A general and relatively widely-held assessment of the state of well-being of the people of the planet is that they sit in the depths of an apparent aporia â an irresolvable contradiction. They are much better off than they were fifty years ago. People are living longer. Materially poverty levels are significantly lower. And yet, and this is the aporia, inequality is as intense as it has ever been and rising. With respect to the first element of the aporia, the drafters of Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development say that âsignificant progress has been made in meeting many development challenges. Within the past generation, hundreds of millions of people have emerged from extreme povertyâ (United Nations 2015: para: 15). With respect to the second, the United Kingdom based advocacy group Oxfam (2016: 1) explains that âthe global inequality crisis is reaching new extremes. The richest 1% now have more wealth than the rest of the world combined.â
This aporia has a certain poignancy for South Africa. While the quality of life for most of its people improved after 1994 when apartheid fell, its citizens, the sociologist Goran Therborn (2019: 31) tells us, âare among themselves about as unequal as the inhabitants of our planet. And the burghers or citadines of Johannesburg are more unequal not only among other citizens of South Africa but (possibly) among humankind as a whole.â
In this short Foreword I seek to work in an exploratory way with this South African expression of our aporia. How might we understand what has happened here? Why is South Africa, as Therborn suggests, not only reflective of the globe but, in some ways, a poster child for the worst that it has to generate?
It is at this point, as the why question is posed, that we all who claim understanding of this extraordinary place â South Africa â stiffen our backs and assume postures of puzzlement at the question. Isnât the answer obvious? Not without some anxiety, I would beg to differ and say, as some might anticipate, that the answer is complex. It is both more and less than the explanations that riff off the standard logics that circulate amongst us. To help us Therborn himself is useful. Why South Africaâs inequality is so intense, he argues (Therborn 2019: 33), has to do with many factors. Deeply influential, even determinative, amongst these, is the weight of the countryâs history. In Therbornâs explanation this history is what he calls settler colonialism: âthe conquest and occupation of a territory by people coming from somewhere else.â He argues that settler colonialism
The problem that confronts us in this discussion is that the effects of racism are largely read through and interpreted through proxy indicators, i.e., what happens to people, the operation of racial discrimination in peopleâs everyday lives. It is clear, to be seen, in the major indicators of material inequality in South Africa â incomes, levels of education, the provision of housing, access to amenities such as education, health, welfare provision, the availability of social amenities. People who have been classified black are worse off than, particularly, those classified white. But, as the critical work of Seekings and Nattrass (2005) shows, in operation in many of the outcome indicators for determining discrimination are often a multiplicity of factors. âRaceâ may be one of them, but it is not, looking at things causally, unambiguously the sole and only responsible factor.
One is in a bit of difficulty here. Intuitively, one wants to say that the work of scholars such as Seekings and Nattrass (2007) cannot be correct. They are not accounting for the weight of racism on South Africansâ lives. This criticism may have something to which we need to hold on. Following Therborn (2019), I want to argue for a better understanding of the psychological effects that surround the experience of racism. Towards understanding racism better, we need to understand how it affects people directly. We need to understand what it does to their heads, their ways of thinking, and particularly their self-understandings. These self-understandings are never, it needs to be said, either straightforward or predictable. Racism certainly incapacitates some. It produces within them that thing, that hard-to-talk-about thing called an inferiority complex. It also produces a superiority complex in some. But this is not what automatically plays out in the victimsâ heads, or, indeed, the heads of perpetrators.
But, unfortunately, aside from anecdotal evidence for what I am saying above, it is very difficult to demonstrate the claims that are made there empirically. We do not, as yet, have a full and documented analysis or a deconstructive psychosocial/economic framework with which to work which says categorically that this is how racism works in the lives of people. We can do so through the proxy factors I spoke of above. But direct evidence of the effects of racism is very difficult to adduce. This is clear from the work of Williams et al. (2008 and 2012) which provides us with the strongest empirical record of what effects racism precipitates in peopleâs heads and minds.
This work, Paradise Lost, is an important contribution to understanding how this process works amongst us. It is an attempt to understand better what is going on in our lives. It arises out of political disappointment but is fuelled by the urgency of wanting to understand better so that the work of remaking the world in truly non-racial ways may proceed on a better and more informed basis. It is an important contribution to the South African discussion but has implications for the global struggle against racism.
References
Oxfam (2016) An Economy for the 1%: How Privilege and Power in the Economy Drive Extreme Inequality and How This Can Be Stopped. 210 Oxfam Briefing Paper, 18 January, Oxford, UK: Oxfam.
Seekings J & Nattrass N (2005) Race, Class and Inequality in South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press.
Therborn G (2019) South African Inequalities in a Global Perspective. In C. Soudien, V. Reddy & I. Woolard (eds) Poverty and Inequality: Diagnosis, Prognosis Responses. Cape Town: HSRC Press.
Williams D, Gonzalez H, Williams S, Mohammed S, Moomal H & Stein D (2008) Perceived Discrimination, Race and Health in South Africa. Social Science and Medicine 67: 441-452.
Williams D, Haile R, Mohammed S, Herman A, Sonnega J, Jackson J & Stein D (2012) Perceived Discrimination and Psychological Wellbeing in the USA and South Africa. Ethnicity and Health 17(1-2): 111-133.
United Nations (2015) Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Accessed in December 2019, https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld.