HEIDI HOLLAND

Racism: searching for balance

Anybody can adopt a positive rather than a negative attitude towards his neighbour

During a recent visit to India, I heard so much about the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi that I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Coincidentally, on returning home shortly before the ANC celebrated its centenary, my friend Amina Cachalia suggested that we toast the organization she had supported heroically all her life by raising tea cups rather than our fists in the hushed dining room of Jozi’s new Gandhi museum.

Amazingly, the ANC – on whose behalf Amina endured house arrest – had not invited her to its 100th birthday bash (though I understand every one of Zuma’s many descendants attended).

So there was Gandhi peering at me through spherical spectacles once again. Part of his lure as a human rights champion is the profound influence a single and materially poor individual’s philosophy - passive resistance – had on two countries: South Africa and India. The ANC’s defiance campaign in the 1950s was a brilliant idea based on Gandhi’s teachings and organised by Nelson Mandela in tandem with Yusuf Cachalia, Amina’s late husband. It is one of the reasons the ANC, to its credit, has mainly steered clear of violence in its long struggle against injustice.

Indians revere Gandhi, his name being so influential that the son-in-law of founding father Nehru is believed to have casually adopted it because it made him feel closer to the spiritual Mahatma. It’s weird  to think that assassinated Congress supremo Indira Gandhi and her long-ruling family, including current boss Sonia Gandhi, may carry the most famous surname in India through deed poll rather than blood line. Politicians!

(Well, what’s in a name, you may snort. But try calling yourself Mandela in SA or Churchill in the UK and let me know how you get on.)

Anyway, speaking of Madiba, I recently had a fascinating conversation with an African-American philosopher, Anthony Perez, at my guest house. We were talking about the lingering racism with which SA is still branded all over the world.

Earlier in the conversation, someone had mentioned seeing the film Contagion and Perez was comparing rampant racism, a virus of the mind, with the spread of epidemics like bird flu.

He explained that everyone is exposed to cognitive disease because we humans discriminate lifelong in response to the differences we observe around us. “The meaning of life is to experience stuff”, continued Perez. “We give attributes to some of those experiences – good or bad - in the process of discriminating at one or other end of the spectrum. In the middle lies balance.”

Just as medical science worked out germ theory to treat bacterial infection years ago, so social observers today study people as purely reactive entities. According to Perez, emotional reactions are our only original thoughts, the environment giving us merely a genetic code – which includes skin colour. The only influences we have from the past are our thoughts and our DNA.
Racism is an extreme infection that requires diagnosis and treatment. Political correctness takes the words that express racism out of our language in an attempt to halt the spread of the cognitive disorder. Another means of combating racism is to identify, in a society where most citizens have symptoms of infection, those individuals with a significant immunity to it.

“Where are the people who don’t catch the disease, not because they aren’t exposed to racism but because their minds reject it? They are the balanced ones who can help to treat and cure it. What is different about them? What was it that changed in Mandela’s mind when he developed his resistance to racism? He must have had doubts that led him to choose not to succumb to it. Or perhaps he was not emotionally gratified by extremes, glorying instead in the exquisite details of balance.

“Mandela embodies the cure, but he is not it,” says Perez. “He is a concentration of the innoculation syrup.”

Discussing the continuation of racism in post-apartheid South Africa, Perez believes the ANC made some divisive choices early on. “BEE is a morphed form of racism, for example. Today’s powerful elite is going the same way as its predecessors, making an inclusive society based on consent less and less achievable. Democracy gives citizens the power to change. Opportunity and possibility are enshrined in the Constitution. The government has abandoned the Freedom Charter and must come back to the middle. The cure for all cognitive infections, as Mandela and Gandhi demonstrated, is not to fight extremism with extremism – it is to establish balance.”

We all have choices to make in confronting racism. The first is acknowledging the problem.  Are we as individuals racist or not? A recent study by two charities in Britain found that racial intolerance is still prevalent there among young people. It highlighted the ‘I’m not a racist but…’ trend, in which teenagers explicitly deny holding discriminatory views, despite expressing them casually in conversation.

The racism label is so stigmatized that there is a will worldwide not to be associated with it, but that does not mean people are not racially prejudiced.

There is a widely-held knowledge in South Africa that being racist is wrong – which it certainly is. But how far have we got in actually breaking down racist attitudes? Anybody can adopt a positive rather than a negative attitude towards his neighbor. It is, however, a choice necessitating a complex change of mind.

But then, you have to change your mind every now and then in life – if only to prove that you’ve got one. Perhaps by the time the ANC turns 110, it too will have changed its mind and will invite the likes of Cachalia and others who were snubbed at its centenary celebrations. Not that I’m comparing the ANC to a racist structure – not at all. But a less exclusive ANC might be a healthier reflection of the once glorious liberation movement.

Heidi Holland is a journalist and author of several books, including the recently released 100 Years of Struggle: Mandela’s ANC.