City initiatives to combat racism
The past few weeks have seen a focus on issues related to an intractable global problem that has a distinctive manifestation in South Africa: racism. This distinction is due to the legacy of our past and the institutionalised form that racism took, bureaucratising discrimination and affecting the lived reality of generations of people. The lived reality of this racialised past lives with us today and is a substantive factor in the kinds of opportunity people have access to in South Africa today. Indeed, we did not do enough as a nation to fight the legacy of racism after 1994.
The role of public policy interventions is to address this substantive legacy through redress that tries to promote a meaningful reconciliation. This means dedicating resources to address the myriad inequities that are the result of generational discrimination that reached its zenith in apartheid practices. These public policy interventions involve a measure of a social compact. It means using our resources to cross-subsidise the poor.
It means dedicating attention and focus to areas that were under-serviced and under-resourced. And it means ensuring that we promote the idea of redress in all that we do. For example, in the City of Cape Town, it means investing in massive public works programmes to address poverty and investing in services for informal settlements and backyard communities.
This public policy approach is not easy. It is a moral imperative that promotes substantive social justice in our country and it relies on an agreement from our diverse society that the present is a legacy of our past that needs meaningful interventions in order to change South Africa into a place where individuals need not be trapped by the circumstances of their birth. To be sure, it is a complex undertaking.
At the same time, we need to address the attitudes and mindsets of people who may not appreciate that social change requires a change in culture and behaviours. This type of project, which is more abstract but no less vital, requires public awareness and communication. Last year, on Human Rights Day, I launched the City of Cape Town’s Inclusive City campaign under the banner of: ‘Don’t let racists speak for you’.