Finding Light in the Dark Realm of Race Communism

Live and let live: Why freedom of association is the master freedom

Photo by Rihards Dicis on Unsplash

Stephen Grootes, writing in the Daily Maverick, warns that the “Moderate middle is holding up, but unequal SA could see it fall apart”.¹ In an otherwise bland piece, Grootes puts his finger on our political crisis: “One of the reasons there is so much tension between the ANC and the DA is simply because of the issues of race […and…] it is likely that race will be an important factor in our politics for as long as we have racialised inequality.” This echoes something President Cyril Ramaphosa said in 2013: “Race will remain an issue until all echelons of our society are demographically representative.” Ramaphosa remains firmly committed to the ideal of demographic representivity, with the recent gazetting of new regulations under the Employment Equity Act that will see yet more capable whites – and white males in particular – chased out of industry and business.

Many people are animated by “racialised inequality” because they believe that although God did not make all people equal, He did at least make all races equally deserving of middle-class status. This was the promise of the 1960s, a decade that proved the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

America’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 was meant to fix racialised inequality and to usher in an era of cross-racial fraternity. Instead we got critical race theory, George Floyd protests during Covid lockdowns, BLM, taking the knee, and endless guilting of whites that contributed to American voters giving up on politics as usual and choosing a reality show host cum property developer for president.

In The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties the conservative thinker Christopher Caldwell notes, “If the 1960s were a revolutionary time, the core of the revolution was race.” Caldwell explains the shift that America underwent in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement:

Today slavery is at the center of Americans’ official history, with race the central concept in the country’s official self-understanding. Never before the 1960s was this the case. For almost all of American history, racial conflict was understood as a set of episodes – some shameful, some glorious – set against a larger story about building a constitutional republic. After the 1960s, the constitutional republic was sometimes discussed as if it were a mere set of tools for resolving larger conflicts about race and human rights.

South Africa is downstream of American culture and so here too the constitutional republic has become a set of tools to resolve a larger conflict about race. We should add that the conflict about race is a conflict over continuing racialised inequality, in spite of the strenuous efforts to rectify it. As Caldwell explains:

Civil rights transformed the country not just constitutionally but also culturally and demographically. In ways few people anticipated, it proved to be the mightiest instrument of domestic policy enforcement the country had ever seen. It can fairly be described as the largest undertaking of any kind in American history, costing trillions upon trillions of dollars and spanning half a century.

South Africa’s own reckoning with race since 1994 has seen R15 trillion flowing from whites to their fellow South Africans through taxation, as Dave Steward estimates in his Politicsweb piece “The frogs that lay the golden eggs”.

Yet such sacrifices have not solved the racialised inequality problem, at least not to the liking of those who believe in “systemic racism”. As is pointed out by conservative critics, the liberal establishment in the US has been in charge of racial questions since the 1960s and yet for the past 40 years there has been little progress on the issue.

Without denying that in the 1960s America needed to reckon with the mistreatment of blacks, Caldwell shows how the Civil Rights Act reframed liberal thinking such that America now stands divided against itself. While conservatives want to return to the founding principles of the 1788 constitution (by which the private sphere is protected from undue state interference), the liberal [read Left] establishment believes in the “de facto constitution of 1964”, the moral thrust of which is racialised equality by any means necessary.

There is an echo of this in South Africa. The minorities hoped that 1994 would herald the end of race as the driver of politics. But it turns out that the critics of the 1994 transition had a point: 1994 was not the end of race politics but only the start of another cycle of racialised thinking in which persistent white privilege is held up as evidence of persistent racism. The struggle against anti-black racism remains the animating feature of black politics even though a black political party has been in charge for a generation. How could it be otherwise given the outsized influence of America’s civil rights movement on how we approach the subject? As Caldwell puts it: “Race was invested with a religious significance … the civil rights movement, inside and outside government, became a doctrinal institution, analogous to established churches in pre-democratic Europe.”

The sacralising of race equality has come at a terrible cost. Caldwell cites the American political philosopher Leo Strauss in explaining why fighting “discrimination” (i.e. racialised inequality) can be worse than putting up with it:

In the liberal society there is necessarily a private sphere with which the state’s legislation must not interfere. […] liberal society necessarily makes possible, permits, and even fosters what is called by many people “discrimination”. The prohibition against every ‘discrimination’ would mean the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between the state and society, in a word, the destruction of liberal society.

I hear you asking: are you telling me racialised equality is impossible and that we will do more damage trying to fix it as opposed to learning to live with it?

The obvious point that dare not speak its name is that without racial preferences elite blacks in the US and South Africa would not achieve demographic representivity in elite institutions. For civil rights activists, this is a good reason to support quotas, as a way to ameliorate the ongoing damage to black pride caused by racialised inequality. This might make sense in the US, where blacks are in the minority and where the cost of preferential hiring on the economy is minimal. But in South Africa black empowerment and employment equity are disastrous, disincentivising much-needed investment and job creation.

Alas, the moral equation South Africa inherited from the civil rights movement has it that it is better to have enforced racial equality for elites than “systemic” racialised inequality; it is better to mandate a black middle-class by state fiat than for the valued echelons of the economy to be dominated by minorities.

The point of liberal society is that it guarantees freedom of association, what Caldwell calls the “master freedom”. You get to live and let live; to be who you are, think what you like, hang around with whom you like, employ whoever you like. When you introduce a moral panic into that equation in an attempt to reverse obvious differences in groups related to intellectual acumen, you can no longer call yours a liberal society and you enter the dark realm of race communism. Race communism – perpetrated on behalf of the poorer race against the more successful one – involves a declaration of ideological war against white privilege, white enclaving, white success. If the collapse of the Soviet Union taught us anything it is that Marxism is dead but Leninism lives on. Which is to say that power-mongers will find endless reasons to suspend liberal principles for the sake of revolutionary “progress”.

And now for finding the light amidst this dark prophecy. Race communism is simply another form of communism and like the previous type it too will one day be consigned to the scrapheap of history. Besides, Elon Musk owns X by which you’re allowed to discuss these issues openly without being cancelled. In South Africa everyone can see that race communism does not work and that it is causing institutional ruin. We have powerful organisations – e.g. the Solidarity Movement and the Democratic Alliance – opposing race communism and seeking a settlement among the races based on mutual respect and friendship, not guilt and loathing. In South Africa the races get along just fine at ground level, with millions of daily interactions between those of different races, almost all of which are respectful and kind. Unfortunately, there will always be powerful political figures in South Africa imitating Lenin and justifying all manner of madness and hate in the name of race equality. By standing up to them and protecting the private sphere based on the values of a live and let live liberal society we will save this place for common sense and common decency.

1. Daily Maverick, print edition, 25 April – 1 May, 2025