The Soapbox » race

What it Means to Look White?

The Soapbox — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:30:44 +0000

Poem by Premilla Murcott

What it means to look white?
Can’t help but think about it…
State of mind, random concept,
or just a lot of bullshit?
Some try to wrap me in a tiny box,
with a ribbon and a bow
Who I am, what’s on my mind -
they don’t really wanna know

What it means to be seen as white,
in the sexy new SA?
Token Girl
“Where are your friends?”

“What you doing in this place?”

“Don’t you know it’s just not safe
for you to be this far down town?”

“You better watch yourself,
’cause I’m watching you…
This ain’t where you belong.”

If I’d lived up to appearances,
wonder what the hell I’d be?
Straight as spaghetti
Smart as a lanie
Rolling financially free?

I’m getting used to being asked,
“What are you,
’cause you’re definitely not from here?”
..are you Brazilian, Lebanese
…lesbian or just bi-?”
“Please don’t take offence;
you just seem different…
& I can’t help wonder why?”

Traffic used to stop,
people stood and stared
when my parents walked the streets,
holding hands of different shades
I sense their clear memories
of what went down
back in the day.

In recent times, hear cars slow down
Look of deep disgust in a stranger’s eyes.

Let’s not hold hands
Do we start running?
Are those haters on the horizon?

Premilla, written Sunday 16 August 2009

Ethnic nationalism breeds racism and causes divisions

The Soapbox — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:56:49 +0000

BY HLANGANANI GUMBI

E.TV’s 3rd Degree show and post debate on 3rd Degree Plus on 25th May 2010 centred around racism and left one deeply saddened at the entrenched racism in our society. The show covered a number of incidents from the effects of the AWB Leader Eugene Terre’blanche murder, to the both previous and recent incidents at the University of the Free State (UFS). It is the ethnic nationalism which was witnessed on the show that left one with the greatest lesson of them all: We must rid our society of ethnic nationalism and promote unity.

In one clip during the show, host Debora Patta at the University of the Free State proceeds to question the campus Freedom Front Plus (FF+) Youth Leader about the nature of racism on campus, and further goes on to accuse her of being a racist. The young female leader turns to tears as she tries to explain her “nonracist” character. But what was really interesting is her tendency to promote ethnic nationalism through her party, and left me unable to refrain from addressing this issue for once and for all.

What the FF+ Youth Leader fails to understand is that she belongs to an ethnic nationalist party whose policy is based on the development of a separate homeland to preserve that ethnicity. The FF+ is no less an ethnic nationalist party than the AWB because they both stand to preserve their ethnicity using the smokescreen of culture maximisation as has been seen by both AWB Secretary-General Andre Visagie, and FF+ Leader Pieter Mulder in many instances. Ethnic nationalism places the interests of one group of people over that of the rest of the populace. That is why it breeds racism, and causes divisions. It is the root cause of all the suffering in our history, and that in many parts of the world.

South Africa today must find every means to reject ethnic nationalism and promote unity. This immediately starts with rejecting organisations which promote it. The FF+ and AWB are some of the most forthright ethnic nationalist parties today. The IFP, perhaps on paper does not promote ethnic nationalism, but it certainly cannot be said to be a party accommodative of all people, and leaves one to wonder whether they have a single Xhosa within their senior party ranks considering the social divide amongst Xhosas and Zulus.

The South African electorate needs to reject all these parties as an act against ethnic nationalism. The African National Congress (ANC) is also a party which does not promote unity amongst people adequately. The ANC promotes racial representation within its party and government in an attempt to correct the injustice of the past. The idea that only blacks can represent blacks, and only whites can represent whites et cetera. This is the same approach favoured by Verwoerd in his day and the ANC today, and we must reject it. We must always remain vigilant that, in our attempts to address the legacy of the past, we don’t fall into the trap of seeing people simply as representatives of racial groups. This is precisely what we need to leave behind in our country. Racial representation or even ethnic representation serves more as a barrier to unity than a bridge because it instils a sense of racial ethnic responsibility to promote one’s identity to that group and hence becomes another form of ethnic nationalism.

The Democratic Alliance (DA) on the other hand, is the only party which is truly becoming a party for all. Unlike the ANC, the DA does not believe in groups of people, but in individuals, and groups of individuals. We believe that all individuals are equal both in worth and dignity. The DA is a party which is for blacks, whites, Indians and coloureds. It is for Zulus, Xhosas, Sotho’s, Tswana’s, Afrikaners, Swati’s, Ndebele’s, Venda’s et cetera. The DA is a national entity which swings far beyond the narrow objects of ethnic nationalism, to a party which promotes a single nation. That is why the DA promotes the slogan of “One Nation, One Future”. It is the only party which has earned that right to do so.

The DA believes strongly in the value of diversity and sharing if we are to build a united South Africa. During apartheid, the government refused to share South Africa with all whom resided in it and sought to eliminate diversity through separate development. In the DA we reject this, and promote entirely the opposite. Diversity in comparison to racial ethnic representation is about bringing in decision-making people of wide-ranging experiences and perspectives, without assuming that people can only be represented by others of the same colour or gender.

Ethnic nationalism is an implicit threat to driving South Africa into a passage of continued racism, and plants the seeds of division which we once before sought strongly to remove. We must bring back that spirit by rejecting ethnic nationalism in all forms, and promoting diversity and sharing. The AWB, FF+, and ANC do not stand for these ideals. Only the DA does.

Hlanganani Gumbi is provincial youth chairperson of the Eastern Cape DA.

Why class is more important than race

The Soapbox — Mon, 11 May 2009 13:42:37 +0000

I recently had an idealism-demolishing experience participating in a debate on behalf of the DA Students’ Organisation (DASO) with other student politicians at the University of Pretoria. The topic: transformation. The reason: probably to stir up a bit of emotive politics among students just in time to remind them to “vote with their kind” in the upcoming general election. The facilitator: the SRC, which is ruled by a solid majority of the Freedom Front Plus (FF+), despite attempts by the university management to “depoliticise” its institutions.

A less sceptical observer might explain that the purpose of these debates is to give an outlet to the political thinking and contestation which has purportedly been banned in the “depoliticised” Tuks SRC. Whatever the particular motive of the SRC may have been in choosing the topic, on the whole the debates do represent one of the few opportunities for Tuks students to get exposure to politics.

But, alas, anyone who has ever attended a student debate at Tuks knows that the “political discourse” degrades fairly quickly into a racial zero-sum game between whites and blacks but mainly between Afrikaners and blacks, characterised by a good match of jeers, accusations and insults. One almost has empathy for the reluctance of Big Brother in the university management to let these renegade young politicos have their way in the SRC.

In fact the whole experience was sombre, if not completely depressing for a person who grew up with the idealism of 1994, the promise of a society which belongs to all who live in it and hope for a future in which nobody would be made to feel “lesser than” by anyone else.

Listening to diatribe after diatribe by speakers against Afrikaans and white students, eagerly encouraged by ANC and COPE ringleaders, one could easily have imagined that apartheid had never ended and that South Africa wasn’t being ruled by a party that proclaims itself the “vanguard of the African majority”. Afrikaners in turn, with the exception of a few DASO and FF+ supporters, hardly bothered to show up for the debate, probably avoiding being called to account for the sins of their fathers.

Aside from the ANC and COPE speakers, both of whom stopped short of chanting “down with Afrikaans and Afrikaners at Tuks”, a member of the audience launched into particularly hateful tirade, asking black students why they were busy “negotiating” with whites instead of “taking back” what rightfully belonged to them.

The DASO proposal that racial quotas be abolished at the university in favour of redress measures based on the socio-economic living conditions of students, although well received by the audience was rejected by the ANC and COPE, the latter being slightly more confused about its own position on the matter. The ANC speaker repeated the well-known mantra that racial quotas will last as long as colonialism and apartheid lasted.

The bizarre case for racial bean-counting – a policy sacrosanct to the ANC – is premised on the assumption that most whites at Universities like Tuks aren’t there because of their academic suitability, but because some sinister force of apartheid, probably University management, is acting on their behalf. If it were not for this force, so the young Comrades argue, the university would be 80% black and there would be no Afrikaans which, in the thinking of a racial turf warrior, advantages the “white cause”. (The truth is that only three degree courses at Tuks are still offered in Afrikaans from start to finish).

When the comrades are reminded of the fact that all students are admitted to university based on an “M score” (basically their academic performance in high school) they rightly point out that many rural and township schools are still plagued by the legacy of apartheid education which disadvantages a great many prospective black students.

What they of course don’t concede is that political power did in fact change hands in 1994, and that the people responsible for the dismal state of education aren’t the children of former apartheid beneficiaries who grew up under the new order, but the democratically elected ANC government with its parliamentary majority of 70%. Today, incompetent teachers, schools that lack adequate facilities and dismal matric pass rates aren’t so much consequences of apartheid than consequences of ANC rule.

But what I probably found most depressing about our debate at Tuks was the reductionist idea of so many attendees that what we were in fact engaging in was a competition for state resources and recognition between races. In the hearts of its proponents, racial quotas not only meant guaranteed racial preferment for “our own” but also just racial punishment of “the others”.

When I confronted a COPE speaker after the debate about the obvious contradictions between his own utterances and that of his party leadership about race, language and diversity, he responded that South Africa could not afford to be “held hostage” by a few Afrikaners. In the same vein the FF+ Youth Leader, Cornelius Janse van Rensburg, once angrily reminded the ANC at a similar campus debate that it was the tax money of whites and Afrikaners that kept the university as well as the country in business.

Neither of these respective sentiments, expressed in the heat of crowd-pleasing exchanges, offer to move the debate beyond our unchangeable past to our quite changeable future. Both these arguments are essentially self-indulgent, taking young South Africans back to a crude and callous politics preceding the Constitutional Compact of 1993 and 1996. Moreover, they aim to deceive, obfuscating the fact that the income disparity AMONG whites and AMONG blacks are today far greater than BETWEEN blacks and whites.

What is needed is a paradigm-shift (excuse the cliché) from that of racial competition to social cohesion. A cohesion-centred paradigm in our society, rooted in the Constitutional values of freedom, dignity and equality, can achieve so much more to channel the human and financial resources of the wealthy in aid of the poor than the ANC (and COPE) model of a racial tug-of-war. It will also force the government to face-up to its failures instead blaming everything by default on the past.

With a cooperation-centred paradigm comes the realisation that neither white nor black can benefit from the disadvantage of the other. If our universities shun some of the best medical students today, tomorrow we shouldn’t be surprised by a dire shortage of doctors in public hospitals, where most patients are black. Yet if today we take no measures to create opportunities for the poor, black or white, tomorrow we shouldn’t be surprised that many young people have opted for a life of crime.

We only have one nation with one future: it is our duty to shape this nation into one which where the rights and success of one contributes to the protection and opportunity of the whole. Here’s hoping 22 April 2009 moved South Africa farther from racial competition and closer to social cooperation and ultimate cohesion.

Cilliers Brink is DASO Branch Leader at the University of Pretoria.