TESSA DOOMS | Racism cannot be dealt with forgive and forget attitude

SA does not have a race problem, we have a racism problem. I was recently provoked to articulate this obvious truism when I watched a tribute to the life of Eusebius Mckaiser by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh. Mpofu-Walsh brings attention to Mckaiser’s critiques of non-racialism where he argued that rather than a non-racial society it is more prudent and impactful for SA to be an anti-racist society.

The distinction between non-racialism and anti-racism is an important one. While noble in intent, non-racialism assumes an end point where race no longer is an important sociopolitical and economic signifier. While this would be ideal, in a society steeped in as much racially charged history and still imbued with systems based on racial oppression, the immediate struggle must be against racism itself.

In SA, as it is in many parts of the world where black and brown people have and continue to be oppressed, non-racialism has been reduced to a matter of “forgive and forget”. It’s the lazy argument that if we stop naming race, then racism will magically disappear. This is simply not true. When racism is as endemic and embedded in a society as it is in ours, even if you condemn or even stop overt use of race, particularly by racist people, you do not stop experiences of racisms. If systems borne out of racist intent continue to exist, whether they are economic, political or cultural, racism will still be experienced.

A quote by McKaiser reminds us not only that race is real, but that its invention was particularly for the purposes of racism. He wrote, “It is true, scientifically speaking, that races are not real. They are social and political inventions. They were invented for bad purposes such as dividing people arbitrarily and then oppressing groups of people based on these arbitrary and biologically unstable and nonsensical categories.” Racism is not simply racial prejudice. Simply acknowledging race or holding views about society based on race is prejudice, but racism is power to enact racial prejudice to the benefit of some people and the detriment of others.

When an Motswana young person goes for an interview in corporate SA and finds that their competence will be judged through the lens of their proficiency use of English or Afrikaans, even if a person who speaks Setswana is part of the interview panel, or their respectability will be determined by their ability to “tame’ their afro, no one needs to say race, or refer to black or white for racism to be experienced. This is true even if the people conducting the interview are not themselves racists or are in fact even black people. Once racism is systemic it no longer requires individual intent to be successful.

The most insidious form of power is the power to set the agenda. Whoever sets the rules of the game is the winner, regardless of what battles are won or lost on the field of play. This is what makes racism as a system more dangerous and harder to overcome than individuals using racial slurs. If business, governance or social conventions are designed with the cultures, values, interests or proximity of communities of white people in mind, then anyone who is not white will be disadvantaged.

If we continue to only react to racism when it is as obvious as a slur or a sign, we will never substantively overcome it. In the words of Angela Davis, “If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.” We will think that by removing the words black, white, Indian and coloured we have solved for racial injustice when in fact all we have done is hidden racism by making it harder for people to name it when it happens.

For as long as the rules and systems are unchanged, racism will remain.

We must make a commitment to anti-racism. To resist racism in all its forms. To go beyond the superficial markers of semantics, optics, proximity and tolerance, towards a collective rethinking of the basis for all our systems, with a focus on how they were created and who they inherently benefit. SA can no longer afford to build a non-racist country on the foundations of racist systems.