DA race debate heats up

The race debate in the DA continued to heat up on Monday with two MPs calling for the party to guard against individuals being dominated by others in the name of culture‚ race‚ gender and religion.

Some within the DA are pushing to amend the party’s constitution to include diversity as a value. This as the party continues to struggle to shrug off perceptions that it is white-dominated.

Ahead of the party’s federal congress in April‚ DA MPs Michael Cardo and Gavin Davis sent a letter to delegates last week cautioning against “ANC-ese” talk in the party when it comes to race matters.

They said that while the diversity clause was welcome‚ in its current formulation it did very little to distinguish the DA from the ANC’s doctrine of racial representivity.

“According to the ANC’s world-view of representivity‚ every organisation needs to be transformed until its demographic breakdown is an exact mirror of the population as a whole‚” they write.

“If [media] reports are to be believed‚ the ‘progressives’ want race quotas applied to the party’s representatives in Parliament and other legislatures. The ‘progressives’ (who are almost always quoted anonymously) speak a sort of dialect of ANC-ese‚ in which terms like racial ‘transformation’ and demographic ‘representivity’ are parroted un-self-consciously.”

In another letter sent to delegates on Monday‚ Cardo and Davis state that a diversity clause should contain an express recognition that autonomous individuals form the bedrock of diversity.

“We must go beyond demography and celebrate a plurality of thought and ideas‚” they write.

“It must be emphasised that we reject the apartheid-era doctrine of ‘representivity’ that reduces people to mere representatives of the racial category that this unjust system imposed on them.”

Cardo and Davis said a reformulated diversity clause could read: “South Africa is a richly diverse society. Though our people come from different origins‚ worship in different ways‚ and have different cultures and customs‚ we are all unique individuals.

“Diversity is one of South Africa’s greatest assets. The party celebrates diversity‚ and recognises the right of each individual to be who they want to be‚ free from domination by others; The party solemnly subscribes to the preamble of the Constitution of South Africa which recognises the injustices of our past‚ and affirms that South Africa belongs to all who live in it‚ united in our diversity; The party will take active steps to promote and advance diversity in its own ranks‚ without recourse to regressive mechanisms such as quotas.”

They said there were many different ways that the diversity clause could be re-formulated‚ “but‚ whatever we do‚ we must make it crystal clear that individual freedom is paramount‚ and that we support diversity but reject representivity”.