Media dignitaries debating dignity

Racial dignity was a hot theme during the 2001 Human Rights Commission inquiry into media racism, and it emerged again at the SABC-South African National Editors’ Forum conference last week.

Responding to my speech there, SABC CEO Dali Mpofu raised racial dignity as part of his opposition to the Sunday Times’s stories on Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

His core critique is that the paper violated a right to dignity by its coverage. For him, the Constitution privileges this particular right (by mentioning it thrice), and that this is because it seeks to redress three centuries of racist indignity. The import of his view is, controversially, that dignity is a group, as well as an individual, right.

I hear him on the importance of dignity and redress. But here are some alternative considerations:

Racism in South African history can be argued to have been an effect, rather than a cause. In this view, racial indignity was mainly a means towards maintaining inequality and refusing democracy. Accordingly, one could then point to the Constitution’s stress on rights to equality and democracy, and argue that these are more important than dignity. The point I am making is that it’s tricky to elevate dignity above other rights — such as the Sunday Times’s right, under democracy, to free speech. Other criteria are needed to assess the paper’s action — not dignity as being intrinsically a superior value irrespective of public interest in free speech and equality.

Is the case of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang about her own dignity at stake, or of black dignity more broadly (as Mpofu has suggested, she being one of our “mothers and daughters”)? Does black group dignity sustain unacceptable collateral damage due to damage to the dignity of one black person? Isn’t there a distinction sometimes?

To the extent that at stake is the minister’s dignity as an individual, and not as a representative of a racial class, is it her personal dignity or her political dignity? Again, isn’t there a distinction?

Is there no public interest in any of the story — or is all of it, including the way it was told, so lacking in merit that there is no democratic case for any dignity over-ride?

I’m not sure, then, that the Mpofu stand on dignity gives guidance on evaluating the Sunday Times’s coverage. And yet, the question of race and dignity is not something that can ever be dismissed.