The professor has left. I mourn the departure of his tall, elegant frame and must seek consolation—indeed, diversion—in the bustling presence of Noah, that dear and lovely man.
Noah stands before me. In his hand, he holds a sheet of paper bearing the written imprint of his thoughts. I am impressed. Writing, I have come to believe, is antediluvian and, since Noah by definition cannot have qualities that precede the flood, I had surmised that he, too, must have become unorthographic.
Once again, I have erred. He is no archetype, that’s clear. Being wrong on this point pleases me. I like my men to be unpredictable.
Proudly, he proffers the document. “Would you like to read this?” he asks.
“Of course,” I reply. My enthusiasm is feigned. I have long since learnt that relationships between lovers—I refuse to call us partners, as though we were a law firm—need to be larded with dollops of hypocrisy. I suppose this is true of relationships generally.
The document summarises what the professor has taught us. Reading it (a little too cursorily for Noah’s liking), I say, “Excellent. A summary at once faithful and brief. With practice, you might become a fine lawyer!”
Noah dons his lawyerly face. “Not funny,” he says. “What part of ‘sarcasm is the lowest form of wit’ don’t you understand?” Was this sarcasm, I wonder, or was it irony?
I apologise, forcing a note of sincerity into my voice, and continue. “Well, it is excellent—indeed, superb. Shall we put it into our file of memorabilia, or perhaps frame it and hang it in the loo?”
“You’re incorrigible, and nasty to boot,” he says. “My purpose in penning it was to collect my thoughts; my purpose in giving it to you is to invite you to use it in your next column. I suspect you are beginning to scratch around for material—or is that being nasty, too?”
I sigh. I submit. I am the victim of force majeure, as Noah’s ilk describe superior force.
So I offer the writing up to you.
- Apartheid did not treat blacks as “second-class citizens.” It treated them as non-citizens, much in the way that the Emiratis treat foreign migrant labour. Its attitude was basically tribal: whites are insiders, blacks are outsiders.
- By the standards of the nation-state, tribalism of this sort is very bad. Blacks are not foreigners but inhabitants of a unitary country. Moreover, discriminating by reference to race is utterly, totally, and completely taboo.
- The Constitution institutionalises these points. It says everyone is entitled to equal treatment and no unfair discrimination is permissible on visceral grounds, race not least. It also says that racial differentiation will be presumed to be unfair until the contrary is proved.
- In addition, the Constitution expressly says that measures are permissible if their object is to remedy past discrimination against the individual or group. This clause plainly contemplates remedial affirmative action.
- Segmenting the country by race and insisting on representation proportionate to population is not remedial. It is race-norming. There is nothing in principle wrong with this: Singapore employs just such a programme in an effort to still racial tension and promote peace and stability. In SA, however, such social engineering—for this is what it is—plainly offends against the Equality clause, being racialist in content and unresponsive to past disadvantage.
- Supporters of the current system say that race can legitimately be utilized as a proxy for past disadvantage. This argument is untenable unless we can be sure that, but for apartheid, blacks would be the equal of whites in every sphere of society. This is laughably simplistic: groups obviously differ in culture, creed, and character, as everyone who has even a passing knowledge of the world will accept.
- The same supporters say that tallying heads by race is the only way to ensure satisfactory reparations. As a matter of fact, this is untrue: programmes against poverty will, by targeting the poor, naturally promote the interests of blacks, who are preponderantly impoverished. As a matter of law, it is constitutionally impermissible, since using race as a proxy for disadvantage without a reasonable justification for doing so is the very pith and essence of racialism. Racialism is constitutionally outlawed, pure and simple.
- Finally, the supporters contend that, by permitting the use of race for remedial purposes, the lawgiver must have contemplated – and so implicitly endorsed – the regime of segregated benefits we now have. This conclusion doesn’t follow. Race should be used as a proxy only when there is no other reasonable way to solve a problem. In hiring, this will never be so. In matters of broad policy, it can be, since it can happen that an object cannot sensibly be achieved without recourse to racial criteria. For example, a school feeding scheme may be administratively impracticable unless race is used as a proxy for malnourishment. Such cases will, in the nature of things, be rare.
Well, well. Noah asked me to offer this up, and I agreed. I didn’t have to, and you didn’t have to read it. If you elected not to, I fully understand. Thirty years have elapsed since the transition, and matters of race have become too dull for words. You now have to be our President, one of his acolytes, an opportunist, or a tendrepreneur to believe that, by race-norming, we can solve the problems of inequality that we face.
“But how,” I ask plaintively, “did we get into such a mess? How do we find ourselves replicating the structures of racial segregation in a country constitutionally committed to non-racialism? We seem to return to race-based discrimination like a dog to its vomit.”
“Well,” Noah says, “it didn’t have to be so.”
“Why not?” I ask. My not entirely cynical view is that racialists, both the well-meaning and the vicious ones, are omnipresent. At night, I have been known to check under the bed to see if one is lurking there. But I was brought up on the old, not very funny joke that a black woman who was impregnated during a trip to the moon was proof that the South African Police are everywhere.
“About twenty-five years ago,” Noah explains, “the Constitutional Court gave the current system of race-based social engineering a free pass. In an infamous judgment, Van Heerden, it held that the presumption of unfairness to which I have referred did not apply if the initiative was ostensibly intended to benefit people disadvantaged by past discrimination. I cannot tell you how this conclusion was reached—the judgment is logically insupportable.”
“I think I shall pour myself another drink. Would you like one too?”
“Yes,” Noah replies, “provided, when dispensed by you, it does not become as bitter as gall.” My earlier remarks have struck a nerve. Fair enough. One good wrangle deserves a rankle.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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