GABRIEL CROUSE | 'I did not say racism is human nature'

“Why is there racism? Human nature. There will always be murder, rape, and racism in South Africa, because there will always be human beings, and human nature in South Africa. To my mind the question should be, ‘are things getting worse, or better’, not, ‘is there racism, is there murder, is there rape?’”

I said that to journalist Bulelani Nonyukela as part of a series of interviews that included Chris Nissen, chairperson of the South African Human Rights Commission, Rathabile Ratsomo of the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, and Wynand Boshoff MP, an FF+ parliamentarian and Orania supporter. My line got the headline “Why there’s racism? Human nature, says Institute of Race Relations’ Crouse” (28 June).

Of course that pleased me. Then I noticed that Nissen and Ratsomo responded critically, to put it mildly, but not to what I said. A friend pointed out that almost all the comments on TimesLIVE’s X post of this story criticised me too, many calling me “racist”, though again my words were not quite there.

How did that happen? Nonyukela repeatedly peddled a fake quote, putting words into my mouth. In so doing he set me up to be labelled, and treated, as a racist in public.

The pseudo-trial of my words in the absence of my meaning lacks something important, which this piece will fill in for the reader’s benefit.

Separately, at the end of the podcast Nonyukela said, “By the time of publication we had not seen the Institute of Race Relations [IRR] research on 80% of black people not experiencing racism”. I would like to address that lacuna too.

Nonyukela framed the interview by saying, incorrectly, that “Gabriel Crouse tells us racism is human nature”.

I never said that. Breathing is human nature. Thinking is human nature. Defecating is human nature. Those are impulses that you cannot reasonably overcome for very long. They are inevitable at the level of the individual, making them unblameworthy.

That, in turn, is why no one would ever seriously say “rape is human nature” or “murder is human nature”, or “racism is human nature”, even though anyone could reasonably say that “there will always be murder, rape, and racism in South Africa, because there will always be human beings, and human nature, which includes good, evil, and the power to choose between the two”.

At the level of the individual there is choice, not inevitability. At the level of the group, it is inevitable that someone unpredictable will choose to do wrong. This is not controversial.

However, by fabricating the quote “racism is human nature”, Nonykukela was able to create a controversy. He created the impression that I was excusing racists by claiming they have no choice. He added to the problem by lumping my view with Boshoff’s in the subtitle of his write-up, which is bizarre since Boshoff supports of the whites-only town of Orania that celebrates apartheid leaders including Hendrik Verwoerd and BJ Vorster and thereby perpetuates racism and promotes secession.

Then came the critics. “Ratsomo opposes the Institute of Race Relations take that racism is human nature”, Nonyukela said, doubling down on the fabrication.

Ratsomo then misrepresented my views even more egregiously, saying “my DNA is very close to that of a white person, of an Indian person, of a coloured person, so I think it would be inaccurate to say that racism is human nature”.

At this point my comparison of racism to rape and murder has been double twisted into the idea that DNA differences between white, Indian, coloured, and black people somehow justify racism.

HRC Chairperson Nissen then finished the job by saying the “it’s just human” view of racism is wrong.

But again, I never said “it’s just human”, or that races have different DNA natures, or that it is not a choice because “racism is human nature”.

Nonyukela used his fabricated quote once more in the write-up. “‘Racism is human nature”, says Gabriel Crouse, executive director of the [IRR] legal division, questioning Nelson Mandela’s acclaimed ‘no-one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin’ view.”

Not true. I did not “question” Mandela’s view. Mandela was right, and I did not say “racism is human nature”.

My tragic view that human nature has endowed every individual of every race with the power to choose racism or non-racialism is not “questioning” Mandela’s acclaimed insight, it is the essence of it. Mandela chose good. He was not alone, most South Africans, in each race group, chose good when it comes to non-racialism.

Obviously, Nonyukela would have noticed upon a moment’s reflection, I could not be questioning Mandela’s view since I said racism is like murder and rape and no one is “born” a rapist, or a murderer. These are choices.

The only way to know the trends is by looking at statistics. One key bit of evidence for the claim that more and more people choose non-racialism is that although every urban black worker personally suffered racism every single day in the 1980s, the vast majority of black respondents to a poll commissioned by the IRR in 2020 said they had not personally experienced any form of racism in the last five years.

Nonyukela asked “how many people” participated in that survey. The answer is 2 459. The survey was conducted by MarkData, which has decades of experience, and was hired by eNCA to do election polling in May where it found the ANC to be on 43%, the DA on 19%, MK on 14%, the EFF on 11%, the IFP on 3% − all roughly close to the final results.

In my interview with Nonyukela I went straight to reporting that evidence of good news. Millions of nameless people are making countless positive choices on non-racialism.

Why is that important? The more that good news gets spread, the more confident non-racialists will be, and the more uncomfortable racists (of all races) will be in the knowledge that they are a dwindling minority.

Of course, that good news got lost in the frothy takedowns of Nonyukela’s fake quote that “racism is human nature”.

Our work aims to bring the proportion of people of all races who say they have not personally experienced racism in the last five years up from 80% to 90% in the next five years. The main driver of non-racialism from here is going to be job growth. If we overachieve, if the number goes to 95% great, but I am not going to pretend that in five years, or fifty, racism will not exist at all.

Why? Because human nature manifests the power to choose, always has, always will. No one is born evil, but that choice does get made. Analysis works on achievable goals, not the utopian delusion that heaven is coming to earth via a government programme.

EDITOR'S NOTE:

We publish Crouse’s opinion in the interest of fairness and discourse on the important yet disturbing issue of racism and its provenance. We stand by the podcast Bulelani Nonyukela put together. Readers are encouraged to listen to the debate and form their own opinion here:

• Gabriel Crouse is legal division executive director at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) Gabriel Crouse