THE thing about racism, apparently, is the smell. Only this week the ruling party’s Jabulani Mahlangu was telling the National Assembly that “human society” has been infected with its malodorous vapours.

It was the late Oliver Tambo who had first raised a stink about this, Mahlangu said, and the former ANC president had warned that, among other things, racism warped thought processes and fouled the air with tension, mutual antagonism and hatred.

And so, just as the flap of a butterfly’s wing in a Brazilian forest sets in motion a series of events that result in a tornado half a world away, so too has the seemingly inconsequential flatus of a Sparrow mushroomed into a noxious miasma so repellent it’s a wonder we can even breathe, let alone think.

Clearly something has to be done, and to this end Mahlangu has called for the establishment of a national register of racist offenders. Such a register, he told MPs, would go some way towards the tightening of anti-racist legislation and ensure the blacklisting of these miscreants.

“Making the register accessible to embassies,” he said, “will assist them with screening of visa applications as well as work permits to keep racists from their countries.”

One would imagine that would keep the Gauteng Department of Arts and Culture’s Velaphi Khumalo safely within our borders. Readers will recall his emotional outburst on Facebook about wanting to “cleanse” the country of white people just as “Hitler did to the Jews”.

But perhaps Khumalo wasn’t quite the sort of candidate Mahlangu had in mind for the register. After all, he did issue a groveling and heartfelt apology to both the ANC and the Gauteng government, but not apparently to white people in general or Jews in particular. It was a rather unique act of contrition, one best not scrutinised too closely for fear of being labelled racist.

The media personality Gareth Cliff, on the other hand, could well be included, along with the usual suspects like the hard-of-thinking Penny Sparrow and suspended Standard Bank economist Chris Hart. 

Thinking about it, Cliff could be the register’s leading entry, its poster boy. He even looks like a "racist", what with his blue-eyed blonde boy bimbo schtick.

The problem with Cliff, though, was that he successfully sued M-Net for wrongful dismissal when they booted him from Idols for tweeting a response to Sparrow’s idiotic comments. 

While the court made no finding on whether or not Cliff was racist, it did rule that the case was an urgent matter — as he claimed — due to the the grave damage caused by accusations of racism on social media. It was, according to his counsel, “tantamount to a death sentence”.

With her finding, Judge Caroline Nicholls sent a strong message that labelling someone a “racist” didn’t necessarily mean they were in fact racist. 

Doing so without legitimate grounds was therefore unjust and caused irreparable damage to reputations.

But what then, given the smell and the pressing need to crack on with the entries for Mahlangu’s register, were these legitimate grounds? Did a person first have to be convicted of hate speech or a hate-based crime before he or she was declared racist? 

Would there be grounds for, if I may, “pre-emptive” labelling? Was there a metaphorical pencil test that would enable others to peer into our souls and monitor our thoughts?

These may seem difficult questions, but the ruling party surely has all the answers. They really are the experts here, and they will tell you as much, and very often unbidden too.

This is an election year, after all, and rather than deal with the perhaps more pressing issues of service delivery, poor economic performance, unemployment and the crisis in tertiary education, they’re off chasing dragons with their trusty race cards to the fore.

In the current toxic climate, anyone the ANC doesn’t get along with could be declared a racist. Because it has loudly proclaimed itself to be the only legitimate organisation committed, in the words of national spokesman Zizi Kodwa, “to advancing and realising the aspirations of the majority of our nation’s people to live in a non-racist, non-sexist South Africa”, it therefore follows that its enemies are also the enemies of a non-racist, non-sexist South Africa.

It may be some time before “racists” are made to sport yellow “R” patches on their shirts and jackets or are dumped in the gulags. But Mahlangu’s register suggests we’re perhaps slowly getting there.

Imagine then the take on Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous sermon: “First they came for the ‘racists’, and I did not speak out…”