First a global New York, then a global Johannesburg.

Zohran Mamdani, a communist who has somehow become the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, has a track record that would make the EFF feel right at home.

He has advocated for government-run grocery stores, called for the defunding of the police, and stated – quite plainly – that his end goal is the “seizing [of] the means of production.” While not all of this appears on his formal campaign platform, it reflects the ideological current that has shaped his political career.

Like most communists today, Mamdani is also entirely race-obsessed – which makes his latest scandal all the more revealing. When applying to Columbia University in 2009, Mamdani ticked the box identifying himself as “African-American” – a term universally understood to mean black, despite the fact that he is of Muslim Indian heritage. His justification? He was born in Uganda and claims a “complex identity.” And in a world where race didn’t function as social currency, who would care?

But race does matter – deeply – in many aspects of life across both the West and South Africa. Identity now functions as a gatekeeping mechanism. Tick the right box, and you’re welcomed in. Tick the wrong one, and doors slam shut.

By the same logic, Elon Musk qualifies as African-American too – born in Pretoria, raised in South Africa, with far deeper African roots than many who wear the label in U.S. academic circles. Somehow, I doubt that the US far-left would accept that.

Despite this, America is beginning to fight back against race-based policy. The Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to the DEI apparatus, issuing executive orders to purge diversity ideology from federal agencies, dismantling DEI offices, and launching investigations into universities that violate the new merit-based framework. Major corporations – from Amazon to Meta – have started quietly walking back DEI targets. Furthermore, in 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling outlawing race-based admissions in colleges, restoring the principle that individuals should be judged by merit, not ancestry.

Contrast that with South Africa, which is not just maintaining, but doubling down on racial engineering. Third-wave BEE policies now seek to restrict able-bodied white men to no more than 5% of entry-level positions in many industries – regardless of qualifications, performance, or market need. The rules are tightening year by year and eventually even small private companies with no links to the state may find themselves non-compliant and effectively locked out of the economy.

In light of the recent scandal involving Mamdani, an unusual, albeit not entirely serious, proposal resurfaced from tech-right monarchist provocateur Curtis Yarvin. A software engineer and political blogger with alleged ties to Peter Thiel, he reportedly offers informal advice to Elon Musk’s new America Party. Yarvin has long been known for his deliberately incendiary takes on democracy and race.

Posting on X, he wrote:

“Time to resurrect my big reparations proposal of transferable Blackness. The Black man can monetize his Black status. Sell it – admissions, work lawsuits, general chip on shoulder – to some Ivy-eyed needful Ugandan babu. Hereditary ofc.”

Was he joking? Probably. But with Yarvin, you can never be entirely sure. What is certain, though, is that however absurd this idea may sound, it is more humane than the ANC’s existing race-based regime.

This is because, by contrast, Yarvin’s model would at least make privilege tradable. It’s the difference between racial communism and racial capitalism. Under the former, you’re excluded by birth. Under the latter, you might be able to buy your way in.

Imagine a world where, instead of banning people from jobs, tenders, or universities for being the wrong race, we simply allowed them to offset their whiteness – just like carbon emissions. Who knows, perhaps South Africa could reach net-zero whiteness by 2050. Enter the Equity Credit System, a bold new vision of race-based capitalism fit for the 21st century.

Under this system, every year, individuals classified as black, female, or disabled would receive a fixed number of Equity Credits. These credits serve as golden tickets to opportunity: they boost your priority for jobs, university admissions, government contracts, procurement deals, and more. Here’s the twist: these credits are fully transferable. Don’t need them? Sell them. Lease them. Bundle them into ETFs. If you’re a black, disabled woman, you’ve essentially struck policy gold, but if you’re a poor, able-bodied white male – well, tough luck Boet. You should have chosen your ancestors more wisely.

Now let’s say a foreign entrepreneur, like Elon Musk, wants to launch Starlink in South Africa. Under current laws, he would need to partner with the right empowerment consortium and play the usual backroom games. Yet in the Equity Credit era, the process is refreshingly straightforward. All Elon needs is a net balance of 10,000 Equity Credits to legally operate. So he calls a few ANC branch chairs, attends a golf day or two, and walks away with the credits in hand. No more BEE scorecards or fuzzy transformation targets – just a clean, liquid market in moral debt.

This system opens up an entirely new industry: derivatives on the JSE based on fluctuations in race, gender, and disability indices. There could be an “Equity 40” index fund, tracking the most empowered demographics. In time, even a rural woman in Limpopo could earn passive income by selling her disability status to 15 Stellenbosch wine farms. Now that’s empowerment.

Of course, the Equity Credit System is satire – an absurd mirror held up to an already absurd reality. It isn’t justice, but then again, neither is the current system. At least this one is honest. It embraces the logic of the status quo and simply makes it explicit: race as currency, identity as capital, grievance as yield. With enough trading, whiteness itself could become a liability – something to be offset through transaction, repentance, and strategic partnerships. It is not a serious policy proposal, but it does reflect something deadly serious: the moral bankruptcy of the race-based policy regime that governs South Africa today.

If the past 30 years of racial engineering had succeeded, we wouldn’t need more of it, yet these policies are not being loosened – they are being tightened. That’s why the Referendum Party has introduced the Non-Racialism Bill, a proposal to finally put an end to race-based laws. Already backed by over 12,000 South Africans and set to be presented to Parliament this week, the Bill amends Section 9 of the Constitution – not to erase the past, but to ensure that any future efforts at redress are based on individual circumstances, not crude racial categorisation. It prohibits blanket policies that punish one person to uplift another, and demands a future in which equality means exactly what it says.

It is time to cash out of a race-obsessed past and start building a country where merit matters more than melanin.

The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.

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Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons


contributor

Robert King is a politics, philosophy, and economics student, economy spokesperson for the Referendum Party and co-founder of the Cape Youth Front.