That South Africa is one of the most unequal nations in the world, is a given. This is a reality one need not consult with World Bank or Stats SA reports in order to determine. A simple glance at any city or town in the republic lays bare the material and social divisions that typify the nation. Yet for a country in many ways defined by it’s inequality our conversation around the topic remains somewhat facile. As my colleague, Jeff Rudin, points out much of this has to do with how inequality discourse in South Africa almost always reduces the phenomena to its racial dimensions.

A function of this race reductionism is that the potential to explore a politics of radical change from the status quo is stunted at its roots. This stunting is of particular significance in a society that so desperately needs to build itself after centuries of rampant exploitation and oppression.

How Inequality is “Racial”

While it is important to note that the tendency to reduce inequality to its “racial” factors is both limited and limiting, it does not mean that wealth, income, and social status are completely “deracialised”.

So how is inequality “racial”? Traditionally “racial inequality” is understood as the economic/material disparities between population groups under “racial” categories (What “race” actually is, or even it’s legitimacy as a social category remain highly contested).

What this means is that a wide array of people are reduced to their racial category, their wealth and income is measured and then compared to those of other “racial” groupings. In doing so we are supposed to have a clearer understanding of the nature of inequality. Despite the obvious drawbacks of this Verwoerdian lens of analysis, South Africa does seem to suffer from material disparities between these so-called racial groupings.

Pale skinned descendants of European nationals, the data tells us, earn 3 times more than their brown skinned counterparts. Households consisting primarily of brown skinned descendents of central Africans make up 93% of all poor South Africans. A whole host of other economic disparities exist between the population groups as they would have been divided under apartheid.

Unpacking The Limits

Yet as useful as these observations may be to some, they remain mere descriptions. These observations, and their underlying assumptions about the world, offer us little insight into what produces and reproduces South Africa’s rampant inequality. In addition the assumptions that lead to this approach are often so myopic that data (and analysis) that challenge this approach are often disregarded by virtue of their deviation from ‘common sense’ understandings.

The biggest challenge to the conventional wisdom around inequality, is the glaring reality that intra-”racial” inequality has for the past few years contributed more significantly to total inequality than inter-”racial”. As the 2018 World Inequality Report states: “Rising black per capita incomes over the past three decades have narrowed the interracial income gap, although increasing inequality within the black and Asian/Indian population seems to have prevented any decline in total inequality”

In racialised language this means that the economic gap between Sipho and Vukosi contributes more to generalized inequality than the gap between Sipho and Johan. And not only that, this gap has widened while the gap between “races” continues to contract. This reality, that the current dispensation has produced a layer of wealthy “Black” people whose material gains have exacerbated the gap between the haves and the have-nots more than that between Karen and her domestic worker is both enlightening and challenging to the current policy paradigm and the dominant discourse. Yet these basic facts rarely, if ever, make the headlines.

The dominant approach can be said to merely paint a picture of the complexion of inequality while running away from the complexities of inequality. This crucial limitation inevitably interacts with the material forces at play. And when a mode of analysis is widespread and influential, it is important to interrogate its value and usefulness for our context. Because as Michael Nassen Smith, author of “Confronting Inequality: the South African Crisis” points out: “… discrimination, systemic or individual, is only one — and a limited one at that — way of understanding […] inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.”

To demonstrate the limitations of reducing inequliaty to its racial dimensions, let us imagine a really existing anti-racist capitalism. Under such a system South Africa’s distribution of income and wealth would look slightly different. But it would simply be a matter of appearance, an economy embedded in an extravist, degradational and parasitic road to accumulation is forced to confront a few realities.

Among them is that an anti-racist road to equality effectively requires racial factors to supersede all others. Thus if one has an elite (or 1%), middle class (9%) and underclass (90%) that are all “demographically representative” the problem identified by the anti-racists effectively falls away.

In this distribution of resources, the gap between racial groups has been practically eliminated, yet this picture remains somewhat indistinguishable from the one we experience today. It does not and would not negate the fact that income and wealth would be held in the hands of a minority while the majority would still toil in poverty.

What this should show is that the problem with inequality in South Africa is NOT that it is racialised. Instead the fundamental problem is that South Africa remains a society built on the extraction of surplus value from, both, paid and unpaid labour performed by the majority. It is this reality that necessitates a tightening of the parameters of the discussion around inequality. A discourse meant to highlight material and social inequalities should in my view move away from the narrow particularism that currently defines it. It should transform into a universalist approach that takes issue with the existence of material and social inequalities, and not just one form of inequality.

Universalism, not particularism!

The discursive limits surrounding inequality move us from a question of data analysis -of which the racialist argument is found to be wanting– to a political one. This shift in terrain opens up the possibility to move towards a discourse that is sensitive to the legacy of racialism in South Africa, while cognisant of the need to build a non-racial, non-sexist,non-homophobic, non-transphobic, non-exploitive society.

That the Motsepe’s and Ramaphosa’s of the nation do not hold the same level of wealth, or power as their paler counterparts the Ruperts and the Openheimers is of little significance for the 30 million South Africans who live below the poverty line. To argue otherwise is to engage in a shallow racialist version of trickle down economics. And if there’s one thing the past 30 years have shown is that wealth doesn’t trickle down.

The ways in which we understand a problem determines the ways in which approach the problem. At this juncture our understanding, and thus approach, has facilitated the rise of a class whose presence has gone on to worsen an already terrible level of inequality. It is for this reason that South Africans need to revisit their understandings of race and inequality lest we keep repeating the same mistakes.

by Kgosi Morena, a young nigga trynna get his.