Diversity Archives - Medialternatives

by davidrobertlewis - November 22, 2022November 30, 2022

Watchdog guest Andile ‘bites’ open discussion on Fish Hoek Students

THE WATCHDOG is a regular SABC panel discussion hosted by Vuyo Mvoko. A recent episode on the Fish Hoek High ‘diversity intervention’ saga turned into a political platform for race supremo Andile Mngxitama, who attacked fellow panelist Sara Gon’s right to exist as a human being and citizen.

It does appear the Dept of Education, had used the opportunity presented by accusations of racism levelled at a single Fish Hoek teacher, to instead lock up several hundred students in a school hall, force feeding them propaganda on race and sexuality while reprimanding those present for ‘being white’ or ‘aligned with whiteness’. It was certainly not the ‘mere reading of a poem’ which got people a little hot-headed.

Mngxitama was given ample time to bend the narrative to his own liking, he is after all, the author of a thin, self-published 2009 volume: ‘Blacks can’t be racist’ which borrows heavily from an argument first deployed in a 1987 Socialist Worker article “The Fallacy of Reverse Racism,” in which the author wrote, “Blacks cannot be ‘racists.’ They are not in a position to oppress anyone — certainly not the majority white population of the U.S.”

“It makes me very angry” says Mngxitama, “… a situation where black children, black facilitators trying to deal with acts of racism end up being accused of being racist. You see the civil society organisations called Afriforum, Democratic Alliance, the white political projects including white civil society, is very clear in manipulating language to maintain the white status quo.”

“So white children must not be told that their forefathers stole the land, that they are direct beneficiaries of apartheid.”

This strategic umbrage is unfortunately quite the contrary to the objections and record of the facts, lodged by civil society. (See my earlier piece here). The criticism has nothing to do with language games but rather genuine concern for the well-being of students. People feel targeted and unsafe as a result, necessitating trauma counselling. As the popular saying goes, ‘If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck?’

Free Speech SA’s Gon believes:”It’s very problematic to attribute to children what may or may not have been the behaviours of their predecessors, or their parents or grandparents.” You can read Gon’s piece on the subject here. And further commentary below.

If anything ‘white folk’ as citizens, and especially children, should be considered the current beneficiaries of a democratic system, under the Second Republic, one which grants equal rights and privileges to all citizens under a Bill of Rights. One of which is freedom of thought, the right to exercise inalienable liberties enshrined in our constitution. Understandably such a viewpoint begs the question of how are we all to access our rights, when doing so seems to carry such an enormous economic cost?

Only a fool would pretend such bread and butter issues did not have their genesis in the previous apartheid period, or the failings of the economy under the current government, and yes, the problem of institutional racism. This is not a call to end diversity training, but rather, to pose questions of methodology and praxis.

No Seat First

Mngxitama’s bizarre campaign to end the current status quo by literally halting the democratic dispensation, to pillory all white people, to accuse all and sundry of land theft, is surely a step too far, and has unsurprisingly tended to fail at the polls.

Not only did Black Land First (BLF), fail to garner any seats during the last election, but Mngxitama has been forced out of desperation to gerrymander and hijack platforms like that of Mvoko’s Watchdog. It is no coincidence that the basis for a thin 2009 volume of polemic, Black’s can’t be racist has inveigled its way into so-called diversity sessions. You can read my earlier piece deconstructing the strange assertion here.

One shudders to think what real ‘blackness’ might entail if it meant blind authority and cowtowing to a party line? Fish Hoek High School, like most public schools in the area, services a diverse cross-section of society, and is for all intents and purposes, a mixed school. So much for the time-warp narrative.

Mngxitama however proceeded to accuse Gon, who is not affiliated in any way, of being a ‘spokesperson for whiteness and a beneficiary of apartheid’ and went so far as upbraiding her appearance and presence in the country, claiming ‘whiteness is unethical’.

During the discussion, Mngxtama can be heard repeatedly attacking Gon for her alleged resort to ‘constitutionalism’ and free speech, or as he put it, ‘constitutional words’.

The BLF honcho’s position comes across as that of an intellectual bigot — anyone vaguely white, (you could have just a drop of blood) is automatically a beneficiary of apartheid — and should have no recourse to law, since in Mngxitama’s jaundiced view, such persons should be considered persona non grata?

So far as Mngxitama is concerned, every ‘white person’ is a racist regardless of whether or not you fought against apartheid, or were once the subject of a race reclassification saga. As such all melanin-deficient individuals are to be treated as unwelcome guests inside a ‘black country’, one characterised by the statement, ‘Africa for the Natives Only.’

Is this not the self-same bigotry posing as anti-racism, against which valid objections from Fish Hoek parents to the Dept were addressed, resulting in the Dept issuing a mea culpa? Mvoko resoundingly failed to bother touching the tricky subject of why an apology was even issued.

Blood libel

BLF has time and again issued what is essentially a blood libel, in its effort to inspire a semblance of nationalistic zeal, producing a mythology based upon 1994-denialism. Its founding texts should not be the starting point for anything as sensitive as an ‘intervention session on diversity’.

Ultra-left groups such as these appear to desire the creation of an ‘all black republic’, cast along racial lines, and sugar-coated with socialist rhetoric, similar in many ways to the double-speak of the former apartheid regime. Worse many current formations, envisage a continental superstate, unified not because of non-racial democracy, but rather amalgamated due to the machinations of skin pigmentation. It is a slow moving, ‘Fatah-risation of the struggle’ in which white persons, much like Jews, are restrained from occupying leadership positions.

Though Mvoko gave Gon ample time to put her case, and another guest Hendrik Makaneta stated that he ‘disagreed with blanket blaming people’, before lamely listing the communist Joe Slovo as a ‘white activist who had sacrificed during the struggle’, he essentially failed to moderate the debate when it came to Mngxtama. Mvoko literally introduces Mngxtama as some form of authority then avoids drawing down around the facts, (of which there are precious few). In the end, the current affairs show bore witness to the expression of an unscientific theory cast as the very basis for ‘diversity training’, one which proceeds to excuse behaviour, but exclusively for one group alone?

Mngxitama thus objected to Gon being given extra time, the same way he once objected to the weather. He famously stated the Cape of Storms was the result of ‘white monopoly capital’. (South-Easter, yet more evidence of racism!). Have a white friend or two, well, you’re hopelessly compromised?

Mvoko deserves to be red-carded for dishonesty, and called out for allowing the advocate of a repugnant minority viewpoint to appear on a national news channel, to discuss his own crackpot theories, without bothering to introduce the author as a promoter (if not originator) of the subject. Mngxitama is certainly pitted against non-racialism, a perverse contrarian to our democratic order, yet granted succour in a prime time slot that ended up sadly reiterating the tired race stereotypes and caricature of the past.

As Gon put it: “The way to create understanding between groups, between races … is all about getting people to talk about it without being intimidated.’

by davidrobertlewis - November 14, 2022November 27, 2022

Useful idiots, that Fish Hoek ‘Anti-Racist’ saga

IN A VOICE recording taken by a pupil, Asanda Ngoasheng, the principal facilitator of a controversial diversity course held at Fish Hoek High School can be heard saying ‘Black people can be mean, they can be cruel, they can be prejudiced, they can be nasty, but they can never be racist against white people … because racism requires power.’

The contentious idea is apparently part and parcel of a political re-education programme being punted by the Department of Education. All part of a so-called diversity training course, one which facilitator Caiden Lang claims, is predicated on Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Lang writes in The Daily Friend: “To imagine that what happened on Monday at Fish Hoek High was a diversity training session gone wrong is to fundamentally misunderstand what anti-racist education informed by critical race theory is all about. It is to assume that anti-racist education is geared towards social cohesion by teaching people to be less racist, sexist and so on and to help them to coexist.

“This is a mistake.

“Anti-racist education is about being on the right side of history. The discomfort and anger experienced by those kids is an intended first step to becoming ‘anti-racist’. It is a feature, not a bug.”

Unfortunately race typology, the division of society into black and white, and blind obedience to authority, is not what CRT teaches: “CRT is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old,” writes Stephen Sawchuk in Education Week. “The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”

Civil Rights history

As Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, the civil rights activist who coined the term put it: “It is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced, the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

Though there appears to be some disagreement on the finer points, where CRT was once a theory firmly situated within the discourse of civil rights and thus secular humanism, as a cross-disciplinary subject it has increasingly turned into nothing more than a radical political platform, a campaign gateway by politicos introducing unverifiable concepts such as dialectical materialism (all history is about power) and political notions such as ‘oppressor and oppressed’.

The result is invariably traumatising for young learners, bringing to mind Soviet-era political re-education camps. An affront on ones psychology, and most certainly a violation of a number of clauses in our constitution, including freedom of thought, belief and opinion, academic freedom, right to receive and impart information (in this case, you may receive the Department’s dogma, but don’t talk back or impart), the right to psychological integrity (the Dept seeks to impose discursive sanctions whilst assaulting learner’s mental functioning).

Criticism

Critics of CRT state that the theory leads to ‘negative dynamics such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance’.

CRT in its current form, as rolled out by the Dept commissars, presents caricature and stereotype instead of facts and information, and appears more applicable to the context of black persons living as an oppressed minority in the USA where “white Americans are the racial and ethnic majority, with non-Hispanic whites representing 57.8% of the population”.

Peter Wood in Where Did We Get the Idea That Only White People Can Be Racist? published by the National Association of Scholars writes “The idea that “black people can’t be racist” is just a meme, not a coherent argument.”

Michelle I. Gao in “Who Can’t be Racist” responds: “This argument’s main point — that minorities can’t be racist because they have no power to act on such antagonism — is also reductive. We shouldn’t have to take stock of each other’s race and relative power in society before making a judgment on an act itself. We shouldn’t have to condone prejudice or discrimination against anyone, for any reason.”

In South Africa where persons who define as black are in the majority and have been part of a black majority government for nearly 30 years, there is an immediate rebuttal. The assertion that ‘black people can’t be racist, ‘because racism requires power’ and ‘blacks have no power’ is only even vaguely reasonable if one believes personal power to always be bound up with economic power, instead of the vote.

It is a tired narrative that our country has one of the highest Gini coefficients in the world, the measure of the gap between rich and poor, and that wealth often correlates with our demographics, which says nothing about the Human Development Index (HDI) where SA ranks relatively well.

Here the debate is rather between the haves and have-nots. Providing learners with intellectual tools, rather than prescriptions and injunctions and avoiding a party-line if you will.

Racialising the issue and dispensing with ‘non-racialism’, presents a unique set of problems since not every person informally categorised as black is ‘poor and underprivileged’. There is no universal truth in stating ‘black persons are always poor, have no economic power and therefore they can never be racists’. Saying this, merely gives credence to another ridiculous proposition, ‘black people can’t be litterbugs’.

In the same way as maintaining apartheid’s many Askaris and turncoats, were not traitors so much as heroes, even though they murdered on behalf of the regime?

Philosophical Considerations

Consider the first statement’s corollary, ‘if black people can’t be racists, then whites can never experience racism’.

And Afrikaners can’t be oppressed by the British.

And Jews can never experience Anti-Semitism.

Or ‘white folk’ can never be poor, because, well being poor depends upon … power?

In this jaundiced, reductionist view, those white activists detained, tortured and even murdered by the apartheid regime, were not experiencing racism per se, but merely the brutal instrumentality of the regime. As an activist classified by the apartheid regime as ‘blanke‘, I cannot be spat at, slapped and smeared by right-wing extremists.

The descent from humanism along with its universal truths, the Freedom Charter and its exemplar, our non-racialist Constitution, towards the narrow political objectives and moral absolutism of anti-racism’s pundits, articulated by a radicalised Education platform, is a slippery slope one which invariably ends with denial of the self-same history its zealous advocates profess to teach.

In this jaded current state-of-mind, there were no white people in the civil rights movement as such, nor even the anti-apartheid movement for that matter.

And if there were, such persons like myself, were merely allies at best, or worse, useful idiots.

SEE: Palesa Morudu dismisses ‘diversity grifters’ at the same time she downplays the incident as a mere ‘reading of a poem to a captive audience of 800 pupils‘

SEE: FF Plus lays complaint with SAHRC about Fish Hoek ‘diversity’ session