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| Steven Friedman |
Steven Friedman, SACSIS
OUR real ‘ticking time
bomb’ may be not poverty, but what it always has been – race. Our angriest
people may not be those forced to survive on much less than they need, but the
black middle class.
Poverty is our biggest
problem: it affects most people and imposes huge economic and social costs. But
the frequently heard claim that poor people are about to rise up and destroy
the economy ignores reality: poverty usually forces people to be more pragmatic
because more is at stake. The poor are not yet organised enough and still too
isolated from economic power to change society.
Middle class people, by
contrast, can organise and make themselves heard. And, if middle class people
are black, they may be very angry.
The point was illustrated
during a recent radio debate whose audience was overwhelmingly black and middle
class. Callers angrily insisted that they were considering voting for the EFF
in Gauteng because the ANC was reportedly considering appointing a white person
as the province’s premier. Why was that a problem? The callers were lawyers,
managers or business people: all complained of workplace experiences with
whites who, in their view, failed to take them seriously or recognise their
dignity.
One radio discussion does
not make a trend. But the fact that 400 000 voters did choose the EFF in
Gauteng suggests that there were many more angry black professionals in the
province than those who called in to the radio station. What evidence we have
suggests that the ANC lost ground in Gauteng primarily because the black middle
class deserted it – and that an important reason for the shift was a sense
that, two decades into democracy, black professionals and business people may
live vastly better than previous generations, but face the same racial
attitudes and sense of exclusion, even if the process is now subtler.
This anger upsets two
common beliefs. First, that entry into the middle class is likely to make black
people happier with the market economy and that racial contact in the workplace
is sure to make people get on better with each other.
This ignores two realities.
One is that race still matters here and that it matters most to black people in
business and the professions because it is they who are at the sharp end of the
racial interface.
Some unemployed black
people don’t have any contact with whites at all – a study in Khayelitsha, Cape
Town, found that up to a third of residents spoke no English or Afrikaans,
which surely means that they have little or no contact with whites: for them, white
attitudes are an abstract problem. Black blue collar workers may experience
workplace racism but the effects are reduced by a tendency among many large
companies to hire black managers who deal with black workers. Professionals, on
the other hand, spend most of their time in direct contact with white people.
The other reality is that
many black professionals experience racial mixing as a process not of
affirmation but of constant belittling. And so the result is not more tolerance
and the happy racial mixing featured in beer ads but anger at what is seen as
the persistence of the white attitudes which underpinned apartheid.
Racial pecking orders in
business and the professions have not died – that much is obvious to anyone who
spends time engaging with businesses. Not only are the upper echelons of
companies still mainly white. but the way people engage with each other has
hardly shifted. There are obvious exceptions but, at many engagements with
companies, it is the white people who speak during the formal sessions and the
black people who wait until the meeting is over to approach an invited speaker,
not only to ask questions but, at times, to point out that the attitudes which
black managers express to their white colleagues are not necessarily those they
really hold.
None of this should be
all that surprising. Apartheid was underpinned by attitudes far too deeply held
to disappear in two decades – the assumption that only whites are competent to
perform complicated tasks dies hard.
This affects our national debate: much of the stress on ‘leaving the
markets alone’ is code for freeing the white people who run the private economy
from the control of black people who run the government. Inevitably, it affects
attitudes in the workplace too.
This past may also have
ensured that black people enter the middle class with little confidence and
little trust. And so it would be naïve to expect the beer ads to describe the
real world.
How much of this is white
bigotry and how much a sense by black people that they have been thrust into a
world shaped by others where they are given little help to enable them to feel
at home is not clear - it is surely both. But what is clear is that the cutting
edge of racial mistrust is not the streets of townships or shack settlements
but the air-conditioned offices of our major cities.
The angry black middle
class will have limited influence on future elections - even if they all desert
the ANC, their numbers are likely to remain too small for too long to make them
a major power at the ballot box. But the way race plays out in business and the
professions is a huge problem for the society. It places a permanent limit on
developing talent, makes open conversation about our economic and political
priorities far more difficult and distorts our debate because racial anger in
the middle class is often confused with rebellion by workers and the poor. And
it remains a potential threat to democracy because it makes tolerance and
mutual respect more difficult.
In the early 1990s, racial
attitudes in the middle class were a major issue for a society negotiating a
new political order. When democracy was achieved, the social power holders -
business, the professions, academics, the media - seemed to decide that race
was a problem no longer because everyone had the vote and formal rights. And so
racial tensions which should have been addressed over the past two decades were
ignored.
The anger confirms that
this was a mistake. The problem has not disappeared and, if it is not addressed
now, we may pay a rising price for ignoring our deepest divide.
