Race and sex/gender are commonly argued to deserve equal priority with class oppression in egalitarian politics. However, placing race and sex in the same list as what is here termed “standard-of-living class” constitutes a category error. Standard of living, alongside power and status, belongs to a distinctive list of “metrics of hierarchy” that should be accorded priority in an important respect: in the specification of the hierarchies (or “distribution strata”) that egalitarians seek ultimately to eliminate or reduce. Race and sex, along with other “differentiators,” matter primarily for the way they are “used” by social arrangements (e.g., apartheid, patriarchy, capitalism) to assign persons to places in hierarchies of living standard, power, and status. Examining policies to promote black capitalism in post-apartheid South Africa, the author shows how the conflation of differentiators (race, in this case) and distribution strata (like standard-of-living class) is complicit in justifying multiracialized inequality.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971/1999), 52-73, 132-36. With Rawls and other choice-sensitive egalitarians, one might also make allowances for inequalities resulting from genuine personal choices.
2.
It is only where it is rooted in such arrangements (such as caste) that status difference becomes relevant to an egalitarian politics. The latter cannot hope, indeed ought not to aspire, to ensure that all are equally esteemed irrespective of their behavior. Egalitarians also ought not to seek to equalize the degree to which individuals’ talents are admired or to which individuals are found attractive to others, even though these bases of esteem are morally arbitrary. (They can, though, seek to limit the extent of overall social inequality flowing from these natural inequalities, an issue briefly touched on again later in the article.) Egalitarians may wish for all to be equally self-estimating (at least all who have done no serious wrong, and where such equalization does not cause individuals to make self-damaging choices), but that goal too lies beyond the rubric of an egalitarian politics.
3.
While I consider the ultimate moral test of a policy or arrangement to be the extent to which it contributes to individual flourishing or well-being-as I reaffirm later, groups, morally speaking, have no status distinguishable from the lives of their members-this normative stance in no sense implies atomism. I join all egalitarians I know in thinking that individuals benefit from their association with others in love, friendship, organizations, group activities, and politics.
4.
Gender II could also refer to the domination of (say) binarized gender categories over bisexual or transgendered ones.
5.
I derive the expressions "hodgepodge" and "mosaic" from Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes, "Introduction: Multicultural Questions," in Multicultural Questions , ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8-11.
6.
Tommie Shelby, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2005), 207-16.
7.
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defence of Pluralism and Equality ( Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1983 ); Rawls, Theory of Justice, 86-93.
8.
I should say at once that egalitarians need have no objection in principle to medical interventions to improve human mental or physical well-being. Nor should they have objections to the maximization of (fairly distributed) human happiness. Medication acts upon biologically irreducible sources of misery, that is, misery that will be left over when standard-of-living, power, and status hierarchies are reduced; moreover there may be a case for using it against sources of misery that are rooted in social arrangements until such time as those social arrangements are altered, and provided that using it does not become a substitute for seeking such alterations. Human subjective well-being is, in my view, the ultimate object of politics; the justice-based argument against the happiness pill or happy slave must be rooted finally in the belief that happiness achieved except via justice is ultimately unsustainable or incomplete. In philosophical terms my stance might be termed rule-consequentialist.
9.
Rawls, Theory of Justice , 86-93.
10.
While freedom can be a distributional question, apartheid’s freedom problem was not only a distributional one: not simply a problem of some having less freedom than others. It would not have helped, from a pro-freedom point of view, if all were equally repressed under apartheid, irrespective of race. In that case apartheid’s denial of freedom would have constituted a problem for freedom rather than distributive justice. (The distinction is analogous to the one made earlier in respect of gender I: qua repressive role differentiation gender constitutes a problem for freedom, even where it represses men, women, and the transgendered equally.) In apartheid’s case repression was both a libertarian and an egalitarian issue, because blacks had vastly less freedom than whites, and especially less of the most valuable freedom (that which gave access to economic prosperity). It should be noted, though, that whites were themselves subject to a range of restrictions-on whom they could marry and have sex with, on whom they could organize with politically, on what they could (qua journalists) report in the press. The point about apartheid’s freedom deficit can thus be made independently of the egalitarian one about its unequal distribution of power conceived as freedom.
11.
Daryl Glaser , "Should An Egalitarian Support Black Economic Empowerment?" Politikon34, no. 2 (2007): 105-23.
12.
According to former President Thabo Mbeki, the policy is designed to achieve "the integrated objectives of economic growth, poverty eradication and the building of an egalitarian society." See Thabo Mbeki, Letters from the President: Articles from the First 100 Editions of ANC Today (Johannesburg: African National Congress Communication Unit, 2003), 23. See also the preamble to Republic of South Africa, "Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act (Act no. 53, 2003)," Government Gazette 463, no. 25899 (2004): 2-10, which refers to "the constitutional right to equality," "a more equitable income distribution," and "equal opportunity" (2).
13.
For recent indictments, see William M. Gumede, "Delivering the Democratic Developmental State in South Africa" in The Politics of Service Delivery, ed. Anne McLennan and Barry Munslow (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009), 89-91; R. W. Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since the End of Apartheid (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 381-444; and Moeletsi Mbeki, Architects of Poverty: Why Africa’s Capitalism Needs Changing (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2009), 61-100.
14.
While I am not aware of any systematic research into this topic, there is direct and indirect evidence for mixed attitudes among many blacks toward new elites. Thus a 2004 survey found that 65 percent of South African blacks believed that Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) enriched only a select few. On the related matter of racial affirmative action, 22 percent of Africans strongly supported the policy, 56 percent opposed it on meritocratic grounds, in a 2000 survey (figures cited in Johnson, South Africa’s Brave New World, 115, 428). Since affirmative action-which I do not discuss in this article-benefits a broader black stratum than BEE, and BEE is at least equally non-meritocratic, it is reasonable to suppose that much the same or a greater proportion would have reported themselves as opposed to BEE, especially in its narrow variant. Beyond such data, public discourse in South Africa reverberates with expressions of opposition to elite black enrichment issuing from sections of a range of black-led and mass-based political formations, notably the labor movement.
15.
In South African parlance, the term "African" is often used to denote the descendants of the Bantu-speakers who migrated some two thousand years ago into what is today South Africa and who make up some 80 percent of the population (though like all "race" groups in southern Africa, these descendants are genetically mixed, in this case notably with aboriginal Khoi and San people). This racial usage, sometimes signaled by the adjectival qualifier black, is to be distinguished from the syncretic or inclusively multiracial use of the term. It is invoked in this context because allusion is being made to hypothetical instances of competition for business places between two officially black population categories, Indians and black Africans.
16.
A discussion of affirmative action more broadly is a matter for another occasion. Certainly affirmative action should have the same test applied it as does narrow BEE: does it enhance interpersonal as opposed to (just) group equality of living standards, power, and status? It is likely to fare better in this test than BEE, but to encounter various egalitarian objections of its own.
17.
Michael Jonas , ‘The downside of diversity’, Boston Globe, august 5, 2007. http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/05/the_downside_of_diversity/ "http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/08/0the_downside_of_diversity/ Accessed on May 21, 2010.
18.
See Max Weber, "Class, Status and Party" in Class, Status and Power: A Reader in Social Stratification, eds. Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1953). I am tipping my hat also to Rawls, whose "primary goods" include basic rights and liberties, freedoms of movement and occupation, powers associated with offices and positions of responsibility, income and wealth and social bases of self-respect. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 181.
19.
For a survey of debates around this, see Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002), 177-87.
