Race matters in SA, Cliff and Steenhuisen
Both the podcast host and the leader of the Democratic Alliance believe in a toothless nonracialism that ignores the historical foundation of racism and the pain it still inflicts
In the now-infamous episode of The Burning Platform podcast, host Gareth Cliff and John Steenhuisen, the Democratic Alliance (DA) leader, made dishonest and incoherent assertions regarding the relevance of racism in South Africa.
In response to Mudzuli Rakhivane, a member and advocate of the One South Africa Movement, who questioned whether the DA had fed racial tensions by erecting its controversial election posters in Phoenix, Cliff asserted that racism was not a priority in the 1 November elections and no one was interested in identity politics. As Rakhivane was articulating a response, citing her own experience of racism, Cliff interjected her “personal experience is completely anecdotal and unimportant to all of us”.
Cliff’s perspectives show how debilitating our conversations about race can be; and exist in a tradition of toothless nonracialism that claims to recognise the social construction of race while separating it from its roots and economic underpinnings.
Race essentialism needs to be examined together with the impotent nonracialism represented by the likes of Cliff and the DA.
Like the Marikana massacre and the horror of the Life Esidimeni scandal, the unrest of July exposed the flaws of post-apartheid South Africa and the destruction that awaits an unsustainable social order. Amid the destruction there was also death. Thirty-six people were killed in Phoenix, 10% of the deaths resulting from the unrest in Kwazulu-natal and Gauteng. The majority of those murdered were black residents of Inanda, Amaoti and Bhambayi who were travelling to Phoenix, largely untouched by the looting and protests. With police overwhelmed, fake news proliferated about attempts to target Indian communities, and vigilante groups sick with fear mobilised.
I don’t doubt people were scared during that week. I was. But in some communities anxious rage inspired discrimination as black people in suburban areas were assaulted, denied entry or killed because their skin colour symbolised a threat.
An intellectual arrogance hinders those like Steenhuisen and Cliff from realising that racism has produced and proliferated the myth that black people, especially poor black men, are inherently dangerous or strongly inclined towards violent criminality.
The economic hierarchy of apartheid worked brilliantly to distance its oppressed subjects from each other, to eradicate the possibility of solidarity between persecuted communities. Some in the Indian community absorbed such myths and some black people continue to foster distrust towards some Indian South Africans. The relationship between Indian and black communities in Kwazulu-natal is complex. In this context the DA’S posters caused outrage. One poster read, “The ANC calls you racists” and the other ,“We call you heroes”.
Despite an apology from the DA, Steenhuisen and the DA’S federal chair Helen Zille maintain the posters were not an attempt to provoke racial division. Both, and some right-wing talking heads, claim that accusing them of racism is itself racist.
It’s possible to understand the roots and causes of the social strains between the black and Indian community in Kwazulu-natal. But weak nonracialism stunts our political imagination and strangles the urge for inquiry. Importantly, it does not align with the DA’S political interests and it doesn’t echo with the economic concerns of their constituents.
Race, empirically, is not an objective reality. Here there is no room for unscientific debate. There are no meaningful biological distinctions by race that determine intelligence, ability or psychological inclinations.
Yet we behave as if people are helplessly predisposed to certain kinds of behaviour because of their skin colour. Consider the popularity of the term “coconut” or the trope of the “strong black woman”, suggesting black women have a higher tolerance for suffering.
Race is a subjective reality. Like the law or the nation state, race is a social construct. Just because the law is not an objective reality does not mean you won’t suffer consequences for violating it. Social constructs are beliefs and values that guide our perception of the world, instruct our behaviour and organise relations within society.
Advocates of nonracialism understand this but fail to ask why certain social constructs exist. These inventions advance particular interests.
African slaves were not shipped across the Atlantic because of the bigotry of their captors, nor did imperialists carve out the borders of Africa to prove their superiority. Racial categories, which now seem to be a permanent feature of our reality, are very recent inventions, built and developed in the destructive pursuit of economic power.
Colonialism required that imperialists possess vast political power and an ideology to justify the domination of conquered subjects and exploitative socioeconomic relations. Capitalism developed alongside colonisation. In South Africa the objective was not only to seize land and livestock and shatter precolonial society but to exploit African labour, establish markets and transform Africans into dependent consumers.
The imagined relationship of colonisers and white settlers was one of inherent superiority, destined by God and rationalised by science, an institution which — like the church and colonial education — functioned to make the myth of white superiority appear as real as the air we breathe.
Racial segregation was not the sole purpose of apartheid. Segregation was a mechanism to accumulate wealth for a white minority through the exploitation of African, Indian and coloured labour. Forced to sell their labour for a pittance, working in grim conditions, perpetually reminded of their supposed inferiority, locked in ghettos and enduring oppression by the state, black people became an underclass. Racism was legislated but it rested on the foundation of economic domination.
Nonracialists failed to ask themselves whether the economic relations of apartheid endure today. South Africans are recognising that too many black citizens work in lowpaying jobs, are trapped in townships plagued by increasing financial precarity, dire destitution, social death, violent crime and with each passing year the post-apartheid state displays authoritarian tendencies in its attempts to silence dissent.
Capitalist property relations remained intact after the transition to political democracy. Economic domination endures due to the efforts of a multiracial elite.
Racism and its economic foundations pours into local politics. In her enlightening book Can We Be Safe? The Future of Policing in South Africa, Ziyanda Stuurman demonstrates how policing of black, Indian and coloured communities acted to protect private property alongside punishing those who engaged in resistance. This treatment of black and coloured citizens as those who must be disciplined and punished persists today. Capitalism requires a police force to manage dissenting voices of the working class, the unemployed and poor. And in South Africa the face of socioeconomic suffering is often not white.
Meek nonracialism evades these realities for multiple reasons. The conservative liberalism of the DA and Gareth Cliff elevate the individual and the law to the point of mystification. Within their framework, the individual is not only the most important actor in society but also seen as some self-contained nomad, shielded from the currents of history and gliding above structures within society.
This framework results in liberals understanding racism to be an issue of personal prejudice or legal discrimination and not an extensive ideology.
Reconciliation may have been a brief strategic necessity but the evasion of economic justice has led to an insensitivity from some white South Africans towards black suffering. Layered on top of this is a lack of reflection on how white supremacist ideology has infiltrated their perception of the world. Helen Zille’s attempt to argue for the benefits of colonisation or her recent fear-mongering about the persecution of white people are examples of this ignorance.
Asking that white people reflect on the injustice of the past and act against the injustices in the present is not a call for white people to engage in self-flagellation because of their skin colour. White guilt is ultimately a useless, self-absorbed exercise.
Nonracialism demands nothing of its adherents. If race is not real, then there is no need to change our social order, no need to question private property, the power of corporations or the commodification of basic necessities or labour relations that leave workers underpaid or unemployed.
To unearth the real history of race in South Africa is to excavate its intimate relationship with capitalism. Nonracialism will keep black people in servitude and socioeconomic suffering because it erases critical questions we should ask about our history, economy and racial ideology.
If there is to be a world beyond race, getting there necessitates radically upturning the political order and economic system which gave birth to the ruinous concept.