Attitudes and decisions based on the other’s race or ethnicity offend because they stereotype groups and individuals, shackling both without good cause.
Reverse racism falls to be condemned on the same grounds — two wrongs don’t make a right, they say. But if that reverse thing is aimed at redress, is it racism? Who disputes affirmative action and black economic empowerment in principle, and who denies those discriminated-against the right to group together to contest the original discrimination?
Debate about the Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) has centred on its total exclusion of non-black journalists. Is this racism in reverse or an attempt at redress?
My colleague Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya came close to resolving the question for me when he asked: ”Can we as a newsroom honestly say that the black staff in our newsroom do not have issues they feel particularly unhappy about … can we assuredly say that we have created a newsroom that makes black journalists not need an FBJ?”
Fikile, if I understand him correctly, bases his argument on the alienation experienced by black journalists in newsrooms still suffering a hangover of white hegemony. It struck a chord.
I was raised Afrikaans, not an ”Afrikaner” with the ethnic schmaltz and solidarity it entailed. At school in the 1970s and 1980s — a Cape Afrikaner bastion attended by the offspring of apartheid’s ministers resident at nearby Groote Schuur Estate — I felt oppressed by Afrikaner culture and its attempts to lay claim to me.
The headmaster humiliated me, publicly, for not playing rugby (I chose football extramurally), I resigned from the Voortrekkers (a Boy Scout equivalent) to make a statement, and I remained an anguished oddity for my divergent politics and inability to conform. Some of my most enduring teenage memories, still hurting, are of not belonging. Alienated.
Then off I went to the University of Cape Town and my career in journalism, first at the Cape Argus and then at the Mail & Guardian, which I joined in the month of our first democratic election.
It was a new world, well removed from Afrikanerdom’s cloying embrace. But the sense of alienation was still stalking me, as I often had to confront being regarded as a member of the group that I had not chosen and which had failed to choose me — an Afrikaner!
Braaivleis? Don’t look at this boertjie. I am not one and, besides, I don’t do meat. Yet I couldn’t stay away from the fruits of the sea — perhaps the genetic pull of the Khoi blood which I assume mingles in me with that of German, French, Flemish and Nguni ancestors.
A story about the military or the police? Send Stefaans, he can cover it. ”They” know about these things, don’t they? Sure, send me. I know about as much as the draft dodger that I am. I have never fired a gun and still don’t know a corporal from a sergeant.
I regard myself as an African — or if you insist I’ll borrow from Breyten Breytenbach and call myself a ”whitish, Afrikaans-speaking South African African”. This is my choice, for which I find succour in the death of racial classification and the right to freedom of association contained in our Bill of Rights.
The M&G, always ahead of its peers in transformation, is more diverse and probably more tolerant than when I first joined 14 years ago. Most of my colleagues know not to make assumptions about me, or perhaps my skin has grown thicker.
But once in a while alienation still pays me a visit, bearing its familiar gifts of anguish and hurt when my deemed identity, even if it is just that of ”white male”, is held against me or makes me into someone’s performing monkey.
So who am I to gainsay Fikile and other black colleagues when they assert they feel like outsiders in newsrooms insensitive to their cultures or their individuality? I can understand their need to retreat to a laager like the FBJ to regroup, re-emerge and assert themselves in these alien environments.
I can understand their need, even if retreating to ”my” laager was never a personal option, Afrikanerdom not having been my laager in the first place.
What I fail to understand is that, in spite of our shared alienation and hurt, the FBJ won’t let me, an African, join their laager.