“So, let’s recap,” says Noah. “B-BBEE, by dividing the population into racial silos and imposing mandatory quotas for each, is racialist in concept. In its implementation, which concentrates exclusively on satisfying the quota for blacks, it becomes nakedly racist. The former is probably unconstitutional; the latter certainly is.”
“Well, suppose that’s true,” says Seamus. “The problem is easily solved. Scrap the silo system and restore the system of affirmative action we once knew. Set a goal for blacks, insist that proper efforts are made to achieve it, then monitor the process carefully.
“Why?” I try not to sound challenging but fail.
“Why should blacks be preferred in this way? Can’t they stand on their own two feet?”
“No,” says Seamus, “their legs have been cut out from under them by apartheid. They must now be rehabilitated and, by setting and policing appropriate quotas, we can give them the leg-up they deserve.”
“Are they cripples, then, cripples who need – what’s the word? – prosthetic limbs? Is this what you are saying?” Sean asks.
A fine picnic is stretching out behind us but, as you can tell, the occasion is by no means over. The others may seem fine, but I am struggling. In my mind’s eye, I am faced with a gazillion Douglas Baders, each of them black-skinned, battling to move around on the peg-legs with which they have been issued and are now forced to wear. That the poor souls are miserable stands to reason; their gait is not straight and they are forced eternally to struggle, as though in Dante’s Inferno, with a form of Infirmative Action which they cannot leggo.
I emulate Macbeth. By crying “Avaunt, and quit my sight!”, I am able to dispatch the horrific image, every bit as terrifying as the spectre of Banquo. If only it were so easy to ban quotas.
Noah suffers from no such distractions.
Up and running, he asks Seamus how the goal should be set.
“By reference to the racial composition of the country,” is the answer. “You set a target, say eighty percent representation for blacks at every level of society, and in pursuit of the redress I favour, prefer blacks for advancement until it is reached.”
“Lesser condition”
“Your system of redress,” says Noah, “supposes that, were it not for apartheid, blacks would today be the equal of whites. According to you, the lesser condition of blacks is the result of nothing but the programme of discrimination inflicted on them by whites. Not so?”
Seamus nods.
“This, my dear friend, simply cannot be true,” says Noah.
“Blacks and whites are not dodgem cars in which a bang by one produces an exact recoil by the other. Each group has a pre-existing culture that shapes its separate progression. Take the Jews ….”
“Ah, the Jews!” says Sean.
“Yes, the Jews. They have suffered centuries of discrimination but have emerged triumphant. They have a culture that reveals a will to survive, indeed flourish, however dismally they are treated. Survive and flourish they certainly have: if you want proof, simply count the number of Nobel prizes they have won.
“What this tells us is that groups are divergent. The examples can be multiplied. Thomas Sowell, the sainted US philosopher, has beautifully made the point that, faced with the same circumstances, no two groups will react, respond, and progress in precisely the same way. As he stresses, regimes of oppression do not invariably produce a reciprocal level of disadvantage. No doubt, it would suit your theory if they did, but they don’t.”
“So what?” says Seamus. I start. “Soooo, Watt …” is what typically heralded an act of condign punishment at the hands of my overbearing schoolteachers. I bear the scars.
“So what?” Noah repeats. “So, a lot. Given the primordial divergence between groups, we have no reliable way of establishing the extent to which discrimination impairs the progress of one group as compared to another. The issue is too intractable for ready resolution.
“Sole cause”
“All we can say for certain is that we have no right to presume that discrimination is the sole cause of a disparity in group outcomes. Yet this is precisely the assumption your argument makes, Seamus, and it is precisely the assumption our lawmakers have made in framing B-BBEE.
“Upon the assumption that racial discrimination is solely responsible for racial disparities, they have erected a creed that says black people, being worse off, are entitled to a stream of benefits sufficient to make them the equal of whites. This, I am afraid, is naked racism.
“So, you ask, what do I, Noah, envisage?”
No one, as it happens, had asked him this question, but he felt entitled to ask a rhetorical question by way of engagement with the rhetorical question they had not asked.
“I envisage a world in which decision-makers enquire and treat each case on its merits. In the process, they would be free, indeed encouraged, to seek out past disadvantage in the subjects of the decision and bring it appropriately into account. The choice would be theirs, of course, but I don’t doubt that it would favour people who happen to be black. Pro-Black choices are highly cost-efficient in a market that is now overwhelmingly black.
“If we implemented what I suggest,” says Noah, “then we Saffers could take a bow. We would be able to say, heads held high, that we had at last cured ourselves of the disease of separate development.”
Sean, who knows his history, goes pop.
“What’s wrong with you Saffers?” he exclaims. “Since time immemorial, one group or the other has begged for legislative protections and benefits. Look at the pathetic parade: it goes from white preference from the twenties, through apartheid from the fifties, through separate development in the mid-sixties, only to culminate in Black Economic Empowerment, still with you people following transition. Each time it’s the same story. ‘Please help us, O mighty lawmakers, because we can’t compete on our own.’ What a bunch of racist arseholes!”
Another reverie
This brings the party to an end. I am pleased. I have reason to fear another reverie, this time one in which there is a racist to the bottom.
As I bid our kind guests farewell, I resolve to rein Noah in. If he really wants to have these heavy exchanges, I shall create a salon to which the intelligentsia alone are invited. Upon the arrival of this coterie – I see bespectacled women in dirndl skirts and weedy men in tweedy jackets – I shall proffer provisions comprising plates of cucumber sandwiches and beakers of dandelion wine. I shall then plead indisposition as an excuse for absenting myself.
Saying I have a headache should do it – it has worked in the past.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
If you like what you have just read, support the Daily Friend