Demeaning question highlights humiliating nature of continuing race classification

9 October 2024

“Are you a white male?”

This was the bizarre question that Chief Justice Mandisa Maya reportedly put to Judge Phillip Coppin in his interview before the Judicial Service Commission.

Judge Coppin, who has applied for a position on the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), had to explain that he was “biracial” but had been born and had grown up in Kliptown in Soweto and had not had any of the benefits that white people received during apartheid.

This demeaning line of questioning shows the folly of continuing to classify people by race in South Africa, says the Institute of Race Relations (IRR).

“In a professional setting in modern South Africa nobody should be asked what their race is. Judge Coppin’s race, however it is perceived, has no bearing on how well he would do as a judge of the SCA,” says Marius Roodt, IRR analyst and writer.

“Since the repeal of various apartheid laws in the early 1990s there is no legal standard to determine an individual's race, which begs the question: why do we still insist on people racially classifying themselves?” Roodt says.

Roodt goes on: “This kind of invasive questioning about a person’s race is demeaning and embarrassing. It also brings to mind the fiasco before the 2015 Rugby World Cup when Damian de Allende had to tell people whether he was white or coloured. One would wish it was parody, but it is not.”

Roodt notes that the IRR has written to a number of South African institutions, including the Commission for Employment Equity and the South African Human Rights Commission, challenging them to explain why people are still racially classified in South Africa, even though the country is formally committed to non-racialism.

“We will continue to press institutions on why there is a need to still classify South Africans by race, including political parties in the GNU,” Roodt says.

“One can understand that some will argue that racial classification is still necessary because of the history of this country and the fact that people of colour were deprived of opportunities and their freedom. The argument would be that race is an important proxy to indicate disadvantage, but this is increasingly not the case.

“Policy makers should stop looking at race to determine disadvantage but rather look at actual disadvantage and help people on that basis. In any case, any policy which targets actual disadvantage rather than race will overwhelmingly benefit black South Africans,” says Roodt.

“The model for such an approach is the IRR’s Economic Empowerment for the Disadvantaged (EED) policy, which should replace failed policies based on racial preference,” Roodt concludes.

You can read the IRR’s EED policy here.

Statement issued by Marius Roodt, IRR Head of Campaigns, 9 October 2024