APC participates in first HSRC Racism Dialogue

The HSRC held its first dialogue on racism at the Leriba Hotel in Centurion on 11 May 2016. The series of dialogues is intended to address racial inequalities and racism in South Africa: history, mechanisms and ideas for change.

The panel debate (with media panellists Justice Malala, Khadija Patel, Piet Rampedi and Angelo Fick) was led by journalist Siki Mgabadeli. Panelists observed that South Africa has racially not changed much over the last 22 years – the deeply entrenched apartheid legacies were deeply structural and systemic. Fick asserted that racism was not unlearnt on 27 April 1994 and that we have arrived at this crisis because (in some part) the 1950 Population Registration Act was reinforced in post-apartheid South Africa. 

Justice Malala pointed out the irony that though much of the media was black owned (For instance, Independent Newspapers is owned by Iqbal Surve; the whole of the SABC Board is black; eNCA is owned more than 30% by a trade union), there is still the need to question the role media plays in keeping racism in place, such as putting dead black people in newspapers, but not dead white bodies.

Rampedi spoke on ‘whiteness’ in mainstream media such as that shack fires do not matter, but mountain fires in white residential areas do.  A hot issue of debate amongst the panellists was on the question of whether black people could themselves also be racist or not since racism is rooted in structural and economic systems; that we need to address the political economy of racism and how it works.

Fick pointed out that real decisions are made outside of institutions (such as at off campus socials and within old established racialized power networks). But the structural workings of racism aside, it was the everyday racism (the apartheid idea that you need to put black people ‘in their place’) that was now increasingly haunting South Africa such as in the recent media reports on the utterances of Penny Sparrow and Judge Mabel Jansen. 

A debate ensued on whether racism should be criminalised. A participant questioned the panel on whether such public ‘outing’ of racists was in any way helpful.  Another participant found that the media was ‘reactive’ to individual racism instead of addressing how to reconfigure and restructure the media in terms of power and economic relations of control and narratives.

Rampedi highlighted ‘race denialism’ in a racialized economy and that the mainstream media was complicit in fostering ‘denialism’ as the framework of contemporary narratives. Mgabadeli provoked discussion on whether we are lying to ourselves as a society, and whether the media was in fact participating in this ‘denial’. 

Patel pointed to the problematic of ‘the expected narrative’ and that any divergence from that narrative was met with hostility in the public domain. A participant commented that normalising black pain has become a global problem and South Africa was part of global racism where black lives do not matter. We therefore have to address reinforced generational and global racism. 

A young participant questioned the Constitution of 1996 and whether it was transformative as it was a product of consensus within which the media circulates its narratives.

In his closing remarks, HSRC CEO Professor Crain Soudien posed the question of what it is we know and how we make it meaningful in our lives; that we also needed major dialogues on gender.  How do we teach our children in ways that we live differently? We have to find answers in the past 300 years of colonisation; we have to turn that all around in how and what we teach in schools and universities.

Racism has damaged people around the world; European ‘civilisations’ have been built on woundedness. We need to therefore listen very carefully to the words that we use, and we really need to talk about ‘black pain’. 

Emerging from this first debate is the realisation that as South Africans, we have made assumptions about our relations to the state, expecting that political and economic structures would by default provide the anti-racist interventions necessary for our democracy and that there is little everyday civic responsibility in this charge. What do we do with the spaces created in 1994? What is our respective agency in taking responsibility in everyday anti-racist work?

The series moved to Cape Town on 27 May and to Durban on 14 June and Port Elizabeth on 28 June.