Failure to act may well mean that history will repeat itself, leaving a terrible legacy for our children, writes Xolela Mangcu.
Between this column and the next one, the US will have elected its first woman president, Hillary Clinton. The question is: why did it take so long? On this score, the US, arguably the greatest democracy in the history of the world, lags behind Britain, Germany, Ireland, Canada, India, Liberia, Argentina and so many other countries.
This paradox between American political liberalism and its social conservatism is deeply rooted in American history. The Declaration of Independence stated that all men are created equal while its author, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves. Add to the paradox the hypocrisy of Jefferson fathering children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.
The term “social conservatism” is a portmanteau for a range of groups within the Republican Party - from small-government economic conservatives to racist tea party xenophobes turned Trumpists. The latter are on the ascendancy and no one knows what kind of Republican Party will emerge in the end - just as ANC members don’t know what kind of party they will have after Jacob Zuma has done all the damage. Sorry, I couldn’t resist that one.
The US has taken so long to elect a woman for the same reasons it took so long to elect a black president - a toxic mix of racism and misogyny. The election of a black president and now a woman president means that it is not beyond the imagination that the US will have a Latino president in our lifetime.
The world is changing and the perpetually endangered white male is running to the embrace of a racist scoundrel such as Donald Trump for cover.
Amy Taub of The New York Times explains the support for Trump among a significant section of white Americans in a brilliant essay, Behind the Gathering Turmoil, A Crisis of White Identity. Among middle-class whites this sense of panic emerged as “white people’s privileged status waned over the latter part of the 20th century with the demise of discriminatory practices in, say, university admissions”.
The backlash against affirmative action among middle-class whites at the universities is precisely because of the feeling that their historical grip on racial privilege is loosening, as it should. Fortunately, the best universities in the world did not buckle under the pressure. The white panic in the US would be even stronger among non-college-educated whites.
Even though, in Marxist terms, they share the same economic status as working-class blacks, white workers have historically earned what WEB Du Bois called “the psychological wage”: “It must be remembered that the white group of labourers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage - their vote selected public officials, and while this had a small effect on the economic situation, it had great effect on their personal treatment and the deference shown to them.”
Fortunately for the world, white political and social dominance is being checkmated by the most natural of forces - the inexorable fact of demographic transformation. The US is now a minority-majority country, which means white people are only the biggest minority. The demographic transformation is just one factor behind the flight to Trump. The other major factor is the mechanisation of production that is decimating the white working class. And this comes at a time when they can no longer use racist mobilisation to defend their privileged status, as they did in the Rand strikes of 1922 in Joburg.
Back then their rallying cry was: “White workers of the world united to keep South Africa white.” This kind of mobilisation became taboo after the Holocaust and the civil rights movement and the democratic government in South Africa. As scriptural and biological racism receded, a new cultural racism came to take its place.
In the new vocabulary, black people were at the bottom of the social ladder because they did not want to work. They wanted to take what whites had worked so hard to achieve, as if all of that took place under conditions of free and fair competition. In the place of overt racist messages came a new discourse of standards, as if a concern for standards was the exclusive concern of white people.
“Polite” as it was, the cultural argument was blind to its own racism.
According to Amy Taub, white identities that in good times were defined in terms of personal achievement were in bad times defined in terms of ascribed identities. The politeness gave way to outright aggressive racism.
Trump can openly call Mexicans rapists and criminals without any fear of a backlash. He can openly say African-Americans live in “ghettos” where they cannot openly walk down the street without being shot. He does this, as he said, because his people want it.
No one knows for sure what further mutation the new virus of anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-Muslim and anti-black racism will take. One shudders to think that slavery, the Holocaust and apartheid are not enough to teach people about the dangers of racism.
But this time we are talking about the prospect of a racist misogynist having his finger on the nuclear button. But then again Clinton’s campaign promises an antidote to Trump. But antidote is not enough. What we really need is an antiretroviral drug to stop the spread of racism once and for all.
Failure to act may well mean that history will repeat itself, as tragedy and farce, leaving a terrible legacy for our children. This must begin with an acceptance that skin colour must never ever be the guarantee of social privilege.
After 500 years of human destruction - from slavery to colonialism to apartheid - that social vision has run its course.
As Taub puts it: “There will not likely be a return to the whiteness of social dominance and exclusive national identity.
“Immigration cannot be halted without damaging Western nations’ economies; immigrants who have already arrived cannot be expelled en masse without causing social and moral damage.”
* Mangcu is professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town and Harry Oppenheimer Fellow at Harvard University.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
The Sunday Independent