The Human Rights Commission and Racism
During the months of March and April this year the country was confronted with a bizarre operation launched by the human rights commission to track manifestations of racism in the printed and electronic media in South Africa. It’s campaign arose reportedly from complaints lodged by the Black Lawyers Association (BLA) and the Black Accounts’ Association (BAA) against two newspapers in particular, the Sunday Times and the Mail & Guardian. That campaign was given a thrust by a report presented by a Ms Braude on her studies of “racism” manifested by an “Afrikaans” newspaper and Radio Pretoria, a predominantly “Afrikaans” radio station.
The details of the original complaints lodges with the HRC need not occupy too much of our own reaction to the HRC’s operation. Far more significant were the HRC’s modus operandi and the performance of the newspaper editors, radio and television management and the representatives of the government.
The HRC’s sally into the field of “racism” in the media proved by all accounts to be a pathetic, poorly-managed operation, in which it’s own lack of knowledge, skill and degree of preparedness to handle the problem was only too sadly evident. It’s decision to subpoena newspaper editors and others to present themselves before the Commission and to report on their efforts to cleanse publications and radio and television programmes of racism, or to counteract racism, met with accusations against the HRC of the kind of bureaucratic compulsion that drove earlier commissions. Certainly the likening of the Commission’s approach to that of the Senator Joe McCarthy “Anti-Red” commission in the USA in the 1950’s was not out of place.
What has underlined the HRC’s position even more seriously is the fact that over the entire period of it’s existence the commission has not achieved any presence of note in the re-education of the people of this country in matters of racism and racialism in all their many forms. On this occasion there can be little doubt that most members of the commission are quite inadequately qualified to handle the issues that surround the work of all the media in working towards the “non-racialism” that defines the nature of the society which the liberatory movement strove to achieve.
It may sound a severe judgement to make, but there was so much petty-fogging, disputes accusation and counter-accusations between both the Commissioners and those who appeared before the Commission and between the many individuals and groups who were summoned to present themselves before that body. There was little evidence of a coherent understanding of the meanings of words that convey the thinking, actions, attitudes and knowledge of the perpetrators and the victims of racism in general.
There is a vast amount of factual evidence available to destroy the notions of “races” and “racism”, and thus to place upon a sound footing those who wish to engage in the challenging work of handling the struggle against the protean forms of this disease in our society.
The notions of “race” and the racialist practices that form the web of South African society may be traced most boldly to the era of aggressive colonisation of the world during the past 500 years. In the early phases the notions of race and racialist policies were part and parcel of the process of justifying both the conquest of colonial peoples and the oppression and exploitation of the conquered. The notion of the “racial inferiority” of the victims was but one side of the ideological coin. The other side was the elaboration of ideas and the creation of an image of the conquerors as members of a “superior” race. South Africa’s experience reflects ALL the false mythology that seeped through recorded history, literature, religion, law, education, labour practices and the endless ways in which the pursuit of wealth and power by the conquerors was joined with the denigration of their victims.
It is part of the record of the Teachers’ League, and it’s allies in the liberatory movement, that more than fifty years ago it set about clarifying the philosophy, language and manifestations of racism and racialism. And providing a scientific, politically defensible, framework of ideas and day-to-day policies to destroy the falsehood of the colonialist- capitalist-imperialist notions upon which segregation-apartheid neo-colonial mental and physical slavery was based.
The very notion of “race” as applied to human beings can only imply one “human race”. Before, such ideas as “pure blood”, “mixed blood” and racial purity were the stock-in-trade of the racialists. But studies in biology have shown by the now simple understanding of blood groups and their compatibility that these notions are false. The ideas of inheritance had previously been linked to those same falsehoods. But the scientific laws of inheritance, modern discoveries in the field of genetics and the unravelling of DNA and the genetic profile of human beings make dreary, ugly nonsense of the idea that there are different races among humanity and, equally, of the idea “multi-racial”, “inter-racial”, and like idiocies that even now litter the writings and the broadcasts of those who claim to promote “non-racialism”. And we are now confronted with further idiocies in the wake of the repeated claim that in “our new democracy” of South Africa racism and racialism have been cleansed from society. A further grand error on the part of those willing to believe this is the idea that, “race discrimination” having been ended, it is only class division that now bedevils our society.
A fundamental feature in all colonial and ex-colonial societies is the interlocking identification of class discrimination and colour discrimination. These are reflected in all the many areas of our society; and it is impossible to separate them at this juncture in our history. Merely to pronounce the aims of our struggles does not wipe out the reality of our situation as it has unfolded over centuries.
And this became only too clear when at the HRC session certain media representatives divided themselves along “colour” lines. And even clearer when a claim was made that there was a need for more “black” editors in the Press World. And far clearer still when other representatives when asked what steps had been taken to implement “representivity” in the institutions, represented a head-count of their staff on the basis of colour and the basic divisions among South Africans the National Party government Population Register had used of old. And in Parliament itself the Minister of Labour recounted, without a murmur of protest from parliament, how job appointments should preferably be made to reflect the demographics – read “race” identities – of the population to achieve employment equity.
The HRC has lost its way – if indeed it ever had a rational path to follow. The inclination to peck or hammer or bitch in particular cases of human rights abuses is a reflection of a grave inadequacy: in a field where they claim to be able to help this country get the burden of colonialist “race” and class discrimination off it’s back such men and women must be big in understanding and large in their approach to their tasks if they are to justify their appointment to positions on a Human Right’s Commission! The reeducation of all the people of this country, regardless of colour and class, demands just that.
So far the Commission and many who appeared before it have proved only three discernible things: there are people who just do not know. There are people that don’t know that they don’t know and make absurd claims and suggestions as to how “the problem” must be dealt with. And there is once more ample evidence that racialism is a universal refuge of the small mind.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL, PUBLISHED BY NUPSAW EDUCATION SECTOR, NOVEMBER - APRIL-MAY 2000]
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