Racist South Africans retreat to apart-hate

South Africans are racist as naturally as roses bloom. A struggle in which thousands were murdered, tortured, detained and persecuted to ensure a non-racial, non-sexist country appears meaningless to those who now preach the politics of exclusion, whether in right-wing journalist fora, universities or the workplace.

More disturbing is seeing young people, the children of democracy, lash out at each other or indulge in despicable acts against those they consider lesser.

Discrimination is most often based on fear and feelings of inadequacy, but on occasion it is a deliberate strategy of a group trying to assert control. Adolf Hitler’s strategy of blaming the Jews, a minority group, was to avoid German governors taking blame for disastrous economic policies that had impoverished Germans. Hard-working Jews were an easy target. Apartheid governors used their policies to uplift poor Afrikaners by giving them preferential access to jobs and state tenders. Similar strategies by post-apartheid rulers to create social justice for black people are increasingly seeing quotas deny opportunity to whites and even, on occasion, coloured and Indian people.

Unfair treatment provokes in those who feel discriminated against — even when indicators show that repression against them is lessening (black people and women) — a persistent defensiveness, and pervasive whining. An inherent lack of self-worth is often outwardly displayed as arrogance or aggression. The greatest enemy is always within. Until we change our attitudes, it is often not the bigot that delays our progress, but ourselves.

Categories, beloved by the statistician, also divide and may encourage discrimination. True power lies in unity and the creation of common purpose while tolerating difference, recognising the right of others to forge their own path, to pursue dreams …

Barack Obama has a good chance of becoming the next president of the United States precisely because he is waging a campaign on a ticket of unity. In none of his books or speeches is being black more important to him than being an American. We have much to learn.

Let’s linger on the lessons of the US. Already Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii and the District of Columbia “are majority minority. Twelve other states have populations that are more than a third Latino, black and/or Asian. Latino Americans now number 42-million and are the fastest-growing demographic group accounting for almost half the nation’s population growth between 2004 and 2005; the Asian American population though far smaller has experienced a similar surge and (will) increase by more than 200% over the next 45 years. Shortly after 2050, experts predict, American will no longer be a majority white country — with consequences for our economics, our politics and our culture that we cannot fully anticipate,” wrote Barack Obama in his book The Audacity of Hope.

But there are still not enough black or Latino people to vote him into power in 2008. White people will have to do that.

Why should they do this? Because they don’t see Obama’s colour; they see a worthy candidate. We open ourselves to persistent excellence when we remove quotas and race, religion or gender barriers.

Professor Stephen Cohen, a professor of law at Georgetown University who was assistant secretary of state for human rights under president Jimmy Carter, is a frequent visitor to South Africa. Commenting on the present US presidential race, he says: “There has been a generational shift that is not fully appreciated. Race is much less important for people under the age of 40 than people over the age of 40.”

Cohen elaborates: “I was born in 1945 and went to elementary high in the Fifties and college in the Sixties. The US was a highly segregated society. I’m now 62; people who are 40 grew up in a much more integrated country. There were no blacks in my elementary school and two blacks in a high school of 1 500 students. In a college class of 300, two were African-American. Now in the same size class at least a third will be Hispanic, black or Asian-American. There has been a radical change in the way society has integrated and how it thinks. Barack Obama, unlike Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, doesn’t have to present himself as a black leader, but as a leader.”

What does that tell South Africa? Plenty. We just have to look at our children, most of whom freely mix, who increasingly have a single, similar accent. It’s some parents who are Neanderthals, but most of our children are not and those who react are most often responding to parental fears. No one has told us the family background of the 17-year-old who in an act eerily reminiscent of the US Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings went into the black Swartruggens community and opened fire, killing four. What sort of parental background do the University of the Free State accused have? I guarantee they hear racial hatred over the dinner table and, as in the instance of the Swartruggens gunner, may have experienced cruelty themselves.

Toyi-toying students or crowds breaking down fences outside the Swartruggens court also displays people who have not learnt. Where are the politicians to preach unity or common sense? Instead today’s politician is more likely to fan racist flames, whether among white racists or black racists.

On International Human Rights Day in 1965, Martin Luther King observed: “In South Africa incredibly brave white people are risking their careers, their homes and their lives in the cause of human justice. The brotherhood of man is not confined within a narrow, limited circle of select people. It is felt everywhere in the world; it is an international sentiment of surpassing strength … when men of good will finally unite, they will be invincible.”

Two years before, Nelson Mandela proclaimed: “I have fought white racism and I will fight black racism.”

So why are we retreating to racial separateness?

Poor education and a lack of unifying messages from the top create convenient amnesia. At a school visit to the University of Fort Hare this week, an archivist asked matriculants: “Why was the African National Congress formed?” None knew. “What was the 1976 Soweto uprising about?” Blank faces. A teacher intervened: “They’re learning Russian history at the moment; they’ll learn South African history from June.” But these were matriculants. If they hadn’t studied this at school, why had they not learnt from parental discourse?

Where basic historical knowledge is deficient, discrimination becomes easier — but it carries costs.

Shifting political landscapes and globalisation mean that those who narrow their world, whether on the basis of race, gender or religion, will lose out.

If South Africa returns to racial polarisation, it will doom itself to being just “another developing state”, unable to make the attitudinal leap that will ensure sustained prosperity. Why should talented people remain if opportunity is denied them? It’s a world desperate for high-level skills.

History teaches us that a house divided is a house that will fall.

A recent indicator of re-emergent bigotry was when white journalists were denied admission to an event by the new Forum of Black Journalists. If it’s OK for black journalists to exclude whites from an event, then we must allow those Afrikaners who want white-only schools to have them. Men can deny women access to clubs and pubs. Why pretend this is the 21st century if we behave as though it’s 1950?

It is obnoxious when those who claim to defend freedoms, as journalists persistently do, deny access when it is we, more than any other profession, who demand access to events, documents and individuals.

Jacob Zuma, the man at the helm of an organisation that saw Chief Albert Luthuli, Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela lead it to install the dream of a non-racial country, said he saw “nothing wrong” with the actions of the FBJ. “There are experiences that people … may not want to share,” he said. What did the president of the ANC have to say that the whole country may not hear?

Zuma and the FBJ dishonour those white journalists who risked or lost their lives and had difficult careers because of their determination to expose the injustices black South Africans faced. Ruth First died in a parcel-bomb explosion; George de’Ath was hacked to death in Crossroads in 1986; two photographers (one of mixed-race descent and one white) were shot dead in the perilous Phola Park informal settlement in the early 1990s — places so dangerous that most of those leading the BJF never dared report on them.

But most tragic of all is when we have failed to instil in our children a sense that this country belongs to all of them, black and white, as the Freedom Charter promised. Every time a child acts violently it is we, as adults, who have failed; our shame can have no measure. It demands that we as adults focus more powerfully on that which gives our young cause to hope.

Martin Luther King Jnr said: “The ultimate measure of a man (or woman) is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Ignorant of our own history, we are doomed to repeat it.