Inequality+still+writ+in+black+and+white,+Vukani+Mde,+Weekender

Business Day Weekender, 2006/10/07 12:00:00 AM
=Inequality still writ in black and white=


 * Vukani Mde**

I AM of the view that white South Africans will prove historically incidental to the changes that are occurring and will continue to occur in this country over the coming decades. As SA vacillates between competing ideas of how it should fashion itself for the future, its white citizens — 4-million permanent tourists — are at best disgruntled spectators, and at worst an occasional hindrance. No interaction that I have with and nothing that I come to learn about the form of whiteness peculiar to SA persuades me that I am wrong in this view. And I’m even talking about Douglas Gibson.

This week, a group of white students thought it would be fun to call on President Thabo Mbeki to “reclassify” them as African. In their petition, they submitted Employment Equity Act (EEA1) documents, which are issued by the labour department to companies and their employees for the purposes of monitoring progress on affirmative action. Their effort, supported by the white Solidarity trade union, involved painting their faces black. This, in itself, is a callous trivialisation of the difficult politics of race with which this country was saddled by people acting in the interests of these very same students.

“We as Africans with a pale complexion, whose EEA1 forms are attached, are concerned that a new obsession with race is depriving us of our African identity and reducing us to second-class citizens in the country of our birth,” they say in their letter.

They also helpfully invoke (or rather appropriate) Mbeki’s own “I am an African” speech to argue that they indeed qualify for any employment equity position since they are “proud young Africans”. Mbeki will probably not have the heart to tell them that while he meant every word he said in the speech, the president’s poetic flourishes have no part in formulating cold policy.

I have no quarrel with any white person’s claim to Africanness. You are as African as you feel, and no presidential classification is necessary to make you so. But what you must accept is that such a claim to African identity can only be rhetorical (which is not to say less valid). It can have no policy or practical implications, especially ones that have the effect of making you an employment equity candidate. You cannot be the beneficiary of a century of legislated job reservation and 200 years of colonial privilege before that, and then experience no corrective discrimination in the new order, all because of a discursive summersault. That mocks the continuing oppression of this country’s majority.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/Articles/TarkArticle.aspx?ID=2269894**

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