Human beings have complicated moral psychologies. Sometimes we respond empathetically to the plight of those worse off than ourselves; think of the global response to the earthquake that hit Haiti, for example. At other times, we are oblivious to or even implicated in the suffering of others. Hence the jarring reality of many victims of anti-black racism often ignoring their own experiences of discrimination when engaging in xenophobic attacks or violence against black lesbians. These are violent expressions of culpable amnesia.
States are no different to human beings. They, too, are susceptible to shameful variations in moral judgment. A case in point is the devastating revelations that have surfaced about military ties between Israel and apartheid South Africa in the '70s. Israel was also guilty of culpable amnesia.
In his brilliant new book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's relationship with apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky tells of massive military co-operation between the two countries. A 1976 visit to Israel by Prime Minister John Vorster, for example, helped seal a military deal worth more than $700-million, according to Admiral Binyamin Telem, who was the commander of Israel's navy during the Yom Kippur War. This trip expanded on an earlier munitions contract worth $100-million.
Such military co-operation was to continue for years, despite a weapons embargo imposed against South Africa by the United Nations in 1977. Israel publicly supported the embargo but acted otherwise privately. In the '80s, for example, Israel and the South African Defence Force jointly researched missiles with nuclear capability. Israel also updated SA's fighter jets in Israel. These updates were worth about $2-billion, according to correspondence between an Armscor mission in Tel Aviv and SADF chief Constand Viljoen.
Exports to South Africa, ranging from rifles and anti-riot equipment to tanks and aircraft, amounted to about $600-million between the mid-'70s and early '90s. These claims are based on declassified documents that the author had patiently fought to see in terms of legislation governing access to information.
In addition, he interviewed most of the key actors within the military bureaucracies of both South Africa and Israel, including former minister of defence General Magnus Malan, former SADF head General Jannie Geldenhuys and former mining minister Fanie Botha.
Many of the key actors on the Israeli side also spoke to the author, particularly after he produced declassified documents and recorded oral sources.
What are the moral implications of these revelations? It is important to remember that a pariah state's life is prolonged when not all members of the international community play moral ball.
Even in the unlikely event that none of these weapons were to be used by an immoral state, their mere accumulation strengthened that state's hold over its subjects and neighbours, at least in so far as militarisation gave it a psychological bargaining chip. So Israel's role in propping up the apartheid state militarily was crucial to the apartheid state's survival, even in the unlikely event that Israel genuinely thought these weapons would never be used.
Most shocking, however, is the moral paradox that a people who have a painful history of having been at the receiving end of the most grotesque abuses of natural rights can end up exercising such callously poor moral judgment. Although all states should exercise moral caution when dealing with a pariah state, one would expect a state such as Israel to be particularly vigilant. This is not because victims of prejudice necessarily carry a greater normative burden to desist from prejudicial behaviour.
Israel's military ties with apartheid SA were abhorrent even if we do not impute to it a unique moral burden to be virtuous. What is uniquely morally offensive, though, is the fact that a victim of oppression who carries a set of memories that are vividly kept alive in many different ways (think of a film like Schindler's List or the German government encouraging its citizens to visit concentration camps lest they forget) should disregard its own memory in aiding an aggressor at the tip of Africa that was inspired by the likes of Nazi Germany.
Like victims of anti-black racism who become perpetrators of analogous moral crimes, so Israel's co-operation with apartheid South Africa shows a state's crude preference for political expediency over moral virtue. Israel should have known and done otherwise.
The elemental truth is that a state is comprised of human beings who, in their turn, are susceptible to moral criticism. This is no different to multinational corporations being treated as moral agents.
We expect companies to behave morally even though they are legal rather than biological entities. The reason is simple. Behind the legal status are real human beings who can and should reason morally about the impact of their actions on the world around them.
Similarly, Israeli politicians were in a position to consider the consequences of military co-operation with the apartheid state. They opted to prop up the apartheid state in the face of universal political and moral condemnation. They defied their own experiences of moral crimes, crimes that were arguably worse than those experienced by black South Africans.
This is a tragic illustration of immoral statehood and culpable amnesia. History is mandated to judge Israel harshly.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article555917.ece/When-the-oppressed-become-the-oppressor
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
DOES RACISM TRUMP HOMOPHOBIA?!
Is racism worse than homophobia? The callousness of this question should hit any thinking person like a ton of bricks. Jerry Matjila, South Africa's representative to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, is one person who is not fazed by a ton of bricks. For him, homophobia is not nearly as unsexy as racism. Indeed, he falls just short of openly endorsing homophobia. He regards attempts to defeat racism as having moral priority over attempts to deal with homophobia. Hence his claim that protecting gay rights "demeans the legitimate plight of the victims of racism".
This raises two questions. Is there a relevant moral difference between racism and homophobia? And just how committed is the government to a foreign policy based on human rights principles?
First, let's turn our attention to the question of moral equivalence. Prejudice refers to actions or attitudes that unfairly differentiate between individuals or groups. We assess the appropriateness of differential treatment by asking whether it is rational. Discriminating against the blind by not allowing them to drive on the road is a justified form of discrimination because sight is rationally related to safe driving. When discrimination is not rational in this way, then it is unjustified. And, because unjustified discrimination negatively impacts on those at the receiving end of such behaviour, it is not merely irrational but also immoral.
It follows from this definition that prejudice could be based on almost any trait. Someone might be discriminated against because their sex is arbitrarily regarded as an indicator of what they are capable of. But other traits can be the basis of prejudice too, including class, accent, sexual orientation, country of origin, language, culture and so on. So long as the discrimination is arbitrary, it counts as an instance of prejudice. Both racism and homophobia are unjustified forms of discrimination. They are morally equivalent.
Some black victims of racism are simply homophobic. This stops them from seeing or accepting the moral-equivalence argument. Matjila is a homophobic victim of racism. This failure to see the moral equivalence between racism and homophobia explains why black lesbians get raped to "correct" their sexual orientation. It is one of the most macabre moral paradoxes of post-democratic South Africa that many victims of racial prejudice forget their past and nonchalantly throw prejudicial attitudes in the direction of gay people -- including those who share their lived experiences of racism. How and why victims of prejudice turn into monsters is a question best left to psychologists. From a moral point of view, however, there is no normative argument that justifies a hierarchy of prejudice.
First, the history of prejudice is not restricted to racism. Gay men and women were slaughtered side by side with Jews in Nazi Germany, for example. Today, gay men and women continue to be killed in many countries in a systematic expression of violent hatred that is similar to that experienced in apartheid South Africa by black people. Second, even if racism has more historical resonance in South Africa than homophobia, that in itself does not constitute an overriding moral reason to regard the one as less uncool than the other. Prejudice is an equal-opportunities bastard that needs to be rooted out in all guises.So why, if this is the ethical truth of the matter, do we see evidence of inconsistent thinking and acting by our government representatives?
First there was the infamous remark by President Jacob Zuma that in his youth he would proudly have knocked out a gay person. A truthful recollection, perhaps, but in the absence of a sensitive discussion of why that behaviour was misguided, it amounted to a shocking affirmation of continued violence against gay men and women. Then there was the appointment of journalist Jon Qwelane as a top diplomat, despite his verbal and emotional violence against the gay community. To add insult to injury, he was sent to Uganda, a country flirting with the possibility of legally sanctioning the killing of gay people. The government also took forever to respond to regional cases of homophobia such as the widely reported case of a Malawian couple who dared to attempt to get married. In the light of these instances, the idea of a moral foreign policy is really oxymoronic.
There is also, of course, the voting pattern at the United Nations. In December 2008, South Africa failed to support a UN General Assembly joint statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity. South Africa also voted to remove the term "sexual orientation" from the definition of unlawful killings in the UN General Assembly resolution on extrajudicial executions. Representatives abroad who are responsible for these moves have never been unequivocally reined in for their sloppy moral thinking. It leaves one with little doubt that Pretoria sanctions these callous actions.
Indeed, Matjila's boss, Ayanda Ntsaluba, the director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, supported him, merely saying that he should have used "more elegant" language. This is about as progressive as a verligte white imploring his verkrampte cousin to speak "more sensitively" about the "Bantus"; it is really just an encouragement that the cousin be less transparent. Similarly, Ntsaluba's thoughtless reaction is an unsubtle plea to Matjila to hide his homophobia rather than to eradicate it. Ntsaluba should be disciplined for this by his political elders. But that presupposes a government that cares.
What is the upshot of all this? It exposes prejudice in the hearts and minds of many ANC foot soldiers who hold important positions. Previously, these attitudes did not translate into conservative policies. Hence we have the most comprehensive jurisprudence on gay rights in the world. Yet we need to be vigilant. In fact, we should start to worry about the widening gap between our constitutional vision and reality. What matters to a black lesbian woman in Gugulethu is not so much what our constitutional text implores but rather whether she can freely roam the streets without fear of homophobic abuse. Progressive South Africans have understandably but mistakenly placed excessive faith in the Constitution as a catalyst for bringing about changes in attitude and behaviour on the part of both the state and ourselves. We are now learning anew that the fight against prejudice must be a bottom-up one rather than a top-down one.
Fortunately, many organisations have taken the lead. They need our collective support.These homophobic actions on the part of government officials also cast serious doubt on the ANC's commitment to principles of human rights. Constitutional history has yet to tell the story of specific individuals whose influence led to some of the progressive clauses in the Bill of Rights. Some of us, in the absence of knowing which actors at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa won the gay rights battles, have generously imputed progressiveness to all ANC members and government officials. That is a mistake. The exposure of a foreign policy that is not committed to human rights principles tells a different story.
Domestically, the ANC has less space to be honest about its leaders' illiberalism because it has trapped itself in a language of tolerance. But away from the domestic spotlight, it is increasingly coming out of the closet as an organisation infested with homophobes. Before this homophobia seeps into our domestic policies, we must start educating both ordinary folk and state officials about what constitutes prejudice and why all forms of prejudice are wrong, as well as how to respond to our own impulses to be prejudicial against those different to ourselves, and how to react to others' prejudices against ourselves or those too vulnerable to speak for themselves.
Sadly, we cannot rely on the government to lead this project. It is up to us.
This raises two questions. Is there a relevant moral difference between racism and homophobia? And just how committed is the government to a foreign policy based on human rights principles?
First, let's turn our attention to the question of moral equivalence. Prejudice refers to actions or attitudes that unfairly differentiate between individuals or groups. We assess the appropriateness of differential treatment by asking whether it is rational. Discriminating against the blind by not allowing them to drive on the road is a justified form of discrimination because sight is rationally related to safe driving. When discrimination is not rational in this way, then it is unjustified. And, because unjustified discrimination negatively impacts on those at the receiving end of such behaviour, it is not merely irrational but also immoral.
It follows from this definition that prejudice could be based on almost any trait. Someone might be discriminated against because their sex is arbitrarily regarded as an indicator of what they are capable of. But other traits can be the basis of prejudice too, including class, accent, sexual orientation, country of origin, language, culture and so on. So long as the discrimination is arbitrary, it counts as an instance of prejudice. Both racism and homophobia are unjustified forms of discrimination. They are morally equivalent.
Some black victims of racism are simply homophobic. This stops them from seeing or accepting the moral-equivalence argument. Matjila is a homophobic victim of racism. This failure to see the moral equivalence between racism and homophobia explains why black lesbians get raped to "correct" their sexual orientation. It is one of the most macabre moral paradoxes of post-democratic South Africa that many victims of racial prejudice forget their past and nonchalantly throw prejudicial attitudes in the direction of gay people -- including those who share their lived experiences of racism. How and why victims of prejudice turn into monsters is a question best left to psychologists. From a moral point of view, however, there is no normative argument that justifies a hierarchy of prejudice.
First, the history of prejudice is not restricted to racism. Gay men and women were slaughtered side by side with Jews in Nazi Germany, for example. Today, gay men and women continue to be killed in many countries in a systematic expression of violent hatred that is similar to that experienced in apartheid South Africa by black people. Second, even if racism has more historical resonance in South Africa than homophobia, that in itself does not constitute an overriding moral reason to regard the one as less uncool than the other. Prejudice is an equal-opportunities bastard that needs to be rooted out in all guises.So why, if this is the ethical truth of the matter, do we see evidence of inconsistent thinking and acting by our government representatives?
First there was the infamous remark by President Jacob Zuma that in his youth he would proudly have knocked out a gay person. A truthful recollection, perhaps, but in the absence of a sensitive discussion of why that behaviour was misguided, it amounted to a shocking affirmation of continued violence against gay men and women. Then there was the appointment of journalist Jon Qwelane as a top diplomat, despite his verbal and emotional violence against the gay community. To add insult to injury, he was sent to Uganda, a country flirting with the possibility of legally sanctioning the killing of gay people. The government also took forever to respond to regional cases of homophobia such as the widely reported case of a Malawian couple who dared to attempt to get married. In the light of these instances, the idea of a moral foreign policy is really oxymoronic.
There is also, of course, the voting pattern at the United Nations. In December 2008, South Africa failed to support a UN General Assembly joint statement on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity. South Africa also voted to remove the term "sexual orientation" from the definition of unlawful killings in the UN General Assembly resolution on extrajudicial executions. Representatives abroad who are responsible for these moves have never been unequivocally reined in for their sloppy moral thinking. It leaves one with little doubt that Pretoria sanctions these callous actions.
Indeed, Matjila's boss, Ayanda Ntsaluba, the director general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, supported him, merely saying that he should have used "more elegant" language. This is about as progressive as a verligte white imploring his verkrampte cousin to speak "more sensitively" about the "Bantus"; it is really just an encouragement that the cousin be less transparent. Similarly, Ntsaluba's thoughtless reaction is an unsubtle plea to Matjila to hide his homophobia rather than to eradicate it. Ntsaluba should be disciplined for this by his political elders. But that presupposes a government that cares.
What is the upshot of all this? It exposes prejudice in the hearts and minds of many ANC foot soldiers who hold important positions. Previously, these attitudes did not translate into conservative policies. Hence we have the most comprehensive jurisprudence on gay rights in the world. Yet we need to be vigilant. In fact, we should start to worry about the widening gap between our constitutional vision and reality. What matters to a black lesbian woman in Gugulethu is not so much what our constitutional text implores but rather whether she can freely roam the streets without fear of homophobic abuse. Progressive South Africans have understandably but mistakenly placed excessive faith in the Constitution as a catalyst for bringing about changes in attitude and behaviour on the part of both the state and ourselves. We are now learning anew that the fight against prejudice must be a bottom-up one rather than a top-down one.
Fortunately, many organisations have taken the lead. They need our collective support.These homophobic actions on the part of government officials also cast serious doubt on the ANC's commitment to principles of human rights. Constitutional history has yet to tell the story of specific individuals whose influence led to some of the progressive clauses in the Bill of Rights. Some of us, in the absence of knowing which actors at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa won the gay rights battles, have generously imputed progressiveness to all ANC members and government officials. That is a mistake. The exposure of a foreign policy that is not committed to human rights principles tells a different story.
Domestically, the ANC has less space to be honest about its leaders' illiberalism because it has trapped itself in a language of tolerance. But away from the domestic spotlight, it is increasingly coming out of the closet as an organisation infested with homophobes. Before this homophobia seeps into our domestic policies, we must start educating both ordinary folk and state officials about what constitutes prejudice and why all forms of prejudice are wrong, as well as how to respond to our own impulses to be prejudicial against those different to ourselves, and how to react to others' prejudices against ourselves or those too vulnerable to speak for themselves.
Sadly, we cannot rely on the government to lead this project. It is up to us.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Structural obstacles to poverty relief
Last week I argued that state policies which are aimed at poverty relief should be driven by respect for the agency of the poor. Poor people should not be seen as mere recipients of handouts. That would be both fiscally and ethically imprudent. The policy implication is that creative mechanisms must be found to develop self-sufficiency among the poor so as to end undignified dependency. Despite the obvious short-term political unattractiveness of this position it is surely the correct philosophical foundation from which to derive more specific practical solutions.
However, there are important structural realities that I had deliberately set aside so that the principled point could be stated baldly. A person’s agency cannot come alive if the structural impediments they face are insurmountable. Inequality represents the single most important structural injustice in SA today. If we do not address inequality then we can forget about a society in which self-sufficiency and self-actualisation are on glorious display next to glorious soccer stadiums. The more complete goal of our social policies must therefore be to activate the agency of the poor but to recognise that doing so also requires structural impediments to be dismantled. Our social policies should therefore include measures that address these structural obstacles effectively.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a complicated way of contradicting my stated conviction that the poor should not be treated as subjects but as agents. We must resist framing debate on poverty alleviation as a choice between callous ‘tough love’ approaches (“Fend for yourself, wena!”) and disrespectful ‘hand out’ approaches (“If you need anything, Mavis, I’m right here!”)
The topic of entrepreneurship provides an excellent case in point. One obvious strategy for activating someone’s agency and in the process boosting their self-esteem is to provide them with a job. It is therefore deeply troubling that in the past year or so we have been showing signs of not just jobless growth but job-shedding growth according to recent Statistics SA data. Both the problem of dependency and the need for incentivising self-sufficiency, however, are intimately connected to these economic developments.
South Africans go into instant panic mode if they are unable to secure a job from some private company or a state department. Why? Because the confidence it takes to be an entrepreneur is lacking in the psyche of a people who internalised the apartheid state’s propaganda that blacks are useless creatures. It is little wonder that our most successful self-made business persons are mostly white. Whites are less self-deprecating about their capabilities. A culture of dependency reinforces such low self-esteem. Low self-esteem, in turn, means that creative solutions to job creation such as encouraging a much needed culture of entrepreneurship get overlooked. This lack of focus on how to activate our people’s agency clearly goes beyond welfare matters and even seeps into our related macro economic thinking. Respect for agency and self-sufficiency could serve as a catalyst for fresh debate on job creation solutions. Entrepreneurship would then stand a better chance.
Still, if the state recognised that it must incentivise economic self-sufficiency through encouraging entrepreneurship, such a policy would fail if structural obstacles faced by the poor are not addressed. Even if some kid from rural KwaZulu-Natal had the most unexpected levels of Verwoerd defying self-confidence as well as an enviable natural knack for business, she would stand a great chance of failing without access to social capital, financial capital and business mentoring. Things like social capital, financial capital and business mentoring are goodies that do not compete with uncollected litter for space in the streets of our townships. You therefore cannot blame someone for being poor in circumstances where the fundamental explanation for their poverty is the absence of these goods. And therein lies the complicated reality of agency struggling to emerge in the face of crippling structural obstacles.
The government is not totally unaware of these truths. But it fails to put concepts such as agency, self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship at the heart of policy design. Sure, government does use this kind of language from time to time, but that hardly counts as progress. Failure is both the result of these viewpoints not being fore grounded and the result of failed implementation where these ideas are tried out.
For example, institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the National Youth Development Agency exist in part to help the poor overcome structural impediments to business success. But often these institutions simply hand out cash without realising that psychology is as important as money in determining business success. Mentoring young businesspersons to be in the right headspace, helping them negotiate institutional norms in corporate SA that are often career cripplingly alien, offering them practical help in respect of operational and organisational design challenges, etc. are all overlooked in practise. Equally, we could write a treatise on private sector impediments such as the difficult of accessing commercial bank loans. The existence of these structural impediments is not the fault of the poor. And the poor cannot be expected to singlehandedly dismantle these impediments. Government must take the lead.
It remains correct to insist that welfare policies should not breed dependency but aim to activate the agency of the poor. That, however, requires the removal of structural impediments. Time is no longer on our side.
However, there are important structural realities that I had deliberately set aside so that the principled point could be stated baldly. A person’s agency cannot come alive if the structural impediments they face are insurmountable. Inequality represents the single most important structural injustice in SA today. If we do not address inequality then we can forget about a society in which self-sufficiency and self-actualisation are on glorious display next to glorious soccer stadiums. The more complete goal of our social policies must therefore be to activate the agency of the poor but to recognise that doing so also requires structural impediments to be dismantled. Our social policies should therefore include measures that address these structural obstacles effectively.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not a complicated way of contradicting my stated conviction that the poor should not be treated as subjects but as agents. We must resist framing debate on poverty alleviation as a choice between callous ‘tough love’ approaches (“Fend for yourself, wena!”) and disrespectful ‘hand out’ approaches (“If you need anything, Mavis, I’m right here!”)
The topic of entrepreneurship provides an excellent case in point. One obvious strategy for activating someone’s agency and in the process boosting their self-esteem is to provide them with a job. It is therefore deeply troubling that in the past year or so we have been showing signs of not just jobless growth but job-shedding growth according to recent Statistics SA data. Both the problem of dependency and the need for incentivising self-sufficiency, however, are intimately connected to these economic developments.
South Africans go into instant panic mode if they are unable to secure a job from some private company or a state department. Why? Because the confidence it takes to be an entrepreneur is lacking in the psyche of a people who internalised the apartheid state’s propaganda that blacks are useless creatures. It is little wonder that our most successful self-made business persons are mostly white. Whites are less self-deprecating about their capabilities. A culture of dependency reinforces such low self-esteem. Low self-esteem, in turn, means that creative solutions to job creation such as encouraging a much needed culture of entrepreneurship get overlooked. This lack of focus on how to activate our people’s agency clearly goes beyond welfare matters and even seeps into our related macro economic thinking. Respect for agency and self-sufficiency could serve as a catalyst for fresh debate on job creation solutions. Entrepreneurship would then stand a better chance.
Still, if the state recognised that it must incentivise economic self-sufficiency through encouraging entrepreneurship, such a policy would fail if structural obstacles faced by the poor are not addressed. Even if some kid from rural KwaZulu-Natal had the most unexpected levels of Verwoerd defying self-confidence as well as an enviable natural knack for business, she would stand a great chance of failing without access to social capital, financial capital and business mentoring. Things like social capital, financial capital and business mentoring are goodies that do not compete with uncollected litter for space in the streets of our townships. You therefore cannot blame someone for being poor in circumstances where the fundamental explanation for their poverty is the absence of these goods. And therein lies the complicated reality of agency struggling to emerge in the face of crippling structural obstacles.
The government is not totally unaware of these truths. But it fails to put concepts such as agency, self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship at the heart of policy design. Sure, government does use this kind of language from time to time, but that hardly counts as progress. Failure is both the result of these viewpoints not being fore grounded and the result of failed implementation where these ideas are tried out.
For example, institutions like the Industrial Development Corporation, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the National Youth Development Agency exist in part to help the poor overcome structural impediments to business success. But often these institutions simply hand out cash without realising that psychology is as important as money in determining business success. Mentoring young businesspersons to be in the right headspace, helping them negotiate institutional norms in corporate SA that are often career cripplingly alien, offering them practical help in respect of operational and organisational design challenges, etc. are all overlooked in practise. Equally, we could write a treatise on private sector impediments such as the difficult of accessing commercial bank loans. The existence of these structural impediments is not the fault of the poor. And the poor cannot be expected to singlehandedly dismantle these impediments. Government must take the lead.
It remains correct to insist that welfare policies should not breed dependency but aim to activate the agency of the poor. That, however, requires the removal of structural impediments. Time is no longer on our side.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Fight poverty while promoting sense of agency
A COUPLE of weeks ago I was interviewed by a French journalist interested in white poverty. She is making a documentary about poor whites, who are not, in her view, given enough airplay. I had to spoil some of her fun by pointing out that President Jacob Zuma ’s surprise at white
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.
Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.
Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.
Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.
For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.
In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.
This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?
The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.
Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.
Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.
But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945
poverty’s existence does not mean the rest of us never knew that some whites are also poor. But focusing on this aesthetically interesting fact misses the bigger debate on poverty.
Poverty has simply become democratised since 1994. It is an equal-opportunity bastard. And so to impute to a black government a deliberate attempt to impoverish whites or to ignore poor whites is hasty. All poor folk in SA, black and white, are failed subjects of poverty relief. We should instead review existing strategies for poverty relief and ask why current policies have not yet dealt the scourge a fatal blow. To that end, one initial thought has been simmering in my head. It is this: the package of welfare policies that has evolved over the past 16 years wrongly treats the poor as subjects rather than as agents.
Take the child support grant. There is no doubt that the intention behind the system is noble. It is aimed at alleviating the material conditions that prevent many kids from poor families from growing up healthily. It can be particularly useful in helping an unemployed single mother ensure that a child attends school and is not deprived of the social capital that an education represents simply because a school uniform, for example, is beyond the household budget. The money can also be used to buy food for the entire family. It is not just the child who becomes dependant on the R250 a month. It is often the entire family.
Many members of my extended family, for example, make use of this grant as a crucial buffer against abject poverty. I’m therefore personally familiar with the importance of a welfare system that helps stave off utter destitution within families. Furthermore, I would not want to generalise in the absence of facts so am happy, for the sake of argument, to imagine that a majority of grant recipients use the money honestly. The bigger evaluative question then jumps out at us: does this grant system enable families to become self-sufficient? Does it, in other words, act as a catalyst to activate the agency of poor people? I am sceptical.
For one thing, there is no built-in incentive for families to become independent of the state. Whereas the dependency of the aged is understandable on account of their frailty, thereby justifying the old age pension system, there is something about the dependency of a healthy teenage mom that is far less forgiving. Many of these dependent individuals also abuse the system.
In my hometown of Grahamstown, for example, it is well known within the poor coloured township that many single parents ignore their children’s needs by spending the money on overdue alcohol accounts in the many taverns designed to offer antisocial escapism from the boredom of sitting around, unemployed. Again, there is nothing in the grant system that catches out those who abuse the system. Monitoring is poor to nonexistent. All the system does is to breed a culture of dependency.
This is disastrous for the individuals implicated and for society at large. From the perspective of grant recipients, it means a permanent underdevelopment of their agency, a permanent sense of victimhood. From society’s perspective, it means we will continue to have one of the largest welfare states in the world. That is fiscally and ethically unsustainable. The question is where it is all going wrong on the welfare front?
The starting point is to review the principle underlying our package of welfare interventions.
Our welfare policies have to stop being built on the idea of the poor as mere objects of social policy. This habit extends to essential services more generally. The phrase “service delivery”, for example, is one of the most unfortunate bureaucratic inventions. It legitimises the expectation, on the part of the poor, that some dude from the state has to rock up at your door in a debonair outfit with a bag of goodies in hand. This mistake is going to haunt the state because such vertical relationships between government and citizens is not sustainable nor desirable.
Many policy gurus will claim that our policies do aim to activate the agency of the poor. But if so, the policies have failed and we need new ones at any rate. I am more sceptical. I think our government never approached this debate with a view to incentivising self-development on the part of the poor. That route to poverty relief often seems callous and right wing. Hence it is politically unattractive.
But it need not be. A sensitive balance between handing out fish to those in distress and compelling the healthy to learn to fish for themselves is crucial. Anything less is actually an expression of condescension towards the poor because it disrespects them as fully capable beings just needing a break with the help of both carrots and sticks. Ke Nako!
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112945
Friday, June 18, 2010
We need to talk the 'white consciousness' blues
"BUT, Eusebius, we’re not all like that! Did you know that I don’t even think of myself as white?!” This plea-cum- rebuttal to my recent essay on white consciousness has been giving me food for thought. In the essay, which was carried in last weekend’s Sunday Times, I argued that white South Africans are not helped by an unhealthy dichotomy of views about white life in democratic SA.
Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.
I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.
While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.
I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.
This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.
There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?
I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.
Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.
As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?
Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.
However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.
To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215
Some, such as Rian Malan, bemoan a false sense of loss of citizenship power. Others, such as Antjie Krog, berate the Malan-like crew with the injunction that they rather join Krog in expressions of eternal gratitude for being well-treated by magnanimous blacks.
I concluded that whiteness comes out trapped somewhere between Malan’s victimhood motif and Krog’s cringe-worthy self- flagellation. A healthy “third way” out of this mess is for white folk to stop the Malan-like moaning festival and to participate fully within the democratic space but with their agencies fully intact, sans Krog.
While most responses to this essay have been unexpectedly complimentary, I am mindful of the fact that identity debates are not momentary events but continuing dialectical projects. For that reason, it is important to engage all critical responses fully.
I have been struck by one particular criticism. It is the plea-cum-rebuttal by especially some younger white South Africans that my very use of the concept of “white consciousness” is misplaced. The concept is jarring because it equates white skin with white identity. In pop-academic parlance, I am accused of essentialising whiteness.
This is problematic, so the objection goes, for at least two reasons. The white community is not homogenous. A Karen Zoid Afrikaner is a different beast from a Freedom Front Plus radical, and an English-speaking liberal white South African who helped with the Free Nelson Mandela campaign is different from both kinds of Afrikaner. In turn, a 15-year-old white South African, whether Afrikaans or English, has more in common with her black classmates than with these older white folks. In fact, her middle name might even be Winnie. Whiteness, it would appear, is therefore not susceptible to fair generalisation.
There is also a normative gripe with my analysis. Even if some generalisations are true, the tone of my argument suggests that we ought to see ourselves as raced individuals. But why can’t I just be Antjie from the block? Why must I be white Antjie from the block?
I genuinely feel the power of this objection. It speaks to the emotional complexity that identity stuff is about; a social fact that analytic philosophy wrongly tries to obliterate at times in its misplaced pursuit of conceptual perfection. It would therefore be callous, and not only intellectually sloppy, to dismiss this objection as a mere attempt by some whites to wish that race would just leave us all alone.
Yet, even so, I’d be lying if I said that these objections give me sleepless nights about the overall cogency of my analysis. Here is why.
As an important aside, first, it struck me how much more comfortable we are talking about black consciousness than about white consciousness. Somehow essentialising blackness is less egregious than essentialising whiteness. Why? Is it because “they are all the same” but “we” are not? I have not settled on a final explanation yet. But my heart and mind still grapple with why tropes in black behaviour the world over are a more legitimate target of sociological reflection than tropes in white behaviour. Black groups exist. But only white individuals exist. Why?
Much more importantly, identifying trends and tropes are not the same thing as essentialising. It is insane to have such a deep- seated fear of group categorisation. It is certainly understandable. After all, the institutional success of apartheid rested on socially constructed, biologically suspect, yet legally sanctioned group identities.
However, fear of a return to that past will prevent us from dealing with that past, once and for all. I say this because we need group categories for the instrumental purpose of eradicating the effect of our ugly past on our ugly present. In order to get to a future SA where we can do away with group categories, we need such categories in the meantime in order to design policies that can get us to a just society in which such categories will naturally have outstayed their welcome. Our past was constructed in group terms. It can only be undone in group terms. There is no nonracial route to a nonracial future.
To that end, it is useful to ask questions about how phenotypical whites are getting on in the new SA. This, in turn, occasions and justifies reflections on white consciousness. But it does not mean that I am reducing you to your whiteness or blackness. I am merely acknowledging the subtle interplay between group identities, even where these were imposed on us, and our individual agencies which fight to resist those categories in pursuit of autonomous self-definition. Talk about white consciousness is therefore a necessary evil. Even if “you are not all like that!” it remains true that many of you and us are like that. So let’s be painfully real about these things; the future demands that we do.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=112215
Friday, June 11, 2010
World Cup delusions will come back to bite us
TODAY marks the beginning of compulsory national happiness and collective amnesia for four weeks. The race war is temporarily called off. Beggars have been swept off the streets even in cities run by self-declared liberals. I suppose we would not want the Germans to notice our drunken uncles, lest they (the Germans, I mean) forget to return for the Christmas break. Not that we will succeed. At least one Daily Mail reporter will stumble upon our ugly Blikkiesdorp truths. Many of us are holding thumbs that even criminals will impose a four-week moratorium on themselves. All of this belatedly raises the question of whether the World Cup is worth it. I don’t think so.
One of two major benefits is that this event is one huge , positive public relations stunt. It is a chance to defeat Afro-pessimism. The rest of the world thinks we cannot stage an event of this magnitude successfully. Well, let’s disprove them.
Furthermore, SA have had some nasty international press coverage in recent times. Themes have ranged from the politically late Thabo Mbeki ’s irrational AIDS denialism to President Jacob Zuma ’s colourful carnal shenanigans, and in between all of that our various social scourges, such as violent crime, as well as economic and political scourges, such as tenderpreneurship and puzzling voting patterns on the international stage. The narrative about SA has not been cool. This is an opportunity to have a more positive story projected into the wide world. This constitutes the rebuilding of much needed social and political capital.
The second major benefit is that we seemingly have another shot at rainbow nation myth creation. Recall we were on the brink of a race war a few weeks ago, when a famous farmer was killed somewhere in the North West province? At least, that was the reality constructed by sections of both the print and broadcast media, who were hell bent on rehearsing and confirming their own fears.
I digress. Whether myth or reality, many see the World Cup as a chance to bring about genuine and lasting social cohesion and permanent postracial nirvana in the wake of overpowering racialism and racism. From now on, we will live in a colour-blind society, where white Afrikaans peeps from Pretoria will routinely hang out in Soweto and blacks, including members of the Black Management Forum, will shred their race cards as a gesture of goodwill.
Well, sorry fellow citizens, but all of this is one big self-delusional, self-inflicted half- truth, to put it mildly so that I do not spoil your excitement too much.
Of course one cannot deny that the public relations benefits are important. For better or worse, yes, Africa needs to defeat false beliefs about her capacity to make a positive contribution to life in the global village. I will grant the fact that the World Cup, if we pull it off over the next four weeks, yields that outcome.
However, the social cohesion stuff is silly. We just do not learn from history. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is falsely remembered as proof of sport’s ability to be a catalyst for bringing out lasting social cohesion. Films such as Invictus perpetuate such lies. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is, in fact, proof that sporting events can at best offer a temporary reprieve from disunity, not unlike the joyous feeling of slipping into a warm bath in the middle of winter. After a while, of course, the water gets cold and you are yanked back into reality, especially when Eskom has made it too costly for you to add more hot water.
The only way to ensure genuine social cohesion and a lasting reduction in inter- group anxieties is to tackle the real drivers of disunity, which are of course our immoral levels of income inequality and criminal levels of poverty. After the last German has left, these drivers will remain untouched. Consequently, any sense of national cohesion is temporary at best and fake at worst. It is irresponsible to imagine otherwise.
Besides these exaggerated advantages, there are also economic and sovereignty costs. One is the economic lie that we will see positive returns on the R32bn or so spent on the World Cup. With the global recession still affecting everyone, tourism is unlikely to get a boost. Furthermore, even if the gross domestic product improves, only some folk, such as the owners of big construction companies, will eat most of the additional pie.
Second, the loss of bits of our sovereignty to Fifa is both disgusting and, had civil society challenged it, surely also unconstitutional. Think, for example, of patients whose operations are postponed by four weeks. Add to that exemption for Fifa from tax laws, municipal bylaws restricting trade, and other questionable parts of the deal.
In the end, our deep insecurity about being incompetent Africans drove our excitement to take on this project. The opportunity cost will come back to bite us, however. I suggest you keep your vuvuzelas safe. You may need to donate them to folks in Blikkiesdorp to distract themselves from poverty that forgot to leave SA on an aircraft with the last football fan. The opiate that is mass sport is cruel fun.
One of two major benefits is that this event is one huge , positive public relations stunt. It is a chance to defeat Afro-pessimism. The rest of the world thinks we cannot stage an event of this magnitude successfully. Well, let’s disprove them.
Furthermore, SA have had some nasty international press coverage in recent times. Themes have ranged from the politically late Thabo Mbeki ’s irrational AIDS denialism to President Jacob Zuma ’s colourful carnal shenanigans, and in between all of that our various social scourges, such as violent crime, as well as economic and political scourges, such as tenderpreneurship and puzzling voting patterns on the international stage. The narrative about SA has not been cool. This is an opportunity to have a more positive story projected into the wide world. This constitutes the rebuilding of much needed social and political capital.
The second major benefit is that we seemingly have another shot at rainbow nation myth creation. Recall we were on the brink of a race war a few weeks ago, when a famous farmer was killed somewhere in the North West province? At least, that was the reality constructed by sections of both the print and broadcast media, who were hell bent on rehearsing and confirming their own fears.
I digress. Whether myth or reality, many see the World Cup as a chance to bring about genuine and lasting social cohesion and permanent postracial nirvana in the wake of overpowering racialism and racism. From now on, we will live in a colour-blind society, where white Afrikaans peeps from Pretoria will routinely hang out in Soweto and blacks, including members of the Black Management Forum, will shred their race cards as a gesture of goodwill.
Well, sorry fellow citizens, but all of this is one big self-delusional, self-inflicted half- truth, to put it mildly so that I do not spoil your excitement too much.
Of course one cannot deny that the public relations benefits are important. For better or worse, yes, Africa needs to defeat false beliefs about her capacity to make a positive contribution to life in the global village. I will grant the fact that the World Cup, if we pull it off over the next four weeks, yields that outcome.
However, the social cohesion stuff is silly. We just do not learn from history. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is falsely remembered as proof of sport’s ability to be a catalyst for bringing out lasting social cohesion. Films such as Invictus perpetuate such lies. The 1995 Rugby World Cup is, in fact, proof that sporting events can at best offer a temporary reprieve from disunity, not unlike the joyous feeling of slipping into a warm bath in the middle of winter. After a while, of course, the water gets cold and you are yanked back into reality, especially when Eskom has made it too costly for you to add more hot water.
The only way to ensure genuine social cohesion and a lasting reduction in inter- group anxieties is to tackle the real drivers of disunity, which are of course our immoral levels of income inequality and criminal levels of poverty. After the last German has left, these drivers will remain untouched. Consequently, any sense of national cohesion is temporary at best and fake at worst. It is irresponsible to imagine otherwise.
Besides these exaggerated advantages, there are also economic and sovereignty costs. One is the economic lie that we will see positive returns on the R32bn or so spent on the World Cup. With the global recession still affecting everyone, tourism is unlikely to get a boost. Furthermore, even if the gross domestic product improves, only some folk, such as the owners of big construction companies, will eat most of the additional pie.
Second, the loss of bits of our sovereignty to Fifa is both disgusting and, had civil society challenged it, surely also unconstitutional. Think, for example, of patients whose operations are postponed by four weeks. Add to that exemption for Fifa from tax laws, municipal bylaws restricting trade, and other questionable parts of the deal.
In the end, our deep insecurity about being incompetent Africans drove our excitement to take on this project. The opportunity cost will come back to bite us, however. I suggest you keep your vuvuzelas safe. You may need to donate them to folks in Blikkiesdorp to distract themselves from poverty that forgot to leave SA on an aircraft with the last football fan. The opiate that is mass sport is cruel fun.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
On respect, Mr Malema and other classy matters
I HAVE the deepest respect for Mr Peter Bruce, the editor of SA’s best daily, Business Day. And not only because he allows Eusebius McKaiser to write what he wants. Also because he is willing to say what’s on his mind.
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
One interesting surprise from this Monday’s column, for example, is Bruce’s suggestion that all people be shown respect in Business Day by having them referred to by their full titles. This is why I wash down breakfast on Mondays with The Thick End of the Wedge. Bruce has decided that from now on, even an artist formerly known as Juli-ass is to be referred to as Mr Malema, sir!
I think the idea is a fine one, actually. Respect, as many have claimed, goes a long way. Just ask joggers who pull middle fingers at presidential motorcades.
In essence, Bruce has my support on this one. It has, however, made me revisit some simmering thoughts about matters of class.
In one sense, Bruce is simply developing or resurrecting professional codes within the media. But it is also, I think, a class issue. There is something, isn’t there, about good old middle-class respect that requires titles to be, well, respected. Not just within the workplace but even domestically.
“Peter, go to your room at once, you naughty young man!”
“Yes, sir!”
My working-class dad would have frozen at that kind of upper middle-class linguistic marker of respect. Wish I had thought of calling him “Sir!” before I sneaked across class brackets.
I should, of course, acknowledge that respect itself is not class-specific, before I get lynched for implying that the poor unwashed masses lack it.
My gran, who was not unwashed, regularly told me: “Respect, my child, goes a looooong way!” But by that she did not mean I should call old Juli-ass Mr Malema. Although, she might have insisted that I call him Oom Juli-ass. His beer boep, after all, demands the respect of a big Oom, not unlike Oom Benni McCarthy’s.
In general, though, what my gran meant by respect was that I should not be blowing my nose at the lunch table and that I must never serve her church friends tea in cups that were not placed, so far as possible, on matching saucers. That was working-class respect, coloured with streaks of religiosity.
The more serious point I want to make is that class and income diverge sharply. In SA, we wrongly think of class and income as the same thing. This is why talk about the so- called black middle class, for example, drips with conceptual confusion.
Having a massive salary does not make you middle or upper class. It does not even, for that matter, indicate wealth.
Class is a function of many things, including language, accent, spending habits, tastes in food, clothing, education, what furniture you have or buy, drinks choices, what you read (if anything), table manners and so forth. Income is, at best, one marker.
But income is certainly not the sole or even the most important determinant of class.
Let’s take Juli-ass. Sorry, I meant to say Mr Malema. It does not matter how many tenders the man wins or how many Burberry bags he buys, he will remain working class.
No, I am not judging. I am just classifying. Upper-class toffs, for example, are not cute creatures. So it is not necessarily an insult to be working class.
And Malema is in good company. David Beckham, for example, will always be a chav — the English colloquialism for working-class folk of a particularly rough bent — regardless of what football bosses pay him.
Conversely, many journalists, academics and commentators are stuck in embarrassingly unimpressive living standards measure (LSM) brackets but could wear the tag “middle class” because they meet enough of the non-income aspects of the definition: education, language, accent, old furniture, book choices and so forth.
This is why even the term LSM is useless. It confuses income with living standard. I do not desire Malema’s “living standard” at all.
Does any of this matter?
In one sense, I guess not. Labels are just part of the language game that we play as sociolinguistic creatures.
In another sense, it does matter. We design social policies with measurable aims.
If we aim to increase the size of the middle class, we had better be clear whether we mean more folk with private bank accounts or more folk who prefer Business Day to dailies with smaller vocabularies, folk who resent wrestling shows on e.tv, folk who address people by their full titles.
Malema, funnily enough, knows all this. That is why he insists on remaining the son of a domestic worker.
Malema, unlike some of us, does not confuse class and income.
And he knows that class mobility, like elitism, is not for everyone
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
