Prejudice still a major problem in SA business

are competent while black people and women must prove they are (and usually fail in the attempt), which prompted Lamberti and his colleagues to pass over Chowan for someone less qualified.

The problem is not that Lamberti and Imperial are unusually prejudiced. It is that, in a society in which one group has used the law to dominate another, it is natural to see the dominating group in skilled positions and to assume that they belong there – and to assume that the dominated groups don’t belong.

These assumptions may be so deeply rooted that people hold them without realising that they do. They explain how people and companies who believe themselves to be prejudice-free can exclude black men and women from roles for which their skills equip them.

One excuse for the prejudice shown to Chowan may be that affirmative action, by preferring some people, creates doubt about whether they are competent.

Some who make this excuse insist that business executives cannot be prejudiced because they need to maximise their company’s profits by choosing the best people.

But if people are used to associating white men with merit and everyone else with its lack, how do they know who the best people are?

The Imperial case shows that if they are left to decide, white men will continue to choose other white men over everyone else and will remain convinced that they are rewarding merit rather than race or gender.

So, unless laws and policies insist that employers appoint black people and women, white men will continue to dominate not because they are better than everyone else but because they think they are.

But the case shows, too, that this is not enough. As long as the attitudes which prompt some to see others as “employment equities” persist, business will exclude talented black people and women.

This is not only unfair, it is costly. It deprives business of the skills of many black people and women.

It also entrenches in business a distrust of government and in government a distrust of business. And it entrenches a reality in which, throughout society, thinking on the economy is influenced by race – not by what is likely to provide decent livelihoods for all.

In the few years before 1994, many in business leadership were willing to face the racial patterns of the past and seek to change them.

Unless businesses revive that quest, South Africa will continue to pay the price of the hidden prejudices the Imperial case reveals. – The Conversation

Friedman is professor of political studies at the University of Johannesburg.