Can we be friends across racial divide?

WITH the season of realpolitik upon us and the Rainbow Nation myth receding, we must ask ourselves whether we still need a framework of reconciliation that presupposes friendship across the races as an important barometer of the health of the nation.

Some will argue that friendship is frivolous. They will say we must be more concerned with politics and economics than matters of emotion, and that we don’t need to be friends. Others will insist we must be friends. They will argue that to abandon the idea of friendship is to abandon an important national ideal and possibly a peaceful future.

Perhaps counter-intuitively we must hold on to both. Our progress in improving the conditions of black people must be guided not by a desire for blacks and whites to be friends, but by the need for black people to live dignified and equal lives commensurate with their white compatriots.

In defence of this, we must be pre- pared to alienate whites (and for that matter blacks) who do not accept this as a fundamental reality. We must accept that they might leave and seek their fortunes elsewhere and this must not concern us.

On the other hand, we must accept that although the notion of inter-racial friendship has sometimes threatened to overshadow the importance of black dignity, it is crucial that we keep its possibility alive.

This, even as we tend to the more urgent matters of preserving and elevating the meaning of black person-hood because this is the basis upon which a genuine and robust culture of respect in contemporary South Africa will be built.

To even begin to talk about interracial respect in modern South Africa is difficult because so much unintentional damage was done by our country’s first stage of reconciliation; what I refer to as Reconciliation 1.0. There were many flaws in that first version.

Yet in the face of palpable anger and discord on race in recent years, we have a new opportunity to develop a more hon- est code: call it the open-source version. Indeed the seeds of this are evident in the activism that swept our country in 2015. South African students are at the forefront of designing the upgrade, and the next generation will owe them a debt of gratitude.

Ironically, perhaps, in thinking about how we deepen this new code, we must stretch our minds back to ancient times, to the Greeks, to Aristotle in particular. For Aristotle, philia was the most perfect form of friendship. The great philosopher suggested that there are three kinds of friendship:

Those of convenience, where the parties interact, for example, to do business or Black Economic Empowerment deals.

Those of pleasure, where if the pleasurable thing, say drinking or smoking disappeared, then friendship would too.

And friendships of character, in which “one spends a great deal of time with the other person, participating in joint activities and engaging in mutually beneficial behaviour”.

Between friends there is no need for justice and indeed friendliness is considered to be justice in the fullest sense.

In other words, Aristotle argued that between real friends there is seldom a need for the interventions of outsiders; justice is made possible by the nature and depth of the relationship. In short, where there is trust, there is no need for strongly enforced rules.

By extension then, those who consider themselves good and moral cannot be truly so if they do not have the “friends” to prove it.

Because of our history, this moral and practical question is especially directed at white people.

Friendship should and must be of great ethical and philosophical concern for whites. In general, white people in this country should worry and be pained by this matter in ways that black people need not be, for reasons of history.

If we are to replace the optimistic vision of the rainbow with a more honest but no less aspirational vision of dignity and respect, whites will need to give up their ideological and practical specialness.

They will also have to reject the increasingly irrelevant and unhelpful mythology of “Rainbowism”.

Those who are truly invested in the future of this country will also have to stop hiding behind their emotions whenever the subject of race comes up.

One of the tenets of the rainbow era was that those of us who extended our hands across the racial divides were thwarting racism.

If the racist hates it when children play together, then surely those of us who encourage our children to interact are not racist?

Unfortunately it is not so simple. Friendships involving people who are more powerful than us have seldom served black people well. The power imbalances are too great, the possibilities for manipulation and domination even by those with good intentions simply too high to assume that light friendship is the answer.

In a South Africa trying desperately to figure out a way forward these assertions are not easy to speak aloud. Yet they represent a recalibration of our aspirations. Some people are worried by this: they are scared of what they call “separatism”.

I am not – mainly because this sort of robust honesty does not mean we have abandoned the idea that “race” is an empty construct that should neither bind nor divide anyone.

We can both believe in the need for a just world in which race is meaningless, and accept that in this time and place, “race” is a term that is bursting with meaning.

Can we be friends across these “racial” boundaries? Yes, we can. And no, we cannot. It’s that simple and that complex. It’s the struggle for understanding the complexity of this paradox that must enthuse and inspire us. – The Conversation

We can. We can’t. It’s that simple and that complex