In the very week in which the Institute of Race Relations delivered a memorandum to the Presidency warning the government about the costs of abusing citizens, the ruling party’s deputy secretary general, Jessie Duarte, provided a vivid illustration of exactly what we meant.
What we meant is summed up on the first page of the memorandum in a list of all too recognisable conditions.
Citizen abuse, we said, happens when the state:
- Takes its citizens for granted;
- Steals from taxpayers;
- Wastes resources and money meant for community upliftment;
- Appoints incompetent staff and officials;
- Fails to take action against corruption and incompetence;
- Introduces policies that harm the economy and deny access to economic opportunities;
- Insults or stigmatises some citizens on grounds of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, socio-economic status, or sexual orientation;
- Undermines the rights and freedoms citizens enjoy;
- Opposes citizens’ efforts to build better communities; and
- Physically abuses citizens by, for example, shooting at them, beating them, torturing them, or confiscating their goods and assets.
Not a day passes in the life of South Africans in 2021 without a multiple of these abuses registering as an unwelcome reminder of just how shoddily the African National Congress is governing the country.
On Tuesday, it fell to Duarte to deliver the latest reminder when she made time to lead a picket outside the eNCA head office in Hyde Park in protest over what has emerged to have been a contrived ‘racist’ controversy involving parliamentary reporter Lindsay Dentlinger.
The saga stemmed from a stitched-together video montage – we still don’t know who manufactured it – purporting to show Dentlinger insisting that only black interviewees wear masks. More on this in a minute.
No exception
The outraged – who are never inclined to stop and think – needed no encouragement to condemn Dentlinger and eNCA as racist. And Duarte was no exception.
In the obvious absence of any attempt to inquire into the details, Duarte was content merely to demand that eNCA management withdraw its ‘offensive’ statement, and ‘send an unconditional apology to all South Africans for the pain and hurt that Dentlinger and eNCA have caused’.
If she cared a jot about the ‘pain and suffering’ of South Africans, you might have thought the deputy secretary general of a party presiding over a national governance crisis – collapsing municipalities, rampant corruption, multi-billion rand mismanagement, rising unemployment, ballooning debt, a faltering energy supply, stagnant economic growth, and debilitating investor pessimism – wouldn’t have time to squander on hounding a television journalist without bothering to determine whether it was justified or not.
It’s no surprise, then, that what she found ‘offensive’ was the broadcaster’s statement that ‘after meeting with Dentlinger to discuss the matter, (eNCA management) concluded that her conduct was not racially motivated or with malicious intent’ (sic).
That, in fact, is the long and the short of it.
To its credit, News24 took the trouble to investigate, and its findings are revealing – showing, among other things, that the montage ‘was stitched together from four separate dates, with one [a supposedly telling interview with maskless DA MP Geordin Hill-Lewis] pre-dating eNCA guidelines on masks’, and that over this period, Dentlinger did interview black politicians without asking them to put on their masks.
What is clear from the summary of facts is that what might have seemed to cognitively benumbed social media enthusiasts to be an exposure of deliberate racism or racial bias was in fact a sequence of events over a period of months in which there is no evidence of malicious intent or conduct that could be said to have been racially motivated.
‘Hallmark of injustice’
Why this matters was keenly expressed only last month by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote: ‘A hallmark of injustice is indifference to intention. Most of what is cruel, intolerant, stupid and misjudged in life stems from that indifference.’
Perversely enough, Stephens’ column was never published in the New York Times because it was written in defence of fellow Times writer, Donald G. McNeil Jr, who had effectively been fired following ‘the revelation that he had uttered a racial slur while on a New York Times trip to Peru for high school students’.
Put like that, it looks bad. A lot of people thought the same – in the absence of inquiry – in Dentlinger’s case.
But the McNeil story goes like this: ‘In the course of a dinner discussion,’ Stephens wrote, ‘he was asked by a student whether a 12-year-old should have been suspended by her school for making a video in which she had used a racial slur. In a written apology to staff, McNeil explained what happened next: “To understand what was in the video, I asked if she had called someone else the slur or whether she was rapping or quoting a book title. In asking the question, I used the slur itself.”’
At first, reason prevailed. Stephens writes that in an initial note to staff, editor-in-chief Dean Baquet noted that, after conducting an investigation, he was satisfied that McNeil had not used the slur maliciously.
But a protest from other staffers led to a change of heart, and a few days later managing editor Joe Kahn reached a different decision, based on the extraordinary rationale that ‘we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent’.
We are becoming increasingly familiar in South Africa with such concessions to unreason.
Indifference to intention is equivalent to indifference to what makes us human, and how we grapple with the manifold moral and material difficulties that being human entails. Such indifference amounts to a profound disregard for people and how their ideals and values, their learning and their life experience, inform how they choose to conduct themselves.
Seeming lapses
That we never can match the perfectibility of saints does not mean we don’t deserve to be judged fairly, and to have our seeming lapses, errors of judgement, inconsistencies or perceived failures measured against our intentions.
The task, as Stephens argued in his column on Donald G. McNeil, is to ‘try to perceive intent, examine motive, furnish context, explore nuance, explain varying shades of meaning, forgive fallibility, make allowances for irony and humour, slow the rush to judgement (and therefore outrage), and preserve vital intellectual distinctions’.
I worked with Lindsay Dentlinger in the Cape Argus newsroom in the early 2000s, and came to know her as a principled, informed, hard-working and considered journalist, and a thoughtful, well-rounded, sympathetic human being who stood on her merits and judged others on theirs.
I was not aware of Dentlinger’s ever dwelling on her status as someone whom the race nationalists of the past considered inferior because of the colour of her skin – and perhaps because, within herself, she defeated the very notion of racialism by her own unprejudiced engagement with friends, colleagues and strangers.
How ironic, then, that the race nationalists of today so eagerly contrive to cast her as a perpetrator of the very thinking of which she was once a victim, and are willing to make her a victim of it again.
There is some comfort in realising how deluded they are in thinking we are fooled by the insult. It is contemptible that they fail to see that it insults us, too.
[Image: Rodin’s The Thinker, Christian Peters from Pixabay]
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