Who's responsible for race relations in SA?

There seems to be a problem with the delivery of the South African nation. The rainbow nation is currently monochrome and issues remain cast in black and white, ignoring other factors like class, gender and sexuality. In fact the rainbow is highly separated, with very little grey area in between.

The most prominent marker for a person is their skin colour and for many South Africans this continues to be the basis of which they judge someone as worthy to befriend, to love and to work with. The recent murder of Eugene Terre’Blanche, as well as virulent anti-“Western” (which seems to me just simply to be anti-white) verbal vomiting from Julius Malema seems to have opened the gap for those who still feel anger at other race groups to shout it from the roof tops. This anger didn’t suddenly emerge as a result of the event, the event triggered the release of pent-up anger.

So our real problem is that this has not been dealt with. People are expected to suck it up and get through and yet nobody has told anybody how to do this. More importantly, everybody thinks that the responsibility lies with everybody else. White people think black people should do x, Black people think white people should do y, Indian people think coloured people should do z and so on and so forth until the responsibility for change lies with vague race groups and organisational bodies.

Each person has to become involved in a process of considering their raced position in the country, and this is especially important for white people who rarely have to confront themselves as a raced body. For example, nobody tells a joke that starts “a white man, a coloured man and a black man were in a bar”. The jokes just go “there was a man, a black man and a coloured man in the bar”. Apart from the fact that these jokes are rarely funny, the fact that white is considered “normal” and not even mentioned, and every other race is “other”, is a problem. (Ever heard your children describing their peach-coloured crayons as “skin colour” — this is where the problem is).

The tasks vary from race to race but each person as a part of every race group is responsible for making the change. I don’t provide more examples here for black, Indian, coloured or Asian people because I don’t live in your skin. I don’t know what examples you experience in your daily life that make you aware of your race. I think that this process of self-reflection is incredibly important and talking about these instances amongst multi-racial groups is even more important for plotting a path forward.

The change is not going to come from making race invisible, but rather from making race as visible as poverty and gender. If we acknowledge that it’s there, and often comes linked to a whole set of cultural differences, we can go some way to solving the problem of racial tension, but also to solving South Africa’s problems.

If we stop dividing ourselves we can work together on issues of land redistribution, holding government accountable for a lack of service delivery, creating more equitable employment, ensuring each person has equal access to justice, and taking care of our shared environment. Until we stop seeing all of these things as someone else’s responsibility, nothing is going to change.

The truth is that YOU are responsible for improving race relations in South Africa. Yes YOU. Whatever colour you are.