BOOK REVIEW | Non-racialism is dead. Good riddance or a tragedy?

Among the many interesting arguments Ismail Lagardien advances in his excellent book Too White to be Coloured, Too Coloured to be Black is one that supports the claim that non-racialism has failed. It is worth rehearsing and critiquing his argument, and building on it, because the yearning for the concept remains potent in some South African quarters.

He argues that non-racialism was used by some in the anti-apartheid movement, including ANC leaders, to make whites feel guilty and extract gains from that. He writes: “As it goes, the characters in ‘the movement’ seemed terribly expedient, exploitative and manipulative in the 1980s. The trick was to always make white people feel guilty for being white. Much later in life, at about the time I was writing this, I would consider ‘non-racialism’ as part of the ideological snake oil and expediency of (especially) the ANC to garner white support as a tactic. There is no doubt that there were white people committed to the anti-apartheid struggle — especially among the communists and socialists — but for the most part, the idea was to tap into the collective guilt of white ‘progressives’ or liberals to strengthen the presence of the movement. It seems to have worked — for the first decade of democracy. That’s when non-racialism was exposed as a transparent and terribly pathetic magician’s trick.”

Lagardien develops his view more fully in a later chapter, wistfully entitled So long, non-racialism — it’s been good knowing you. Notwithstanding the progressive intentions of the drafters of the constitution, who enshrined non-racialism as a foundational value, he argues that the constitution “did not, and could not foresee ... the rise in distinctly African ethno-nationalism, the spread of an acquisitive society that funnelled opportunity, entitlements and pecuniary gains along a sliding scale of race, embedded privilege and an arbitrary and expedient type of exclusion with a threat of erasure.” He offers some interesting and usefully uncomfortable anecdotal evidence from different provinces, including the Eastern Cape and Northern Cape, of coloured people reporting experiences of explicit economic exclusion in favour of hiring “real Africans”.

In a characteristic mix of empiricism and polemic, Lagardien opines along the way: “Sure, when written on the inside of one of those terribly cloying greeting cards, ‘non-racialism’ sounds nice, but we should make no bones about the fact that most people who are considered to be ‘African’ by the ANC, EFF, BLF, by the dregs of Azapo and whatever or whomever one can pin down of the Pan Africanist Congress would prefer all ‘non-Africans’ to simply disappear ... All of this chauvinism is neatly concealed by the rhetoric of non-racialism.”

A part of Lagardien’s analysis reminds me of some of Shelby Steele’s work, especially the titles A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can’t Win — a title that didn’t age well! — and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. Lagardien rightly balked at the comparison when I recorded a podcast interview with him because, frankly, Steele is a black conservative thinker who has deeply ahistorical analyses of the structural injustices of contemporary societies the world over that wrestle with racial injustices inherited from slavery, colonialism and apartheid. I do not impute to Lagardien the racism denialism that is a feature of much of Steele’s work. The comparison, however, is based on a very small but instructive aspect of the core argument in Steele’s A Bound Man.

Before wrongly predicting that Barack Obama’s attempt to become president of the US would go nowhere, Steele developed the basic idea that there are bargainers and challengers in black society. Challengers, such as Reverend Al Sharpton, challenge the moral authority of white people, reminding them of the history and effects of slavery and anti-black racism, and essentially telling whites that the only way to make amends for being implicated in the story of American racism is by agreeing to concessions, such as race-based affirmative action policies.

Bargainers, such as Oprah Winfrey, are gentler and essentially make whites an offer: “We won’t remind you of the heavy slavery and racism stuff if you tune in to my post-race talk show every afternoon! Deal?” Whites gain emotional comfort in this bargaining game and blacks get some material rewards.

Lagardien suggests non-racialism has been weaponised by many black people, including the ANC-led government after 1994, to challenge white people to prove their commitment to a nascent democratic society by demanding they make various concessions as proof they do not have any nostalgic yearning for our racist past.

Upon reflection, this analysis has a few shortcomings. First, it gives the ANC way too much credit. The type of intentionality Lagardien ascribes to ANC heads in the 1980s and after 1994 is difficult to sustain because, frankly, most of their energies have been spent occupying positions within the state and eating from the trough.

Upon reflection, this analysis has a few shortcomings. First, it gives the ANC way too much credit. The type of intentionality Lagardien ascribes to ANC heads in the 1980s and after 1994 is difficult to sustain because, frankly, most of their energies have been spent occupying positions within the state and eating from the trough. Some ANC politicians left the state and no doubt relied on the guilt of corporate citizens to give them positions on boards, for example, thereby positioning themselves to benefit from the nexus between politics and business. But the relative economic power of white South Africans as a racialised group, compared with, say, coloureds, Indians and black Africans, suggests the ANC either didn’t “challenge” white people, as the Steele/Lagardien theory posits, or white people ignored moral scolding and simply continued to enjoy being the greatest economic beneficiaries of the dawn of democracy.

Lagardien agreed that a supplementation of his analysis would require reflecting on the weaponising of non-racialism by some white people. It is not just a black person or a black-led state that can try to extract gains from whites by appealing to white guilt. White people too can try to shut down conversation about racism by appealing to the greeting card version of non-racialism, which effectively defines it as race eliminativism. In other words, races do not exist and therefore we should eliminate references to racialised groups in our conversations and policy documents. Many progressive whites love this conception of non-racialism because it helps to side-step any emotionally difficult conversation about unearned racialised privileges, being implicated in the history of anti-black racism or — their worst nightmare — having to confront the possibility that they might be racist, even if some of their best friends are, um, black.

So while Largadien does an excellent job overall to expose the normative fantasy of a non-racial society (especially when one analyses state and labour practices), a more complete analysis would complement his state-centric argument by also delving into our interpersonal relationships as citizens and making sense of the use of non-racialism to evade confronting racism. This is why I still prefer a framing of our anti-racism end goal, rather than the ambiguous idea of non-racialism that has become too woolly to be discursively useful.

Non-racialism, frankly, deserves to be dead.