Neville Alexander: Race is Skin Deep, Humanity is Not Thirdly, and finally, it is time that we admit publicly and without any qualifications that you cannot fight racial inequality, racial prejudice and race thinking by using racial categories as a “site of redress”. Among many others, I have written about alternatives to affirmative action policies; so I shall not repeat those points here. Suffice it to say that fighting race with race is bad social science and even worse practical politics. Besides tackling the structural economic and social inequalities that we took over without much modification from the apartheid state, we have to do the hard work of exploring, researching and piloting alternative approaches to those based on the apartheid racial categories. It is a fundamental theoretical and strategic error to try to do so by perpetuating racial identities in the nonsensical belief that this will not have any negative or destructive social consequences. The Employment Equity Act and all related legislation should be reviewed, not in the direction that the Department of Labour seems to want to do but in a totally different direction, one that moves away decisively from any notion of “race” and looks specifically at “disadvantage”. Seventeen years into the new South Africa, we can afford to interrogate even our most dearly held views about things. In South Africa, because we do live in a liberal democracy, we can actually ask these questions without fear of losing our limbs or even our lives. The Manyi affair is much larger than the few individuals involved. It is a matter that, unless we look beneath the verbiage, may ruin any future of peace and prosperity our children may hope for.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 14:28:48 +0000
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