again during the Poverty Conference a week ago.
Sixty-one per cent of South Africa’s poor are black, 38% are coloured, and the corresponding figure for whites is 1%. Although not all blacks are poor, poverty is a condition that afflicts blacks.
Asked to define the term “negro” during the 1950s, the great African American scholar WEB du Bois replied: “Someone who has to ride Jim Crow in Alabama.” Can South Africans be content with a situation that could lead to our own social scientists defining “black” as “someone who is poor”?
Over the past five centuries, in every colonial society, especially in South Africa, race has been employed as a device to allocate power. Racism is consequently more than an attitude. It defines relations of power which are, in the last instance, rooted in the control over and disposal of economic assets.
Non-racialism requires engagement with race and its salience as an index of power and access to power, rather than ignoring it and thus also avoiding addressing the power relations that undergird it.
Non-racialism either addresses such inequalities with a view to ending them, or becomes a rhetorical pose. Well-meaning at best; devious at worst.
Creating a non-racial society necessarily entails action on a number of fronts – political, economic and cultural. It requires active social policy to abolish statutory racist practices and other forms of institutionalised racism. But to be effective, such measures must be buttressed by supplementary policies to reverse the effects of past racist practice through corrective action that begins to address the disempowerment of the previously racially oppressed.
At the same time, measures that consciously de-racialise society by affirming the humanity of the previously racially oppressed will also be necessary. Among other things, such a strategy must censure any acts of omission or commission that degrade, dehumanise or denigrate the previously oppressed; and create the social, political, cultural and economic space for greater interaction as equals among the racially oppressed and their former oppressors.
Acknowledgement of the contribution of blacks, coloureds and Indians to every aspect of human endeavour through education and a revisiting of heritage programmes would be another dimension.
Strategies to uproot racism have invariably foundered on the resistance mounted by the beneficiaries of racial oppression. To add insult to injury, such resistance is often couched in terms that suggest that it is the anti-racists who are racist. These days, the National Party repeats like a litany that drawing attention to race as an index of power is to racialise politics. To its eternal shame the DP initiated this shallow political sleight of hand in Tony Leon’s The Death of the Rainbow Nation.
It is inescapable that if a single, united South African nation is to be built, white privilege, in all its guises, must be uprooted. But this cannot be regarded as the responsibility of the ANC-led government alone. South Africans must make a collective commitment to strive towards this goal, irrespective of their race or political affiliations.
Democracy has abolished statutory apartheid, but the material realities it created remain largely untouched. The transformation of the quality of life of the black majority involves putting an end to poverty, hunger, illiteracy, innumeracy, insecurity and homelessness. What South Africa needs are policies to address these, and a government with sufficient power to make them effective.
Genuine non-racists do not go to the hustings to rubbish affirmative action. Those who wish to eradicate poverty do not block every attempt to empower the poor through land reform and redistribution.
In the 17th century John Donne wrote a poignant plea for human solidarity:
No man is an island entire of it selfe; … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.