LETTER: IRR serves own agenda

It’s a sad irony that the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) is a leading peddler of all manner of misinformation on issues from climate change to racism (“Institute of Race Relations is truthful when it suits”, July 26).

The IRR mischaracterises the problem of racism as one that only has to do with racist attitudes or racial disrespect. Even when producing data on racial inequality and injustice, it argues that racism is not the problem, and that liberalised economic policies are the solution to the inequality and injustice we observe.

This ignores structural elements that perpetuate racial inequality and injustice, and ignores recent evidence of continued discrimination in labour force recruitment and advancement after having controlled for relevant factors such as education and experience (see Carlos Gradín’s paper Occupational Segregation by Race in South Africa after Apartheid).

Racial disrespect based on racist attitudes, though immoral in its own right, is not the only sort of racism we face. The focus on racial disrespect by the IRR is a ploy to shift attention away from what they view to be undesirable options in the debate about how we are to correct for the detrimental material effects of racism.

The opinion polls and surveys of the IRR are purposefully designed to downplay the seriousness of racism by focusing on people’s professed attitudes. This has led the IRR to ludicrous conclusions, such as a generous estimate of racist incidents in SA is 13.3 a day and that whites have experienced more racism than blacks since 1994.

The IRR misleads on race for the purposes of influencing policy to its own ideological ends, as has become blatantly obvious in its civic engagement as a “think-tank”. If you want to understand anything about race in SA, the IRR is not the place to go.

Phila Mfundo Msimang, Via e-mail

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