The Colour of Our Future

Does Race Matter In Post-Apartheid South Africa?

Xolela Mangcu, Nina G Jablonski, Lawrence Blum, Steven Friedman, Mark Swilling, Vusi Gumede, Joel Netshitenzhe, Suren Pillay, Crain Soudien, Hlonipha Mokena, Xolela Mangcu, Xolela Mangcu

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781868149100
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

South Africa is ready for a new vocabulary than can form the basis for a national consciousness which recognises racialised identities while affirming that, as human beings, we are much more than our racial, sexual, class, religious or national identities.The Colour of Our Future makes a bold and ambitious contribution to the discourse on race. It addresses the tension between the promise of a post-racial society and the persistence of racialised identities in South Africa, which has historically played itself out in debates between the 'I don't see race' of non-racialism and the 'I'm proud to be black' of black consciousness. The chapters in this volume highlight the need for a race-transcendent vision that moves beyond 'the festival of negatives' embodied in concepts such as non-racialism, non-sexism, anti-colonialism and anti-apartheid. Steve Biko's notion of a 'joint culture' is the scaffold on which this vision rests; it recognises that a race-transcendent society can only be built by acknowledging the constituent elements of South Africa's EuroAfricanAsian heritage.The distinguished authors in this volume have, over the past two decades, used the democratic space to insert into the public domain new conversations around the intersections of race and the economy, race and the state, race and the environment, race and ethnic difference, and race and higher education. Presented here is some of their most trenchant and yet still evolving thinking.

1

WHAT MOVING BEYOND RACE CAN ACTUALLY
MEAN: TOWARDS A JOINT CULTURE

XOLELA MANGCU

Sure it [the joint culture] will have European experience because we have whites here who are descended from Europe. We don’t dispute that. But for God’s sake it must have African experience as well.¹

To embrace different racial realities is to acknowledge and integrate different South African experiences. It is to be conscious of, and also question, the multiple ways in which our society continues to be marked by racism and those differentiated experiences to which racism has given rise. Self-conscious analysis and understanding will take us closer to a society where all human beings are valued and their dignity protected.²

Seeing race is as old as the ages. This much is clear from the recently published multi-volume Image of the Black in Western Art, edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr.³ In the introduction to the first volume, covering Pharaonic Egypt and the Graeco-Roman Period, classicist, art historian and sociologist Jeremy Tanner disputes the argument that racial prejudice is a modern invention that was unknown to the ancients. His argument is primarily a critique of the Afrocentrists, who arugue that black people were well integrated into these early societies, and of the argument that racism owes its origins to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s racial classification at the end of the eighteenth century. He criticises those who, like Martin Bernal, argue that ancient racism pales in comparison with ‘the tidal wave of ethnicity and racialism’⁴ of the eighteenth century, even though he also admits that in the early period racial ‘boundaries were not policed in the systematic manner characteristic of the southern United States before the Civil Rights Act or the apartheid era in South Africa’.⁵

Without entering into the intricacies of the debate about who was more or less racist between the ancients and the moderns – although the inventions of the latter would seem hard to match – there seems to be sufficient consensus in the literature that ‘neither ancient Egypt, nor Greece and Rome were before “color prejudice” ’.⁶ Even more important for the purposes of this book is to point out that racialisation of black people in terms of body parts – dark skin, thick lips, woolly hair, exaggerated penis size – and their representation in art was a reflection of their geopolitical power or lack thereof at any given point in time. Thus Tanner is not entirely accurate when he paints an overwhelmingly negative picture – pardon the pun – of how black people were represented in Egyptian art. If we focus on the period after 1400 BCE, when the dark-skinned Cushites had attempted an attack and were repelled by Egypt, we will find a surfeit of grotesque representations of dark-skinned people. That is not surprising, given that they were a real danger to Egyptian Maat (order).

But as Jean Vercoutter argues in the same volume, earlier representations of black people were very different. In the third millennium BCE dark-skinned Pygmy and other statuettes formed part of a ‘veritable gallery of portraits’ that showed a much more egalitarian society in which dark-skinned people were treated with awe and admiration, and intermarried with other racial groups.

The point of this truncated history of racialisation is to argue that the roots of racism run much deeper in the recesses of history – and the human mind – than lack of scientific knowledge on the part of those who practise it. As Tanner observes, there is a commonality among the ancients and the moderns in the ways that certain tropes and visual representations are used to justify racial supremacy. The black other is often depicted as a beast and, I would add, overly sexualised. To acknowledge these ancient roots of racism is not to let the moderns off the hook or to yield to naturalist justifications of racist reaction to strangers, but to point to racism’s fundamentally political nature. Perforce this suggests that a political response would be more appropriate in combating racism than the rationalist notion that racism is just a matter of prejudice that can be eradicated with better knowledge. This is the rationalist conceit that informs both the liberal and the Marxist versions of non-racialism in South Africa – and elsewhere in the world, for that matter.

Liberals would rather we banished race talk because they view such talk as pre-modern. Gary Peller located liberalism’s dismissive attitude towards race within a longstanding ‘Enlightenment story of progress as consisting of the movement from mere belief and superstition to knowledge and reason, from the particular and therefore parochial to the universal and therefore enlightened’.⁷ He writes that the ‘transition from segregation to integration, from race consciousness to race neutrality mirrors movements from myth to enlightenment, from ignorance to knowledge, from superstition to reason, from the primitive to the civilised, from religion to secularism’.⁸

But as Isaiah Berlin points out, this liberal argument also harks back to the Enlightenment idea that solutions to social problems will be obtained ‘by the correct use of reason, deductively as in the mathematical sciences, inductively as in the sciences of nature . . . there is no reason why such answers, which after all have produced triumphant results in the worlds of physics and chemistry, should not apply to the equally troubled fields of politics, ethics and aesthetics’.⁹ On matters of race this logic quickly turns into what Kwame Anthony Appiah describes as an uncompromising, ‘hard rationalism’ that will not countenance any social phenomenon that cannot be established through scientific rationality. And yet, Appiah argues, identities are ‘unlikely to be settled by uncontroversially factual considerations’. To wit, there is much more to the human make-up than rationalist logic, or as Appiah puts it, ‘we do well to pay obeisance to fallibilism.’¹⁰

Patrick Chabal makes a similar point about why it is dangerous to explain identities on rationalist grounds: ‘for instance it is often argued that racism is irrational because there is no scientific basis to racial differences. However, people’s reactions to racial differences may mean that some of them want to put distance between themselves and the racially distinct other. But since society considers such attitudes irrational, some of these people might be driven to embrace more extreme ideologies that accommodate their fears.’ We are better placed to allay such fears and combat such prejudices when we directly confront them as real, instead of dismissing them as manifestations of a warped consciousness. Thus, in addition to recognising our own fallibilism about our identities, we should also realise that our ‘inability to conceive of other beliefs, other rationalities, confines our abilities to make sense of what we observe’.¹¹

Liberal opposition to race talk is of course also a political stance with origins in the Kantian ideal of the disembodied individual, and (early) John Rawls’s prioritisation of the individual right over the public good.¹² CB Macpherson goes even further back in time to locate liberal individualism in the twelfth-century work of Thomas Hobbes, whom he designates as the founding philosopher of liberal modern property relations and the system of political obligations they engendered, which limited political rights to the propertied classes. For centuries the ideal of the sovereign individual has been mobilised to defend and even justify economic inequality, and the system of obligations it produced justified political inequality. Suffice to say that the evolution of liberal individualism was coextensive with the construction of a political regime that excluded women and black people from the regime of property ownership and its system of political obligations.

Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume justified slavery on the basis that black people were a different species from the rest of humanity. Thus was laid the basis for the construction of our contemporary racist modernity, through the systems of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. Despite this history, efforts to even acknowledge, let alone compensate, people ravaged by this history are met with impatient injunctions to move on, or what Benjamin Barber calls the liberal credo: ‘Don’t cross this line . . . don’t walk on my turf’.¹³

This liberal individualist opposition to race talk is not to be confused with what Cornel West calls left-liberalism. The left-liberalism has a ‘sense of history’, but it sees solutions to race within the broader liberal paradigm of economic and political equality. If liberal individualists are against any form of government intervention, left-liberals see government intervention as crucial to the fight against social inequality: ‘For left-liberals, strata and social position supersede class location, and financial remuneration at the workplace, that is, income, serves as the basic measure of well-being.’¹⁴

The distinction between the left-liberal and the Marxist critique of race is often hard to discern – just as it is hard to discern left-liberals from Marxists. The difference of course is that while left-liberals are concerned with individual welfare, Marxists see social progress as an outcome of conflict between economic classes over the control and distribution of economic resources. In this view, racial consciousness – like all consciousness – is a corresponding reflection of underlying economic forces. Thus Gerhard Maré argues that in order to understand the ‘growth of inequality’ under global capitalism

race will no longer obscure the economic processes that drive this growth, and race will no longer protect those who exploit, no matter what their colour. Class conflict will take centre stage, as the vocabulary used to classify groups whose lives are so materially different from one another, and used to explain these differences, shifts from race to class categories.¹⁵

The Marxist-inspired South African intellectual Neville Alexander attributes the embrace of racial identities to lack of awareness: ‘We must remember, however, that even though they are constructed, social identities seem to have a primordial validity for most individuals, precisely because they are not aware [own emphasis] of the historical, social and political ways in which their identities have been constructed.’¹⁶ Maré also registers frustration about the stubbornness of racial consciousness, ‘despite the trashing term “race” has received; despite the moral and reasoned rejection of the notion through international agreements; despite knowledge of the horrors inflicted by some on other human beings, because they had been grouped as despised races’.¹⁷

However, the Marxist critique of race thinking is so abstracted from the cultural dimensions of everyday life that Antonio Gramsci was moved to write that ‘the claim presented as an essential postulate of historical materialism, that every fluctuation in politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an immediate expression of the structure (i.e. the economic base) must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in practice with the authentic testimony of Marx, the author of concrete historical and political works’.¹⁸

A number of distinguished cultural Marxists – from Raymond Williams to Stuart Hall to Cornel West to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe – were inspired by Gramsci to reject the reduction of the social, political and cultural life to the economic base. Raymond Williams famously described this materialist interpretation of society as not so much a ‘reduction’ as an ‘evasion’.¹⁹

In Time Longer than Rope, Charles M Payne and Adam Green identify three dominant but problematic ways in which African American struggles – and I would say black struggles in general – have been portrayed. First, there is the right-wing denial that says, ‘We never did anything to them, but if we did, it was for their own good and even if it was wrong it was a long time ago and the best thing to do is to put it behind us and move on’. Second, there is the liberal position that sees race as no more than a social construction that can be overcome by education and equal opportunity. Finally, there is the left, which sees only the structural foundations while everything else is mere superstructure.²⁰

NON-RACIALISM AND BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS: TWO SIDES OF A COIN?

The historian Phil Bonner has described the alternation between non-racial modernity of the African National Congress (ANC) and the race consciousness of Black Consciousness and Pan Africanism as a ‘recurrent trope in South African resistance history . . . This tension will probably always be with us: even when the one political tradition gains the ascendancy, the other lurks with less public profile below.’²¹ However, a sense of this tension has been lost in the embrace of non-racialism as the normative consensus of post-1994 South Africa. Non-racialism has been so normalised and reified that you would be forgiven for thinking that its political ascendancy in black politics has been uncontested. The consensus is belied by the tortuous journey the term has taken since it was introduced into liberation discourse by the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) – the first known use of the term has been attributed to Jan Smuts in his effort to unite Afrikaner...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter One: What Moving Beyond Race Can Actually Mean: Towards a Joint Culture
• Chapter Two: The Colour of Our Past and Present: The Evolution of Human Skin Pigmentation
• Chapter Three: Races, Racialised Groups and Racial Identity: Perspectives from South Africa and the United States
• Chapter Four: The Janus Face of the Past: Preserving and Resisting South African Path Dependence
• Chapter Five: How Black is the Future of Green in South Africa’s Urban Future?
• Chapter Six: Inequality in Democratic South Africa
• Chapter Seven: Interrogating the Concept and Dynamics of Race in Public Policy
• Chapter Eight: Why I Am No Longer a Non-Racialist: Identity and Difference
• Chapter Nine: Interrogating Transformation in South African Higher Education
• Chapter Ten: The Black Interpreters and the Arch of History
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index