Achille Mbembe, The Mail & Guardian
Born out of the crucible
of the struggle against apartheid, the idea of nonracialism is arguably one of
South Africa’s most potent contributions to modern political thought and
practice.
At its most utopian,
nonracialism gestures towards a future when the structures of racism will be
dismantled and all forms of racial injury and trauma will be healed.
Race as a category of
political organisation and an index of social identification will become
irrelevant. The distribution of the means of life and survival will be made on
a basis other than mere claims of descent.
The utopian ideal of a
world free of the burden of race has powered the struggles of the oppressed
since the advent of the modern age. It gave meaning and purpose to the
campaigns for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century. It was central to
the decolonisation struggle, the Civil Rights movement in the United States,
and some of the radical attempts to change the world in the 20th century.
As racism has kept
mutating, though, so have forms of intersections between race, class and
gender. Although local in its manifestations, racism has always been a global
phenomenon and part of its persistence is a result of its globalisation.
Furthermore, the force of racism in our world stems from its capacity to mutate
and to reappear constantly in ever-changing forms in the most unexpected sites
of everyday life.
The weakness of most
antiracist struggles is the result of our inability to keep up with the
mutating structures of racism and their virulence. As racism worldwide takes on
a genomic turn and is now propelled by the war on terror, various
anti-migratory policies, the resurgence of compensatory forms of nationalism
and mass incarceration, South Africa is caught between various contradictory
processes.
The first is the
unilateral intellectual disarmament undertaken by the ANC over the past decade.
Twenty years after the end of apartheid, the movement is intellectually dead.
This intellectual disarmament has paved the way to the bifurcation of public
life and the capitulation of the elites to the kind of bureaucratic
instrumentalism that now dominates public culture.
Bureaucratic
instrumentalism rests on the false belief that the current South African
predicament is of a purely materialistic order – that our problems are
technical and can be resolved through purely technical means. We need to tackle
poverty, but we do not need ideas. The politics of value is irrelevant because
all that is needed is to feed the hungry and shelter the poor.
Having deserted the
sphere of ideas and having delegitimised values as a primary site of the
political, the former liberation movement has depleted most of the moral and
symbolic capital accumulated during the struggle. As a result, it has been
unable to give any positive, future-oriented meaning to the project of
nonracialism: nonracialism is meaningless in the absence of values.
To do so would have
required a sophisticated, noninstrumentalist understanding of the work that
arts, culture and memory perform in periods of transformation. It would have
required harnessing the intellectual traditions and the cultural history of
black people as well as the articulation of an Afropolitan position that could
embrace those forms of white-African identity we need in the struggle for
racial justice.
Having failed to turn
white guilt into a moral debt, the ANC has let the most reactionary sectors of
white society off the hook while chasing away those progressive and antiracist
whites who could have supported the idea of a radical transformation of the
society.
Reactionary and
conservative forces have co-opted nonracialism, which they now equate with
colour-blindness. They use nonracialism as a weapon to discredit any attempt to
deracialise property, institutions and structures inherited from an odious
past. Rather than promoting affinities, they invite us to celebrate our
differences – in an ironic twist that tragically reveals the extent of
apartheid’s posthumous victory.
Reactionary forces also
mobilise the discourse of nonracialism to silence those who point to any trace
of racism in the present, or call for some form of reparation for the
injustices of the past. Instead, they now pretend that the government is
practising “reverse racism” in a country in which not one single former
oppressor lost a cent as a result of the transition away from centuries of
spoilation and dehumanisation.
Nonracialism is also
under attack from forces that equate it with a politics of accommodation or
capitulation. Indeed, for many, nonracialism is nothing but ideological cover
for the failure to address the inequities of the present. It is no different
from earlier attempts at justifying unequal coexistence. Instead of
nonracialism, what is needed is a resolute antiracist politics.
And yet, properly
understood, nonracialism is not opposed to antiracism. In fact, it is the
necessary supplement to all forms of antiracism. It allows us to project
ourselves into the future in a way our current struggles hardly allow.
A proper nonracial project
is not the equivalent of colour-blindness. Under current conditions,
colour-blindness simply means “keeping blacks in their place”.
The legacies of South
African apartheid cannot be eradicated through exclusion constructed by
self-serving notions of meritocracy or by privatising public spaces and
services. The market has never been an engine for racial equality.
Given South Africa’s
history, the effect of colour-blindness is to render invisible and to leave
untouched the structures of white privilege and the way they are woven into the
unexamined institutional practices, habits of mind and received truths.
Concentrated racial
poverty can only be altered by directly confronting the white privileges that
sustain them. This is what the ANC government has so far failed to do.
As Australian
anthropologist Ghassan Hage argues, nonracialism begins with the necessity of
uprooting racism from the sinews of the present. It implies depriving the
racists in our midst of the power to externalise their racism.
It requires that
everything be done to prevent the racists from successfully making the
racialised hate themselves. For it to succeed, the victims of racism must be
supported and the troubling gaps in life chances between blacks and whites must
be reduced.
Those who have been
racialised and dehumanised must be empowered to recover a modicum of
self-agency and, if necessary, the kind of healthy narcissism that has been
crushed during the long centuries of brutality.
Any effective policy to
combat racial inequality today must confront the complex relationships between
race, class and gender in South Africa.
