wiseMusings

Two hours, eleven minutes.

For two hours and eleven minutes, I climbed into my lair and listened to the Waking Up podcast by Sam Harris where Harris and his guest, Vox editor Ezra Klein, were in discussion over their very public spat.
I’d listened to the podcast shortly after it was released, and I had found salient points on both sides of the divide. Also, I’m a fan of both Harris and Klein, so taking another listen was enticing to me – if only to hear them speak.

The Charles Murray drama was the focus of the podcast, but they then segued into the focus of this tidbit I’m writing about now – identity politics. After some verbal grappling, Sam expressed his distaste for identity politics. What would follow is an hour’s worth of Ezra trying to get Sam to see that “identity politics is all politics”, and failing dismally.

I’m not so interested in the exact dialogue as I am interested in Sam Harris’ perspective on identity politics. Simply put, he sees identity politics as a framework whereby people use innate unchanged similarities to organise and dominate a sphere of society. According to him (though not his exact words), this is antithetical to true socio-political engagement as people are sorted into neat, discrete groups instead of being seen as individuals with unique histories, viewpoints and experiences.

This was a view I held not so long ago. In fact, I surmised that identity politics brands us by whatever arbitrary description it chooses, and forces us into a rigid view that “the True Xs” impute to it. Listening to the podcast (and doing some reading on the philosophy of race) has shaken that view. In fact, it’s close to being blown away.

Sam Harris (and I) made the fundamental mistake of believing that individualism, in its true sense of the word, can exist in a system filled with social strife. Of course, when taken literally, we are individuals. But this discounts the fact that certain people link with certain others because of a shared inequity. This does not absolve them of their individuality, or make them any less individual than they are. It merely reflects that we don’t live in an isolated world where our actions have no tangible effect on each other. We live in a world that throws around keywords such as “globalisation” and “cosmopolitanism” , but conveniently forgot to bring about the material and social changes to make true integration possible. So ordinary groups of people lobby for the integration we say we’re committed to, and its realization beyond nice words.

Your identity will likely determine your level of agreement with this statement. If you have been a victim of social and/or systemic marginalization, there is a greater likelihood of you nodding in agreement than somebody who only had to “work hard” a la the deputy president.

This isn’t to say that Harris was purposefully malicious in his hatred of identity politics. I believe Sam intends to give all ideas before him the benefit of the doubt, at the very least. Yet, there is a tone-deafness to his conversation with Klein that is all too common in South Africa, and its race relations.

I have outlined, numerous times, how certain black people want to put a premium on blackness. I want to now look at the other common flaw when discussing this topic: the concept of a “colour-blind” South Africa where race has no bearing on where one ends up in life. If they just “work hard”, they’ll get to where they need to be. In this utopia, the African National Congress (ANC) and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) act as players of the “race card”, and do so dishonestly, and for their own selfish ends.

While I would enjoy a South Africa that is free of race-based talk and where we can all be human – that’s not the South Africa we live in today. The one thing the EFF does well is its ability to lay out that out, even to those who refuse to recognize its validity. Politicians will use racial-speak and amass votes with racial-speak, for as long as poverty is largely skewered along racial lines.

Solving the problem of poverty, then, cannot be a problem of the government. People – especially those who will not immediately and directly be affected – must ensure the end of poverty in South Africa.

It is easy to dismiss black radicals as “playing identity politics”, and not hear their views. But we should solve the problems that plague them most: ensuring that we have an educational system that produces smart, critical thinkers and a society that actively enables retention and minimising drop-outs; making jobs available for young men and women; making clear provisions for skills development and training for said young men and women so that they can be of greater value in our economy; elevating the best and brightest minds within us in order to encourage innovation and intellectual curiosity.

This is not an exhaustive list, and I don’t pretend that it is.

My point is that it is the work of us all. While the underperforming ANC can take the brunt of the blame, we do not get to slink off into our mansions and plead ignorance while another promising matriculant earns minimum wage as a cleaner when he would be a much better fit as a first-year law student, and then suddenly develop a political affinity when the economy is failing on our side of town.

Personal responsibility aside, there is an apathy on the part of some white South Africans under the illusion that “we’re all equal now” and that “playing the race card takes us back.”

To be fair, the ANC and EFF do make hasty generalisations about race and racism. However, to go from that to completely denying the existence of inequalities that are skewered towards a certain race is not only unhelpful. It plays right into the hands of these politicians, and sadly shows a lack of empathy on the part of white South Africans – who, in the view of many, find it easy to talk about a fictitious white genocide but are silent on the constant reality that is poverty.

It is unfortunate that most people who think this way usually show an affinity to vote for the Democratic Alliance (DA) over the other two parties. This sullies the party itself as being, in Eusebius McKaiser’s words, “ahistorical” rather than taking major social concerns into account.

A class-based approach – which is said to be preferable to the binary race-based approach – will lead to the same conclusion. Arguing for approaches where identity is not important while not fixing the exact reasons why identity politics became popular in the first place solves nothing.

The politically (and socially) expedient thing to do is to create informal networks within the middle-class – across races – where retired teachers could tutor learners in disadvantaged schools, where business moguls can mentor aspiring entrepreneurs, where award ceremonies are conducted for exemplary persons within the community, and so on. This would not merely be an “interest group” as much as it would be a “friend of the government” a la “friends of the court.” Not to leave the government to its own devices, but to take civic action as the highest form of criticism.

The true end of identity politics – whether here or in the USA – will only happen when there is a clear, concerted effort on the “privileged” to use their time and effort, if nothing else, to selflessly and wholeheartedly help the have-nots to someday have.

Two hours and eleven minutes spent well, if you ask me.