Ronald Suresh Roberts
CROSSFIRE
The Mail & Guardian abandoned its sassy and irreverent best self last week, instead offering readers an editorial full of artless bombast (“The M&G’s not for burning”). Why?
According to the editorial, some participants in the Human Rights Commission (HRC) media hearings have defamed all whites as “intrinsically guilty of racism”, which is “a reversion back to the primitive tenets, such as that of original sin and collective guilt, which have underpinned religious dogmas of the past and can give way so easily to such heresies as the ‘blood libel’ familiar to anti-Semitism”. Half a step from the charnel house, are we really?
It is one thing for befuddled old-timers like Ken Owen (Leadership, March) to denounce the supposedly “fascist instincts” of the media hearings: Owen insanely equates Barney Pityana (too inept to harm a fly) with the murderous apartheid premier John Vorster (whose vicious legacy continues in today’s Angolan carnage). We have long expected mere amusement from Auntie Ken. But Philip van Niekerk should be more robust. He once took a bullet in the head and survived; subsequently he was airlifted to safety from a conflict in Monrovia – all with relative equanimity and good humour. So when the M&G swaps its accustomed satirical strengths for the clenched idiom of a small-town evangelist (“they should know that the M&G will not be led tamely to the stake”), good citizens must sit up and ask: what new and special peril is this?
The concern, apparently, is to defend “the principles of individual responsibility which underpin modern political thinking”. These “principles” are imperilled by the suggestion that collective (not merely individual) racism exists in the media. In the M&G’s “modern” opinion, we should all see each other as raceless individuals. But, as Toni Morrison says, the act of enforcing racelessness is itself a racial act. “Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand.”
Media racism, like all racism, is a collective cultural happening, requiring collective redress. The overemphasis of “individual responsibility” is hardly “modern” but rather a Victorian anachronism, revived in Margaret Thatcher’s creed that there is no such thing as society. This mindset cannot accommodate the intricate twists of 21st- century racism. Hence the tangle that happened when the M&G’s Howard Barrell road-tested his “individualist” approach at the media hearings. Barrell pedantically defined racism in a way that – he explicitly conceded – would render racial transformation itself “racist” (“What has racism got to do with it?” March 9).
At stake in the media hearings is not the moral vanity – the “individual responsibility” – of a few editors, but the future direction of a country, a slightly larger matter. Individual guilt and innocence – different stripes of “sinning” – are not what is at stake when racial transformation is in issue. Racial transformation is a collective and forward-looking exercise, while sin is an individual and backward-looking concept. Racial transformation does not seek out guilty “sinners” on whom to inflict reform as punishment. Neither does it exempt alleged “non-sinners” from participation in transformation. After long years of apartheid, the mere subjective good intentions of racial beneficiaries do not guarantee transformation.
Given apartheid’s structural legacy and history’s inertia, there remains such a thing as racism without racists – sin without sinners, if you like. Racial transformation is based on a shared acknowledgment of history and vision of how to put it behind us. The individualist adage “paddle your own canoe” does not quite work if with your tiny paddle you need to turn around a tanker toxic with historical baggage.
The ANC’s statement at the hearings usefully insisted that racism is a “structural” rather than “subjective” problem. Leading United States constitutionalist Kathleen Sullivan suggests in the Harvard Law Review (“Sins of discrimination”, 1986) a shift in focus, from sin-seeking towards “the benefits of building a racially integrated society.” Sin-based models of racial transformation – the attempted sifting of racially guilty from innocent – merely encourage moral preening and point-scoring.
We have a recent example: former cricket captain Clive Rice blames transformation, rather than Hansie Cronje, for Cronje’s crime. “Because of the politics involved in South African cricket, players feel that they are not on the side only because of merit, so they play for the bucks.”
Sin-seeking not only encourages whites like Rice to exaggerate their “innocence”. Lizeka Mda is black. So the ANC assumes that Mda must be racially sinless. Similarly, during the Hansie- mania I overheard an Indo-South African secretary telling her white supervisor: “Never trust Indians from India. They are crooks.” Sin-seeking obscures the complex ways in which stereotypes travel.
F Scott Fitzgerald thought his wife Zelda’s letters, written from a mental asylum, were “tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance”.
The media racism debate is a monument to Zelda, and Claudia Braude is the pigeon perched on it. Like Zelda’s fevered scribblings, Braude’s “report” dwelt on trivia, so that the South African Communist Party’s Blade Nzimande was left to reassert, last week, that racism’s legacy is not esoteric, subtle and subliminal, but remains manifest and brutal. We need a return to his brand of common sense.