Last year was well endowed with moral issues in our public life.

One, however, that kept raising its head was playing of the race card, specifically black against white.

To criticise the race card, as is being done here, does not mean to deny or take lightly still existing white-against-black race discrimination and racism. All those practices are poisoning our society.

Examples
Thus was the race card played:

� Without any evidence, Judge Nkola Motata called the man who testified against him in his drunk-driving case a “white racist”;

� Dr Blade Nzimande, minister of higher education and training, called the attempt to use constitutional rights to retain certain single-medium (Afrikaans) schools “concealed forms of racism”;

� The commentator Prof Sipho Seepe argued that retired Judge Johan Kriegler’s “tirade” against the Judicial Services Commission “borders on white supremacist ideas”;

� Mr Leonard Chuene, suspended head of Athletics South Africa, held “white racists”, here and abroad, responsible for the athlete Caster Semenya’s gender tragedy; and

� Mr Julius Malema, head of the ANC Youth League, called Mr Jeremy Cronin, deputy minister of transport, a “white messiah”.

The most cynical drawing of the race card was by Mr Jimmy Manyi against Mr Bobby Godsell, then chairperson of Eskom’s board of directors, at the time of Mr Jacob Maroga’s dismissal as chief executive of Eskom.

Manyi, director general of labour and a leader of the Black Management Forum – two irreconcilable positions – argued that Godsell was a racist who thought that black managers were not competent to manage large companies. Without any evidence.

The only attempt at an argument that Manyi and the ANC Youth League did try to make related to their simple-minded conviction that white business people such as Godsell did not buy into the pursuit of a developmental state.

But they are pointing the finger in the wrong direction. If the developmental state means, amongst other things, that semi-state institutions such as Eskom must place the interests of the poor first, then it would be worth Manyi’s while first to check who in particular has handicapped the developmental state during the past decade, namely successive ANC governments.

As a result of, for example, buying unnecessary arms rather than building essential power stations, the cost of new power stations, and thus electricity, has shot up, to the disadvantage of all, but especially the poorest.

Unacceptable
Playing of the race card is unacceptable for various reasons.

Those who play the race card must know that anyone has that option. Whites can play the race card about poor service delivery and crime. But that would be just as wrong, because being black is not the cause of such social wrongs, but other characteristics that cross colour lines.

The race card superficialises our public dialogue and, furthermore, makes us look ridiculous in the eyes of the world, where facts and logical arguments count.

The fanning of a race-based discourse in our national life – black chauvinism, as well as white racism – can set back the building of a true democratic society by decades according to the editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya.

To accuse someone of racism without any evidence is more than intellectual laziness – it is deceitful and harms people. It is almost impossible to prove that one is not a racist.

It is like calling someone a police informer or government spy during apartheid. How does one prove that it is untrue?

Moreover, the more one cries “Wolf! Wolf!”, the more difficult it will be for real victims of racism to point out true racism, because they will fear that they will themselves be suspected of playing the race card.

In that way, the history of real victims of racism is ridiculed.

Mr Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of Cosatu, said correctly, “Pulling out the race card when there is no real racism makes it difficult to combat real racism”.

One of the most serious consequences of Manyi’s racial chauvinism is that it insults blacks. It is no wonder that a director of AngloGold Ashanti, Mr Thero Setiloane, distanced himself from the tendency to attribute every incident that is detrimental to a black manager to racism.

Instead of promoting the status of black managers and professionals, use of the race card does Setiloane and others like him a disservice.

The crass racial perspective on the Eskom saga, according to Setiloane, does just as much damage to the building of a non-racial society as the behaviour of the “Reitz four”.

Turning-point?
Perhaps something good may none the less come from the past year’s overplaying of the race card.

Blacks have openly taken a stand against black race-card players. Messrs Vavi, Frans Baleni, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, and Gwede Mantashe, secretary general of the ANC, took up the cudgels for Godsell (albeit a week too late) and stated that he was not a racist.

The red card must be taken out to trump the race card. And it is the moral duty of prominent black public figures to do so openly and repeatedly against the irrationality of hotheads such as Malema and Manyi.

The race card is poisoning the critical national discourse about the building of a good society. It is a strategy that is trying to make winners of the black elite – at the cost of the truth, and without benefitting the poor in any way.

Willem A Landman
Chief Executive Officer
Ethics Institute of South Africa
28 January 2010