/ 19 July 2010

Black anti-blacks are denialists

Black Anti Blacks Are Denialists

It’s ironic yet not surprising that Eusebius McKaiser’s spirited effort to show the moral equivalence between racism and homophobia ends up downplaying the horror of racism (“Does racism trump homophobia?” July 9).

McKaiser is part of a new group of vocal black public intellectuals whose stock in trade is to deny racism as an experience unique to black people, perpetrated by and benefiting white-skinned people.

Following the African philosopher Lewis R Gordon, I call them professional black anti-black intellectuals. At their worst they excuse racism by recalling their happy childhoods under apartheid. In general they speak on behalf of the white, racist liberal section of society. They are sophisticated hired guns of post-1994 white racism.

McKaiser achieves his race denialism by using a straw-man argument and by neatly erasing the lived black experience from his “rational” logical abstractions. What I find deplorable and hypocritical is the disingenuousness of pushing ideology under the guise of “rationality”.

To build his argument McKaiser asks: “Is racism worse than homophobia?” This is a clever trick, but it doesn’t help to explain anything. Those of us who have argued for race redress do not argue for the Olympics of suffering but argue for conceptual fidelity, as I have done in the essay, “Blacks Can’t Be Racist”. The impatience to expose the fact that blacks are as evil as whites is part of an old trick to try to expunge the claims of reparations which are due to blacks from the white world as a result of slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

McKaiser could easily have exposed the homophobia of the ANC and its functionaries without drawing a moral equivalence between racism and homophobia. Trouble is, for each example of homophobia on the part of government I can produce a hundred examples of anti-black racism.

If McKaiser freed himself from the ideological strictures of logical philosophy, with its attendant Eurocentric underpinnings, he would have known that Jerry Matjila, South Africa’s representative at the United Nations, and the ANC do not privilege racial redress but are in fact running an anti-black state machinery that continues to perpetrate black marginalisation and humiliation.

If he just looked beyond policy declarations to actual lived black experiences under the ANC government, he would have known that Matjila’s statement about victims of racism is mere talk.

But then McKaiser operates with abstractions, so reality has no bearing except when it’s selectively used as a salve to prior, constructed discourses of “rationality”.

For most blacks there is no need to draw moral equivalence between homophobia, misogyny and even Afrophobia (mistakenly called xenophobia) on the one hand and racism on the other hand, because white supremacy actually structures these discriminatory and violent realities. The experiences of black lesbians and gay men are different from those of their white counterparts because of racism. No white lesbian gets raped and killed for being a lesbian.

The constitutional protections and rights that McKaiser extols are a vicious rumour to most blacks, who are trapped in the structural violence of poverty and other various violations of their socioeconomic rights.

Contemporary black patriarchy is an artefact of whiteness and “corrective rapes” are part of a huge arsenal of excuses available to patriarchy. A case can be made that “straight” women actually suffer more gender-based violence than their lesbian counterparts.

It always baffles one how artists and others find it useful to single out violence against lesbians and give it special treatment.

This of course panders to Eurocentric constructions of inherent black backwardness and soon warriors against these sorts of violence are heaped with praise and prizes by the original authors of the black misery they now ascribe to blacks.

New radical black thinking as espoused by such formations as Blackwash posits that the intra-black oppressive practices such as homophobia are determined by white supremacy. Therefore, to fight racism today necessarily must simultaneously be to fight against patriarchy and homophobia, among other things, because it’s chiefly white racism that has structured and intensified, if not formed, these intra-black oppressive practices. These black-on-black oppressive realities, in the final analysis, are the product of and serve white supremacy.

This sort of black-centred thinking is not available to McKaiser and his ilk because they are defenders of the white status quo. McKaiser elegantly says that “some black victims of racism are simply homophobic”, but it doesn’t occur to him that it is equally true that some victims of homophobia are racist.

Thamsanqa Mahlobo, a Durban-based black radical thinker, has argued: “White LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer] liberals have and continue to exploit black suffering to legitimise their own by comparing sexual marginalisation to racial marginalisation.

“The problem is that only white people compare any oppression to racial oppression; blacks, for example, can’t say that their oppression is like racial oppression because they already are oppressed. This comparison has made South Africa one of very few countries with advanced gay laws yet under these laws black lesbians are killed and their deaths not put in context by white liberal feminisms.”

I’m afraid I find that McKaiser largely operates within the paradigm Mahlobo decries.