If it carries the suggestion of racism, it’s bound to grab attention. So, it was entirely expected that the goings-on in a suburban High School in the Western Cape would become a national story, lingering on for weeks.
To recap: a controversy erupted at Fish Hoek High School, sparked by the use by a teacher of one of our talismanic racially-loaded words. Students protested, taking to social media to highlight their grievances. The school penitently admitted to not having lived up to its values, and the provincial education department sent in a diversity consultant to handle the situation. The intervention involved a closed session – literally, as attendees were prohibited from recording it, or leaving – in which the school’s learners were lectured about the correct way to view racism. Learners were, media reports had it, left ‘traumatised.’
The responses from the parent body – and although news reports necessarily tell a partial story, it seems this included parents of all complexions – were vocal and angry. The impression that I gleaned from the coverage was of a parent body that held the school in high regard. And whatever problems may have existed in the institution, THIS was not how they wanted them handled.
Reactions from outside the school varied from unsupportive to scathing. Political parties and activist groups protested. The Freedom Front Plus complained: ‘Under no circumstances may children be bullied and traumatised behind closed doors in such a Nazi-like way’. Cilliers Brink of the Democratic Alliance opined: ‘The demonising of people, particularly of children, on the basis of race has absolutely no place in our constitutional democracy.’ (Brink’s party colleague in the Western Cape Ministry of Education, David Maynier, said that it should ‘never have happened’.) Alana Bailey of Afriforum remarked on the questionable exclusion of staff: ‘Teachers have a duty to protect children’s interests and when they are kept away from conversations with learners, that is a clear red flag.’
Educationist Prof Jonathan Jansen, hardly a figure averse to speaking out on racism (or for that matter particularly positively disposed to the groups mentioned above), wrote: ‘It is hard to imagine a transformation effort going so horribly wrong.’
(Professions of support were few, although it’s worth noting that a group of ‘just over 30’ alumni of private and Model C schools – it’s not clear whether any of them had links to Fish Hoek High – expressed support for the initiative, while claiming not to have been ‘privy’ to the events. The ANC in the Western Cape predictably attacked the suspension of the programme.)
The facilitator, Asanda Ngoasheng, was unrepentant, telling an interviewer that discomfort was part of the experience and was to be expected when people were confronted with the misdeeds of their ancestors. The training she provides is ‘to develop a culture of dialogue and debate on these issues without sowing further division and discord.’
In other words, this is about having those ‘difficult conversations’.
I’m not so sure about this. ‘Difficult’ they may be, and they may be so intended; whether these are ‘conversations’ is another matter. This is certainly the case if we understand conversations to mean the free and respectful exchange of views with the possibility of mutual understanding and influence. A species of deliberation, in other words.
And looking at what Ms Ngoasheng has had to say about her work, I don’t see a conversation. ‘As South Africans, we don’t have agreed definitions of racism’, she said. But this is evidently not something to be discussed. Rather, this is something which her training is designed to correct. As she helpfully indicated, ‘many people have an outdated definition of racism [as] clear and blatant hatred of one group of people by another’, but they need to understand that ‘it is institutional.’
No need for deliberation, then, merely for the delivery of the truth, a service which Ms Ngoasheng and the diversity industry can provide. For a fee.
Let me say clearly that I think that managing diversity is an important skill. Put aside the saccharine our-diversity-is-our-strength bromides, it is increasingly a fact of life that we need to reckon with. Whether ‘diversity’ is positive or negative depends on the precise nature and circumstances at hand. A country like South Africa is an extremely diverse one, on any number of levels, of which race is only one, and not intrinsically the most difficult to deal with: try linguistic diversity where we struggle to comprehend one another’s words, or religious diversity where we hold opposing cosmologies.
Or try diversities of thought. Sometimes we – any one of us – may view things very differently from our peers. That is not only inevitable, it’s arguably the most important normative offer that a free society can make: each of us is free to think about the world around us as we wish and as it makes sense.
Yet this seems to be pretty much what Ms Ngoasheng is trying to circumscribe. What she is effectively pursuing is conformity. It’s also hard to see how this contributes to resolving any of the tensions that her work is supposedly geared at, since her approach dispenses with what I’d regard as a necessary foundational step of any good faith effort at problem solving: working through legitimate divergent understandings of the problem at hand. What she is suggesting is that there’s no need for that: agree with me, and we can have a conversation on that basis.
Something like ‘institutional racism’ is an intellectual proposition, and should be open to interrogation – including the idea that it may fail to stand up to scrutiny. I would argue that it conflates the idea of racial disparities with the idea of racism. (This is the approach taken by the doyen of ‘anti-racism’ thinking, Ibrahim X Kendi, but widely propagated independently of him – read former President Thabo Mbeki’s address at the opening of the National Conference on Racism in 2000 for a flavour of this.) To me, the much remarked-upon ‘imbalances’ in South African society speak significantly (though by no means completely) to a past history that was shaped by racism and nationalisms bound up with it. Does it denote ‘racism’ in the here and now?
Well, according to the ‘institutional racism’ postulate, yes. But I can’t help but think that there is a semantic sleight of hand going on. For however racism may have been redefined in terms of the ‘updated definition’, at some level, we interpret it in terms of morality and blameworthiness. If racism exists, we assume that racists exist, and this is quite apart from the claims sometimes made that the former can exist without the latter.
Having defined the terms of engagement thus, and having removed the possibility of disputing them, the whole racism ‘conversation’ starts to resemble a moral bludgeon. Some will be cast as perpetrators, others as victims – locked up in an ‘institutional’ framework that offers a possibility of redemption only with the complete transformation of society. This is deeply political and ideological, and it’s important that those seeking to contract these services understand this.
Palesa Morudu Rosenberg, a South African writer currently in the US, wrote a very interesting piece in News24 about the controversy. She was highly critical of the diversity field as a ‘big money industry’ drawing its impetus from the United States, and highly complimentary about the school and its learners, to which she had some personal connection. She also offered some commonsense observations as to how thoroughly misguided the entire approach was.
But I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to this:
A US-style DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] intervention here was always likely to fall flat – and so it did. But it also highlights the growing influence of American race consciousness and culture wars on the South African conversation. The one side of this campaign finds expression in identity politics and racial essentialism, which is the toxic antithesis of South Africa’s traditions of non-racialism. The reaction, no less salutary, comes in the form of a campaign against ‘critical race theory’, which conveniently simply doesn’t want to talk about racism. The local purveyors of both snake-oil trades are quick to spot an opportunity.
There are two points to digest here. The first is that she echoes a concern I have about the ideological thrust of this sort of intervention. I would add that I sense something rather cynical going on here. The diversity industry can be called that for a reason: it is producing and marketing a service for a fee. If racism is omnipresent even where one struggles to identify an actual racist – if it’s ‘institutional’ ̶ then it’s an industry with an endless and ever-expanding market. Where we have a shifting vocabulary (complete with definitions in danger of becoming ‘outdated’), it’s possible to keep the objectives moving with innovative product offerings to match. There is a great deal of professional and pecuniary opportunity at stake here, and not a great deal of incentive to actually resolve anything. I give a wan smile when I read the impassioned pleas from diversity consultants not to see this as something to be dealt with in a single workshop. Teresa Oakley-Smith has approvingly invoked Malcolm X’s analogy of racism to a Cadillac whose model changes year by year: ‘Racism proves itself a chameleon-like creature, manifesting itself and always one step ahead’, she warned in a 2010 op-ed. Rather gear up for a long journey. A tough journey. An elusive journey. An expensive journey. A journey with an endpoint always over the next horizon.
Lovelyn Nwadeyi, another prominent diversity consultant, managed to combine all these impulses in a succinct appeal: ‘Consult a social justice practitioner committed to anti-racism, NOT non-racialism (that thing is dead and tired now’). (Note, incidentally, that anti-racism is not merely a more muscular version of non-racism, but an opposing position.)
With regard to her reference to Critical Race Theory, I would disagree that this is a non-issue. I have written about it extensively, and I would suggest that much of what has been imported (as she bemoans) has originated in that school of thought. However, to the extent that some activists may invoke CRT as a portmanteau concept to cover all discussion of racism indiscriminately – and to avoid it – she is correct. Racism is a sad part of human interaction, a regrettable, often vicious and always damaging one, for victims and perpetrators alike. To ignore racism as a factor in South African history, for example, is to willingly engage in myopia. Dealing with it is important; encouraging amity among people is eminently desirable for a functioning society, particularly for a diverse one.
Except perhaps at society’s fringes and in its shadows, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would wish to defend racism. When it is alleged, when people fear that they have been so targeted, it behoves a good society to take this seriously. There should be no reason why discussion of racism should be taboo or threatening – provided doing so does in fact take the form of real deliberation, rather than hectoring or lecturing.
Deliberation is untidy, discomfiting and unpredictable, much like the human condition itself. It can only be doubly so in respect of issues around racism, a matter that evokes so much emotion. Deliberation offers the possibility of understanding. Understanding is an imperfect tool for bridging differences, but the best we have for doing so. To speak openly and honestly is to allow the spectrum of reasoning and feeling within ourselves to match against those of others, to gain insights and to build empathy. Not only in the service of our relationships with others, but as the American philosopher Prof Andrew F Smith writes in his book The Deliberative Impulse, public debate is motivated by what we owe to our own convictions’’.
It is thus that we might have ‘difficult conversations’. These would be conversations unguided by the regimentation of ideology, or by pre-existing conclusions, but by a desire to comprehend and to be understood, where our assumptions (attached to them though we might be) are open to question and challenge, and alternative hypothesis accepted for interrogation.
That means dispensing with prescription; acknowledging that each of us may understand racism – or any other pathology – differently from our peers. That something may come across to one person as offensive while to another it might seem benign. That something may be interpreted as bigoted by one person when it was in all sincerity not meant in that way by his or her interlocutor. I hasten to add that in saying this, I explicitly reject the reductionist chop-logic that posits group binaries between oppressors and oppressed, whites and blacks or anything of that nature – white perspectives versus black perspectives and the like. Each of us is marked by an individual outlook and suite of experiences, even if we strongly identify with a collective. It’s important to capture and work through individual nuances as part of such an endeavour. People of goodwill can in this environment seek to resolve their challenges. And if issues remain unresolved, at least they may be acknowledged.
This would be an approach that actually takes diversity seriously. These would indeed be ‘difficult conversations’, as they would be open to addressing the complexities of our social experience in a way that Ms Ngoasheng and many of her peers seem to have declined to do.
The diversity industry might do a great service if it were to reorient itself on this.
Prof Smith concludes his book with these words: ‘We may have our doubts and fears, in particular about engaging with our adversaries. And it is certainly the case that trust must be earned. But if our energy to engage is lacking, if we refuse to rise to this challenge, we betray the best of who we can be.’
These would have been apt words for Fish Hoek High School.
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