Affirmative action has been in place for three decades in South Africa, and is part of the furniture. The debate should, however, continue.
Last week in Washington DC, I spoke at the White Cross Project Conference at the National Press Club. I was there with my Free Market Foundation colleague David Ansara and long-time FMF collaborator Adv Mark Oppenheimer.
Ansara spoke on the Expropriation Act and the wider assault on private property. Oppenheimer spoke on political hate speech and incitement. I spoke on the Index of Race Law.
The trip, and the Don Caldwell Memorandum on Socialism and Racial Engineering in “Post-Apartheid” South Africa the FMF has been handing to American officials and policy community, has forced a clarification that is easy to miss if one lives inside the mythological logic of South African public policy.
Our culture and zeitgeist for euphemistically so-called “affirmative action” comes almost exclusively from the United States.
The American template has been one of a demographic majority deciding, for itself and voluntarily, that it would handicap itself to a degree in order to empower a minority it had harmed in the past. The majority that controls the policy could decide when to extend it, limit it, or when to withdraw it. The disadvantaged minority is the recipient of a voluntary sacrifice in recognition of a past deficit.
After the end of Apartheid, South Africa incorporated this logic wholesale, except onto a categorically distinct situation.
The demographic unit expected to make the sacrifice does not have political control, or even much political influence. It is politically at the full and total mercy of the demographic majority. And yet it is this minority that is the principal target of South Africa’s comprehensive race law dispensation, in particular the affirmative action statutes, the Employment Equity Act and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act. And the minority cannot expand, limit, or withdraw the application of the policy.
Affirmative action is, by its nature, a majoritarian device. The majority limits itself in the interests of the minority. In South Africa – and in other cases such as Malaysia – the device has been twisted to where the demographic minority is simply made the subject of coercive and authoritarian extraction, about which it can do nothing. It does not matter if the past injustice is eventually rectified or not – the minority simply has no say.
That is something to consider in our debates about affirmative action, especially if we desire to keep up the pretence of democracy.
On a principled level, of course, the policy is a non-starter. It violates the basic premise of non-racialism, and ignores due process and evidence-based policymaking, which require that if one wishes to empower a person one must look at that person’s socio-economic conditions, not at their skin-colour or their genitalia. Affirmative action per se is illiberal and inherently racist.
Placing it in this broader context does not make the principle any less true. It does, however, clarify the matter for people who have not yet decided how they feel about whether affirmative action is appropriate for South Africa – that nagging feeling at the back of their minds. American civil rights logic was written as if a powerful majority were extending a revocable hand to a disempowered minority. South African race law is written and enforced by a political elite that is from within (though it horribly represents) the majority, extracting from minorities that cannot vote the extraction away or even legally limit its scope.
The text of our law does not recognise the difference, but at the very least our political discourse should start.
[Image: by esindeniz]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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