Only when the ANC takes the black middle class seriously will it win their hearts and minds, writes Eusebius McKaiser.
This past weekend, the ANC indicated its intention to woo Gauteng’s black middle-class residents.
The fear is that the party could lose a metro or two in the province during next year’s local elections if black middle-class voters stay away or if those who previously voted ANC choose to support another party.
Well, since the ruling party is most responsive to voters on the eve of an election, now might be a good time to give the ANC some unasked-for advice, as a member of the so-called black middle class.
First, engage us by showing complexity in your understanding of “black middle class” – complexity we don’t get from the DA, your feared alternative home for those black middle-class voters who previously voted ANC.
By this I mean demonstrating an awareness of the obvious fact that the black middle class isn’t a homogeneous group. The very term is incoherent, even if many of us, myself included, use it often. Some black middle-class people are first-generation graduates with extended family members who live in poverty. We are middle class, but very precariously so.
Others have parents either with money from successful business ventures or undeserved political sponsorship, or parents who are degreed professionals without wealth but who are certainly neither poor nor working class.
In other words, the “black middle class” should be segmented into the heterogeneous strata that we occupy, and meaningful dialogue with us should speak to the overlapping, but also the differentiated, lived experiences and varied concerns and aspirations of these groups.
A simple victory the ANC can quickly enjoy over the DA is to take the black middle class seriously enough by not rendering us a bunch of identical individuals with the same life narrative.
I’d like to see political and state engagement with the black middle class that isn’t insensitive to the conceptual flaws in the tag “black middle class”.
Nothing warms the heart of a voter more than being taken seriously, and affirmed. You quickly forget even the flaws of your political suitor when that happens. The EFF doesn’t care much for the black middle class (despite the fact that many of us share their analysis of the state), and the DA shows no regard for black middle-class critics, pretending we’re recalcitrant.
Secondly, it would help if ANC leaders stopped belittling educated black people. Our working-class black parents made sacrifices for some of us to “twang”. Many of us, now in our 20s and 30s, grapple with how to undo the impact of being anglicised through our education. The black middle classes – all its subsets – aren’t apolitical and ahistorical. We live and experience the same daily racism and racialism as poor black people.
So we have a vested interest in supporting a political party that takes historicism seriously in how it makes sense of every nook and cranny of South African life. That means, yes, understanding race as a major fault line in contemporary South Africa.
The DA doesn’t get this, and so it isn’t a natural home for black middle-class voters with even a shallow understanding of colonialism and apartheid’s legacies.
But when you belittle a black middle-class person – be it a writer, an artist, a critic or even a black middle-class person in the DA – the rest of us feel dissed too.
It is possible for me to be both alienated from the DA’s brand and deeply offended, as a “clever black”, when you mock the accent and life experiences of, say, DA leader Mmusi Maimane or DA member Lindiwe Mazibuko.
The reason is simple: we are not merely black. We are an intersection of many different social markers, including language, accent, schooling, education, sex, gender, geography and so on. And that is why many black middle-class voters experience local politics as a dilemma: vote for a DA that doesn’t mind your being a “clever black” but doesn’t take racial justice seriously, or vote for an ANC that wants you to feel bad for being a hard-working, educated black person battling in the untransformed economy while comrades eat at the trough?
The ANC can still win the hearts and minds of the black middle class. But the test isn’t what you say on the eve of an election. It is how you routinely engage us that will determine our political preferences over time.
Certainly you won’t win black middle-class votes by mocking or ignoring us. If you do, we might vote for the party of Dianne Kohler Barnard or that of Julius Malema. Which is your worst nightmare?
* Eusebius McKaiser is the best-selling author of A Bantu In My Bathroom and Could I Vote DA? A Voter’s Dilemma.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
THE STAR