It’s not clear if South Africans are aware that they have five options for their official race, namely black, coloured, white, Indian and Other. In the last two census these were the options and I chose ‘Other’, together with a limited number of other South Africans.
Recently, in official documents from Nelson Mandela University, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality and SANParks I also had these official choices, again choosing ‘Other’.
Under these circumstances, I would like to know how BEE legislation treats someone whose official race is ‘Other’.
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I had an interesting conversation with the Institute of Race Relations about their investigation into so-called “fake transformation” to inform an article on the different perspectives on the Employment Equity regulations updates.
For me, a coloured by the census classification (but who identifies as brown and black, depending on the conversation), I believe that it is not helpful to skew the census data in a society that is still healing from the scars of apartheid and institutionalised segregation.
The data is used to track a lot of the societal blending that has occurred over time and base level economic transformation (land ownership, employment, etc…).
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That is most interesting! Is there a legal expert here who might be able to shed some light on this?
Interested to hear what legal opinion you’re after… There’s a lot of transparency around what census data is used for Census | Statistics South Africa - it is, after all, one of the biggest public data gathering exercises in the country with only Home Affairs and Sars collecting more data on individuals.
I have never been under the impression that these options are a “choice”, but rather a selection based on what is most accurate to you. My understanding is that the “other” option is for people who do not fit into those other categories - Latin American people, for example.
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It’s a hangover from continued reparations needed to address the damage done by the entirely farcical tricameral parliament that was formed in the last throws of apartheid. While the freedom writing was emerging under the cracking coats of whitewash, the apartheid government tried a fresh dose of bleach by allowing coloureds and indians to commune with them and drink some anti-africanist koolaid. It’s one of the many reasons why there is still deep scars between black and brown people in our country - I should, for all intents, tick the black box, but unfortunately that option was robbed from me when the apartheid government decided to treat some blacks as different to others.
To be fair, it was a smart play on the part of the NP. My parents spoke fondly of PW Botha and many of their peers voted for the NP in 1994.
But that then left all the immigrants without a box to tick - and still contributes to a lot of the xenophobia we see now.
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Another curious part of the race classification is how you get defined. According to an Employment Equity expert who did mandatory EE training at my work, your race comes from your father. The classifications made by our old government persist forever and mother race is ignored! This means you cannot create a new Coloured person after 1994. I am classified white male with a white wife. My son married a woman who has black parents. Our grand daughter is deemed white according to EE law. If my daughter should marry a man with a father classified black, any grandchild will be black.
The sad part about this is that EE laws have therefore entrenched apartheid classification and the demon of our past never gets exorcised.
Well, I was under the impression that your race was something that you could decide for yourself, particularly since no official document - ID, passport, drivers licence - specifies race. So, at any stage you can specify any race you want, and any official objecting will have to indicate on what basis that is done. Hark back to the Nats ‘Race Classification Board’ - is that what the ANC or BEE has?
Of course, if one goes back in history, most people have a mixed race background. For instance FW de Klerk and Paul Kruger had Indian slave ancestry - do you think their descendants would be welcome at a Black Lives Matter protest?
Then, with more than 1000 years of Arab slave trading along the east coast of Africa, the extensive trade that the Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe kingdoms had with India and China, many of the people living on the east coast also have eastern and middle-Eastern ancestry.
So they can all choose ‘Other’ without fear of some sort of penalty. Moreover, race should not be used as a defining characteristic of people. As Professor Barney Pityana has said: ‘race is an artificial construct that should not play a role in our country’s future’. Or remember that pan-Africanist leader, Robert Sobukwe, said that there is only one race: the human race.