If I called you a kaffir or a honkie, a hotnot or a coolie

If I called you a kaffir or a honkie, a hotnot or a coolie or any one of scores of racist names, would you hold it against me?

You should. At least that's what the Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act is intended to censure.

What would you think if I called myself that? Probably that my parents never taught me respect for self or that the chips on my shoulders are really messing with my social posture.

Given our legislation, and some degree of social constraint, only the most bolshie of un-reconstructed racists among us would go around spouting racist epithets.

But, we make a mistake to think that the un-reconstructed racists among us are in a minority and that you and I stand outside of their purview. On the contrary, racism cuts vast swathes across every aspect of our communities, whether born out of ignorance, myth, victimhood, ethnocentrism, economic imperative, nationalism, historical precedent, xenophobia or prejudice towards "the other" (people who are different to us).

It takes very little for any one of us in this country - and especially for those of our countrymen who choose to sit thousands of kilometres away and engage in the issues via internet news and social networking sites - to get hot under the collar and begin to call each other the worst racist names imaginable.

The ANC has become a spectacular and embarrassing failure on a host of fronts since it became the governing party. But that does not excuse the fact that much of the criticism of government in some forums drips with unadulterated racist venom.

Nor does it mean that an alternative government by its nature must be non-African, as supporters of the DA-led Western Cape imply, even when senior DA leaders try their darndest to shoot them down.

Many of those who have climbed on the bandwagon of the current debate around race defend a position from inside a racial or cultural laager. And, post Manyi, coloured leaders - or should I say, leaders who define themselves as coloured - have failed miserably in providing the necessary leadership out of this laager mentality.

It also doesn't help when Africans try to occupy a moral high ground by suggesting - as Africanist academic Kwandi Kondlo did in the Robert Sobukwe Memorial Lecture at Fort Hare last week - that it is impossible for "blacks" to be racist because they are not the dominant economic group in our society.

Notwithstanding some hectic exchanges recently, we are only just scratching the surface of our racialised make-up. Race is anything but a touchy-feely issue and the resolution of racialised problems in our society will require difficult engagement.

But, until you and I begin to honestly declare where we stand on this issue of race and how we feel about our very material, very racialised existence in relation to each other, we cannot move forward even when we pretend that we have moved on.

As irritating as this hoo-hah on race may be, it will be repeated whenever our baser instincts trump our good intentions - unless we talk honestly - and civilly - about the fact that:
- You think that my cultural practices are disgusting and offensive to your sense of what is normal or modern or "cultured";

- I am hurting because I lost my investment because I didn't get the tender because I have the wrong racial classification in terms of empowerment legislation;

- You are angry because 17 years after winning the right to vote, you stay in a site-and-service pondokkie with access to few if any municipal services; none of your three kids has regular, sustained work; and your five grandchildren all subsist from your State pension;

- You have never been allowed to talk about the intense hatred you feel towards "them" because their government forcibly removed your family from what they called a slum (your family called it home for almost 50 years); a few weeks later your father died of the stress caused by the move to the middle of nowhere and a short while later your mother died of a broken heart;

- You wonder how it can be that you gave up the country to "them" yet 17 years later you are still being blamed for "their" incompetence;

- I can never conceive of my little girl or boy dating, let alone marrying, one of "them" because "they" really don't measure up to the standards of my family.

- You really think that you are much better than any of us, God's gift really to this society.

If race is a social construct - as natural scientists have proven and as social scientists keep reminding us - then we need to be working damn hard to overcome the social forces that demonise our society.

Recently, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, was asked for his comment on the race spat between Jimmy Manyi and Trevor Manuel.

I am coloured, said Tutu. And he referred to his gnome, the formal scientific link in his genetic makeup to the San people.

But there was an existential component to what Tutu was saying. He was staking himself to the underclass (in this particular debate). It reflected Steve Biko, among others, who wrote on blackness and being black. Biko called it a state of mind. Tutu, I suggest, would call it a "state of heart".

It mimics John F Kennedy who, as Cold War animosity peaked, declared on his trip to the wall that divided East and West Berlin in 1963: "I am a Berliner"?

And it is echoed in the Egyptian youths who stated at the height of opposition to Hosni Mubarak's despotic rule: "We are all Khaled Said" in memory of the martyr savaged by Mubarak's security police.

It debunks the "single stereotypical lens" that Harvard theologian Peter Gomes, who died last month, referred to when he chose to declare his homosexuality in 1996 during a period of sustained gay-bashing on the New England campus.

It's about saying, whether we are black or white: I am you. I want to put myself in your shoes, in your footsteps. I want to understand and experience and know what it is to be you, so that when you hurt, I hurt, when you are overjoyed, I am full of joy.