On what draws angry black professionals in Gauteng to consider Juju’s Economic Fighters
contact with white people.
The other reality is that many black professionals experience racial mixing as a process not of affirmation, but of constant belittling.
And so the result is not more tolerance and the happy racial mixing featured in beer ads, but anger at what is seen as the persistence of the white attitudes which underpinned apartheid.
Racial pecking orders in business and the professions have not died – that much is obvious to anyone who spends time engaging with businesses. Not only are the upper echelons of companies still mainly white, but the way people engage with each other has hardly shifted.
There are obvious exceptions but, at many engagements with companies, it is the white people who speak during the formal sessions and the black people who wait until the meeting is over to approach an invited speaker, not only to ask questions but, at times, to point out that the attitudes which black managers express to their white colleagues are not necessarily those they really hold.
None of this should be all that surprising. Apartheid was underpinned by attitudes far too deeply held to disappear in two decades – the assumption that only whites are competent to perform complicated tasks dies hard. This affects our national debate: much of the stress on “leaving the markets alone” is code for freeing the white people who run the private economy from the control of black people who run the government. Inevitably, it affects attitudes in the workplace too.
This past may also have ensured that black people enter the middle class with little confidence and little trust. And so it would be naïve to expect the beer ads to describe the real world. How much of this is white bigotry and how much a sense by black people that they have been thrust into a world shaped by others where they are given little help to enable them to feel at home is not clear – it is surely both.
But what is clear is that the cutting edge of racial mistrust is not the streets of townships or shack settlements but the air-conditioned offices of our major cities.
The angry black middle class will have limited influence on future elections – even if they all desert the ANC, their numbers are likely to remain too small for too long to make them a major power at the ballot box.
But the way race plays out in business and the professions is a huge problem for the society.
It places a permanent limit on developing talent, makes open conversation about our economic and political priorities far more difficult and distorts our debate because racial anger in the middle class is often confused with rebellion by workers and the poor.
And it remains a potential threat to democracy because it makes tolerance and mutual respect more difficult.
In the early 1990s, racial attitudes in the middle class were a major issue for a society negotiating a new political order. When democracy was achieved, the social power holders – business, the professions, academics, the media – seemed to decide that race was a problem no longer because everyone had the vote and formal rights. And so racial tensions which should have been addressed over the past two decades were ignored.
The anger confirms that this was a mistake.
The problem has not disappeared and, if it is not addressed now, we may pay a rising price for ignoring our deepest divide.