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20111005 Tutu’s white tax will not bring about reconciliation or restitution

Aside from the reasons already mentioned by the FW De Klerk foundation regarding reintroducing categories of who benefited from apartheid and by how much, there are other reasons that Tutu’s ‘white tax’ will not work. It’s important to consider that a once off tax does not make any amends, with the exception of being symbolic. The inequality that was enshrined in the laws of the country, the gross human rights violations, and the resultant interest off that forty year period (plus twenty years since the democratisation of the country) of regulating anything that had monetary value as well as the value of human life, is incalculable. We cannot count the cost of apartheid.

A white tax cannot begin to make reparation for how much damage has been done and continues to be done because of apartheid. Apartheid valued male whiteness and measured all other identities, languages, accents, skin colours, and expressions as negative, oppositional, and needing regulation and correction. A black person who valued (and still values) white maleness is rewarded for the ‘faith’ in the dominant idea of what is considered to be normal; that is, white wealthy maleness. To an extent, the cultural as well as the financial capital still lies in the hands of those who acquiesce to the dominant ideology of white patriarchal hegemony. Black identities are still constructed as “other”, oriental and exotic. Blackness and femininity fall outside of the dominant idea and expression of identity. One cannot pay for the way this discourse has been imposed upon people in order to create a reality that benefits particular people and disadvantages others.

No, in fact, a white tax releases people from the injustices perpetrated and the benefits reaped, willingly or unwillingly, without working through any process of justice or restitution. The white tax, just like the truth and reconciliation commission, does not exercise justice or bring about restitution for anyone.  Black and white people are both left with a distorted view of reality; the view that the injustices were only in the past and that they can be adequately addressed by, and that restitution can be made through, a once off ‘sin tax’.

Just from a monetary perspective, let’s look at the interest over a forty to sixty year period can be calculated in terms of monetary value. Let’s just look at the monetary value of an uncompensated forced removal. Let’s say that we are only interested in the monetary value of the properties that black people were forcibly removed from. Let’s say that the property was worth R1000 in the 1960’s. Let’s take a fifty year period because it is in-between forty and sixty years. Over a fifty year period, that R1000 rand would yield an amount of R1083658 with interest calculated yearly at 9%. That’s only the amount due to one property for one person. There are many other issues though, like the regulating of and disadvantaged access to resources such as health and education. Even if one was capable of entering tertiary education, one’s options were limited. These limited options limit the development of a middle class who have increased cultural capital. Cultural capital, the ability to engage with and produce culture, can change reality in order to favour the oppressed. Apartheid makes formal knowledge production, that is, education and the production of cultural symbols (literature, art), both material and performed, the domain of a particular group of people and legitimises this segregation through law, institutional prejudice, and individual day to day interactions.

The distorted view of reality allows for business as usual. There has been little change in the way we value blackness and whiteness. A white tax will not bring about reconciliation or restitution. That struggle will continue. It might be better for us to change the way we value each other; our valuation of one another should be based on being human, not an arbitrary difference in accent or melanin. That may return some ubuntu, I am through who you are, humanness. That is an almost insurmountable task for a hurt people, black and white, who are currently only able to relate superficially to difference (at Mzoli’s or rugby matches in Soweto). However, we need to be aware that if that change does not come soon, there will be a violent revolution where the disadvantaged will take back their investments with interest.