Eusebius McKaiser
So the ANC has indicated at the weekend that it wants to make love to the black middle class residents of Gauteng.
The fear is that the party could lose a metro or two in Gauteng during next year’s local elections if black middle class voters stay away or if those who voted ANC were to now vote for another party.
Well, seeing as the ANC is most responsive to us 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 do not get from the DA, your feared alternative home for those black middle class voters who voted ANC before. By this I mean, in the first instance, demonstrating an awareness of the obvious fact that the black middle class isn’t a homogenous 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 precariously so.
Others have parents with either money from private business ventures that went well, undeserved politically sponsored cash, or degreed professionals who do not have wealth but 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 win the ANC can quickly enjoy over the DA, really, is merely to take the black middle class seriously enough by not rendering us a bunch of identical individuals with the same life narrative. There are irreducibly complex sub-groupings within this cluster, and 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 are recalcitrant.
Secondly, it would help if ANC leaders stop, in fact, belittling educated black people. Our working class black parents sacrificed for some of us to twang. Many of us, now in our twenties and thirties, grapple with how to undo the impact of being anglicised through our education. The black middle classes – all of its subsets – are not 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 isn’t a natural home for a black middle class voter who has 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, in fact – the rest of us feel dissed too.
It is very possible for me to be alienated from the DA’s brand and simultaneously be 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 still: 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 economy while comrades eat at the trough as you hustle untransformed corporate South Africa with your “accent”?
The ANC can yet win the hearts and minds of the black middle class. But the test is how you routinely engage us during the breaks from an election cycle – that will determine our political preferences over time.