'Whites owe more than other race groups'

“Whites owe more than other race groups”. It’s the kind of headline you will only see in South Africa, a land where everyone — government, marketers and the media — is determined that South Africans continue to see everything, even credit card debt, according to racial categories created more than fifty years ago:

“The Consumer Debt report, compiled by national debt counselling agency Credit Matters, revealed that whites — who make up 9.2% of the population with 4.4-million people — owe a massive R680-billion in household debt, compared with R310-billion for blacks, R82-billion for coloureds and R65-billion owed by Indians.”

I found this story amazing for two reasons. Firstly, I didn’t realise so many white people still lived in South Africa. Secondly, haven’t all the kugels emigrated? (Maybe, like me, they live in Sydney but still spend on their South African credit cards.)

On a more serious note, why is it that race is still perceived to be the primary category by which South Africans make sense of themselves? In the case of a national credit crisis, why not examine the data by income bands or age groups or the area where people live? Why not focus on which financial institutions are responsible for handing out massive credit limits like there was no tomorrow*, and why, despite the advent of the National Credit Act, lending practises have still not been reformed?

Perhaps that might be more enlightening than linking skin colour to the propensity to go shopping up a storm at Sandton City, doll.

The article explains the emphasis on race with the following rationale:

“NCR project manager Mpho Thekiso said the study had been startling because the “perception” was that blacks were the deepest in debt.

“As a matter of fact, a majority of the white South African population is heavily indebted … and the situation is very serious.”

Roger Brown, chief executive of Credit Matters, said whites owed the most because they were traditionally defined as a lower-risk group and offered more credit.

“This, combined with them usually being higher-earning individuals, set them up to be over indebted, ‘biting off more than they could chew’,” he said.”

So there it is. The story is actually intended to undercut another perception (one created by the media — notably the Sunday Times, with a myriad stories on the spending habits of the Black Diamonds in the first place), that black consumers are profligate and the implied moral superiority of white consumers — the kind of moral superiority is misplaced. In South Africa, everything but everything is a racial tit-for-tat it seems.

I have a strong suspicion that the debt counselling agency cited at the beginning of the report released its findings with such a strong racial slant because whatever PR agency was involved knew only too well that the race story was the one that would attract the most attention. And what do you know, they scored the front page of the Sunday Times!

If I were advising Credit Matters on how to get itself into the news, I would probably have done the same thing.

That is not to say that I am disputing the facts of the story. But is the race story the only way to report the findings? I would like to see a little more sense of responsibility on the part of the media that shape so much of our world view. A little less inclination to go for the easy story that will grab attention and get the sales, perhaps. A little more dedication to finding a new and ultimately more relevant angle, to facilitate an understanding that goes beyond the old apartheid era/ BEE/ black diamond paradigm, to use an admittedly overused bunch of words.

If South Africa’s media cannot find a way to think beyond tired racial categories, then what hope is there that ordinary South Africans will?