Racial dignity was a hot theme during the 2001 Human Rights Commission inquiry into media racism, and it emerged again at the SABC-South African National Editors’ Forum conference last week.
Responding to my speech there, SABC CEO Dali Mpofu raised racial dignity as part of his opposition to the Sunday Times’s stories on Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.
His core critique is that the paper violated a right to dignity by its coverage. For him, the Constitution privileges this particular right (by mentioning it thrice), and that this is because it seeks to redress three centuries of racist indignity. The import of his view is, controversially, that dignity is a group, as well as an individual, right.
I hear him on the importance of dignity and redress. But here are some alternative considerations:
Racism in South African history can be argued to have been an effect, rather than a cause. In this view, racial indignity was mainly a means towards maintaining inequality and refusing democracy. Accordingly, one could then point to the Constitution’s stress on rights to equality and democracy, and argue that these are more important than dignity. The point I am making is that it’s tricky to elevate dignity above other rights — such as the Sunday Times’s right, under democracy, to free speech. Other criteria are needed to assess the paper’s action — not dignity as being intrinsically a superior value irrespective of public interest in free speech and equality.
Is the case of Manto Tshabalala-Msimang about her own dignity at stake, or of black dignity more broadly (as Mpofu has suggested, she being one of our “mothers and daughters”)? Does black group dignity sustain unacceptable collateral damage due to damage to the dignity of one black person? Isn’t there a distinction sometimes?
To the extent that at stake is the minister’s dignity as an individual, and not as a representative of a racial class, is it her personal dignity or her political dignity? Again, isn’t there a distinction?
Is there no public interest in any of the story — or is all of it, including the way it was told, so lacking in merit that there is no democratic case for any dignity over-ride?
I’m not sure, then, that the Mpofu stand on dignity gives guidance on evaluating the Sunday Times’s coverage. And yet, the question of race and dignity is not something that can ever be dismissed.
This ground has been covered in numerous debates about African American leaders and sports heroes as being emeblematic of their society – which they are not. Leaders, like the Health Minister, are individuals and should not hide behind the cloak of their race when their personal indiscretions come to light.
Mpofu’s proposal that dignity is the foundational value of the Constitution is not unsupportable. It resonates with a German constitutional tradition, (an important infliunce on our text), which itself can be traced directly back to Kant.
Still, Mpofu’s vision is subject to Guy’s objections; the notion that dignity can be a group right, rather than, as usually conceived, individual, is especially problematic. Mpofu’s suggestion amounts to affirmative action as applied to the law of defamation. To put it crudely: he says that, because of the relevant history, a white person’s dignity is simply less worthy of protection, all other things being equal.
The more conventional analysis would, in balancing the right of the Minister to her dignity against the right to free speech, take into account her position as a public figure. That reduces the weight to be accorded to her reputational interest, for three reasons. First, one who enters public life must be assumed to know that this entails subjecting oneself to the hurly-burley of public discourse — which is often cruel and unfair. Second, the importance of speech on political matters often readily outweighs the public figure’s individual rights. Third, a public figure like the Minister has extaordinary access to the means of defending her reputation if she wishes to; that is why a private plaintiff, who typically has limited opportunity to hit back, or set the record straight, generally has a better chance of winning a defamation case.
Michael Osborne