I OFTEN tell my students that in academia, more than in ordinary conversation, words have very specific meanings. We are constantly looking for consensus or a compromise on what words would mean so that the difficult conversations do not get bogged down in conceptual differences. This is also why academics sometimes tend to tell the simplest story with such lofty, seemingly pretentious rhetoric.
Thus, after years of debate, academics hold a significant consensus on what the words hegemony (systemic authority) and regime (system anchored in specific values) mean; these are words that are rarely used in day-to-day conversation. If you talk about your wife's orderly regime regarding your common business interests and her hegemony regarding your personal finances, the devil may be cut loose and you may be accused of using pretentious terms with the purpose of confusing rather than promoting understanding. Good understanding was born in simplicity, asserts my journalist friend Foeta Krige's comrade-in-arms wife, Madelaine Page. But, as Winston Churchill apparently wisely said: “In academia, the battle is so fierce because the stakes are so small."
Lees hierdie article in Afrikaans
What does democracy mean?
For example, many opinion polls indicate that not all people share the same meaning of “democracy". For some South Africans, the word implies a very involved state with a socio-political function; for others, it is a state that regulates, but remains largely at a distance and allows society to look after itself. In America the word liberal has a “left of centre" ideological association, but for many South Africans liberalism is a conservative philosophy associated with the extremely negative context of apartheid, colonialism and capitalism. I can name literally hundreds of examples of words that we use on a daily basis without a general consensus on what they mean.
This careful introduction brings me to a conversation I have been having with the DA's federal chairperson, Helen Zille, for the last few days. Because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it, I'm simply listening to her, but maybe it's time for a more formal conversation regarding one particular little philosophical tidbit. Helen uses “critical race theory" (CRT) to try to understand the ANC's obsession with race. In her own party, several prominent black leaders have left and made allegations of unsustainable racism within the DA. She thinks their motives are rooted in CRT.
The DA sometimes has succumbed to the pressure to be demographically representative and in the process abandoned merit in the interest of representation. Probably in an attempt to create a political identity that would appeal to black voters sometimes political leaders are recruited for this specific purpose. After leaving the DA, both Mmusi Maimane and Patricia de Lille claimed that the DA was migrating ideologically towards conservative liberalism, which would potentially alienate black party members and probably most South Africans. Conservatism and liberalism for many South Africans are the ideological building blocks of racism.
On privilege and racism
It is almost impossible to convince white thinkers, liberal or conservative, of the systemic privilege and consequent racism that CRT is about. As far as they are concerned, privilege is the result of merit and merit is an individual responsibility of the person towards himself or herself. Systems that do not reward merit are not sustainable and cannot promote the common good. As my cautious introduction to this opinion piece implies, there is probably no consensus on an operational definition of racism. Black South Africans will argue that apartheid was an undeserved privilege in respect of the country's assets and capital and that the market economy and liberalism perpetuate this injustice.
Let me return to my conversation with Helen. In her blood feud with CRT and the attempt to make the DA demographically representative, Zille is undoubtedly right in some cases. The former DA mayor of Tshwane, Randall Williams, should probably never have been in the position. His claims of racism within the DA may be right and fair, but there is the possibility that he is simply a hopeless politician trying to cover up his weaknesses and failures by “playing the race card". It could also be that he was simply a poor political manager who had kept his grudge with the DA's “old boys club" under wraps for years because he was not prepared to undermine his own career ambitions with honesty.
Compare this capitulation of Williams with the presence of Gwen Ngwenya – the DA's head of policy between 2018 and 2023 – in the surrounds of conservative liberalism. She was certainly one of the key thinkers within the DA and had the ability to make a critical liberal line of thought function within the party without reticence. Her commitment to liberal principles such as individual liberty, limited government interference, and a market-oriented economy was intellectually compelling. I don't know what her opinion is on systemic racism. According to the media, she was part of the DA's liberal faction which opposed Mmusi Maimane's ideological move towards a social democratic regime.
As for Zille, Williams, Maimane and Patricia de Lille simply did not rise to the occasion in a very competitive political ecology. As for Williams, I will concede and De Lille's leap from an “Africanist” agenda to liberalism never convinced me. After her grey sojourn in DA conservative liberalism, she finally tried to tap into coloured nationalism by founding the Independent Democrats (2003). GOOD (2018) was but a replication of the same ideological ideas as the ID's. I didn't ask Zille about it, but Williams and De Lille are probably good examples to her of the DA's attempts to become demographically representative without the integrity of merit.
Copying Obama did not convince
Maimane was the DA's leader from 2015 to 2019. He was the party's first black leader until October 2019, when he resigned. His departure followed disagreements over the direction in which the party was moving and his belief that the DA was not fully committed to diversity and transformation. Maimane's priestly approach and his obvious aspiration to be South Africa's Barack Obama were never convincing. I argued in the media at the time that Maimane's political passing is proof that the DA is not prepared to adapt in the general interest of black South Africans – or their social democratic yearnings – and hopes to rather convince them of liberalism, which is impossible given this concept's association with apartheid.
However, Zille has enough examples of black leaders who persist with gravitas and grace within the DA's competitive environment and who refute these allegations. Many black politicians migrate between South Africa's complex array of political parties, but if this happens to the DA - which is easy given the DA's demographic and class composition - race is invoked as the explanatory theory.
There is something unfair about the phenomenon, but sometimes it also explains the realities of a liberal political party with a predominantly white leadership. The combination of these two phenomena – liberalism and race – carries enormously heavy historical baggage, the realities of which are still too pertinent to ignore or wish away. The dominant political culture in any setting, especially within political parties, often determines the narrative regarding justice, race, class and privilege; all highly belaboured concepts in CRT.
The question now is, how should we approach the conversation about racism in South Africa? Which theoretical framework and concepts give us the best explanation of the tension between different races in South Africa and how it manifests itself in our politics? Zille thinks it's CRT. Others, like me, use the theoretical trajectory of colonialism and apartheid to better understand race relations in the country.
CRT developed in the context of American social justice discourse in the late 20th century in legal philosophy and the social sciences. It provided the intellectual and theoretical framework for questions of civil rights and racial equality. The assumption was that racism was systemic and perpetuated by legislation, economic systems, meritocracy and political systems that place individuality above the community and was enshrined across generations.
Important voices
The important voices in this conversation were Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado. Bell is often considered the father of CRT. He was a jurist, civil rights attorney and the first permanent African-American professor at Harvard Law School. His work focused on how racial inequality is embedded in legal systems, and he has challenged the idea that the law is inherently neutral or fair. Bell's interest convergence theory indicates that progress with racial equality occurs more often when it coincides with the interests of whites. As an example, Bell refers to the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court that ended segregation in American schools. He claims that this decision was as much motivated by US Cold War diplomacy as by concerns about black civil rights.
Kimberlé Crenshaw is a lawyer, professor and civil rights activist. She is best known for developing the concept intersectionality, a cornerstone of CRT. Crenshaw is a professor in the law faculties of both Columbia University and the University of California Los Angeles. Intersectionality describes how race, gender, class, and other forms of identity work together to create overlapping systems of oppression. Her internationally renowned article, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" explains how black women face unique challenges that cannot be fully understood by focusing solely on race or gender.
Delgado has criticised traditional liberal approaches to the law and civil rights, arguing that they often fail to address the roots of racial inequality. He obtained his law degree at the University of California Berkeley, and had an impressive academic career as a professor at Harvard, the University of Colorado and is currently in the University of Alabama's law faculty. He is a prolific researcher with more than 200 published articles and numerous books on CRT, civil rights and social justice to his name.
The theoretical underpinnings of apartheid come from elsewhere. Apartheid's racism was grounded in a pseudo-scientific belief in racial hierarchies, largely based on 19th- and early 20th-century theories of racial supremacy and so-called social Darwinism. These ideologies falsely claimed that certain races were inherently better than others, which justified segregation and exploitation. However, Charles Darwin himself never raised ideas similar to the misconceptions of social Darwinism. His theory of natural selection and evolution referred to biological processes in nature, not to the organisation of human societies or the justification of social inequalities.
Two different frameworks
Under apartheid, the National Party institutionalised this belief and systematically oppressed black, Indian and coloured communities to maintain white Afrikaner supremacy. It was a political and social framework designed to maintain white supremacy through legal mechanisms such as the Group Areas Act and Bantu Education Act.
The philosophy of CRT and the theoretical foundation of racism in the apartheid era represent two different frameworks, one aimed at understanding and breaking down systemic racism and the other at justifying racial hierarchies and oppression. South Africa and race relations in this country are the result of systemic apartheid and white ethnocentrism. CRT helps us understand the imbalance that a liberal democracy gives to the demographic dividend of white South Africans. But do American social justice theories explain the complexities of apartheid's race relations? Are the realities of apartheid still with us in a way that fully explains racial tension?
Common ground
CRT and the banal racism of apartheid have at least one point of contact and that is the “benefit of the doubt" that white people sometimes, or even more often, get. A black colleague mentioned to me one day that white women with few exceptions put their phones away if they're alone in an elevator late at night and he walks in. I'm 1,91 m tall, weigh 110 kg and mostly have a sour-ass expression on my face, but no white or black woman ever puts their phone away late at night when I stumble out of the bar and into the lift. Claims among black South Africans that even black people seem to give white people the benefit of the doubt are not unfounded.
For CRT, this affirms the power of the system, rather than a submission to white superiority. The trust that people put in identity, the dominant political culture and the system sometimes determines inclusion and exclusion and can confirm racist prejudice.
Now I just have to get my brain around the woke phenomenon. Instinctively I think it's crap, but that's a conversation for another day.
♦ VWB ♦
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