Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News – 24-10-2019
Political analyst Professor Steven Friedman says the battle in the Democratic Alliance (DA) is between people who think that liberalism is about being white and those who have other ideas.
Friedman writes in The Conversation that liberalism is meant to be about freedom for all individuals, regardless of race – But linking liberalism to whiteness as is happening now is not new in South Africa.
Friedman indicates that most activists who fought for black freedom dismissed liberalism as a white ideology designed to tame black people, not to free them.
Speaking to Radio Islam, Friedman says while Helen Zille was the DA leader who made a serious attempt to bring black people into the party and to compete for the black vote, she hoped the black people would ‘behave’.
“I think that Helen Zille believes that she could recruit lots of black people into the DA and they would behave exactly as the traditional leadership of the DA wanted them to behave and of course that was never realistic.”
Friedman says Zille who is now federal executive chair said the battle within the party was a battle between democratic liberalism and racial nationalism.
“The kind of liberalism I think which the so called pure liberals in the DA claim to support is the liberalism which basically says ‘liberalism is being like white people.’ Like some romanticized idea of white people. So if you have the same value as white people in the leafy suburbs than you are liberal. If you don’t, you don’t.”
Friedman says the symptom of a big problem in which white run organisations believe they can absorb black people without changing the way the organization operates to reflect the new membership.
Listen to the interview with Steven Friedman
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