This is a response to an article in the Mail and Guardian on the 27th of April, 2023, titled The invisibility of Black professionals, by Professor Hlengani Mathebula of the University of Limpopo Business School. The rendering foregrounds matters arising from the piece with a view to giving a completed picture without insinuating any incompleteness.
Citing French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who came up with the theory of capital, Hlengani Mathebula posits that to black professionals in South Africa, today is “a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can be anything”. Hlengani Mathebula further argues, as he cites Bourdieu that capital has three “fundamental guises”: economic capital, which means all that can easily and immediately be converted into money; cultural capital which, under certain circumstances, can be converted into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the form of educational qualifications and social capital — those connections one accumulates which can, under certain conditions, be turned into economic capital".
The essence of Hlengani Mathebula’s rendition is that black professionals are capital without credentials to convert it to economic capital. He argues that interior to the non-black networks, albeit with significant improvements on the Indian component in the official definition of Black, lies a privilege which provides its members with the backing of collectively owned capital, “a credential which entitles them to credit, in the various sense of the word”. This credential makes any member of the non-black community profoundly visible as a professional and ordinary folk to what the economy provides as a system to interact with opportunities.
As part of matters arising from his piece, this rendition emboldens his arguments. It goes on to interrogate what this invisibility is, which Hlengani Mathebula chose not to define but drew inferences therefrom and what would constitute movement towards responding to this invisibility. This rendition posits a need for black professionals to work on visibility intelligence as an attribute to be developed in as critical a vigour as emotional intelligence has received attention.
ABOUT INVISIBILITY OR BEING INVISIBLE
The invisibility of black professionals is a discontent that comes a long way in the history of corporate South Africa and corporate establishments of the world, generically. The dictionary defines invisible as an adjective ‘unable to be seen’. In its expanded meaning, it includes being unnoticeable or unseen. However, to be in an invisible condition does not mean you do not exist or are not in the presence; it denotes being neglected or ignored as there being no reflection of your presence projecting you to where you should ordinarily be visible. To be reflected and projected is a function of what Hlengani Mathebula submits is the credentialing you accumulate through and as part of the networks possessing the three capitals he foregrounds in his rendition.
As a construct in psychology, invisibility is a condition that the invisible person finds themselves either through volition or circumstantial reasons along a continuum of self-generated to manipulated contexts. The socialisation of a person or group of people, including centuries-old caste systems and castes of a special type, such as being classified in terms of the statute to be registered to receive insufficient attention as a component of ‘the public.’ For instance, to be classified non-European and later non-white through state institutional mechanisms creates over and above cultural socialisation, a context where your visibility in law or before the law positions you to be easily invisible where defined opportunities do not recognise how you are registered in terms of the population register as promulgated.
The truism that culture is the relatively stable set of inner values and beliefs generally held by groups in society and the noticeable impact those values and beliefs have on society’s outward behaviour and environment makes culture institutional. As long as we are humans and part of a social setting, we are culturally or otherwise groomed to think and behave in specific ways from the time we are received into this world. The most acute of groomers is humanity’s reception unit into the world beyond conception, the family we are born into.
This organic process applies in almost all settings we are born anew into; when born into schooling, the cultural setting in the school will give you the visibility you require to thrive in that space. Similarly, entry into your professional space, notwithstanding how the three capitals of social, political, and economic Mathebula foregrounded, should make you visible without the compulsion to be reflected and projected because of an established chauvinism.
The institutionalisation of being non- has built within many castes and social groupings a depth of acceptance that being non-something means losing the capability to be visible in spaces you are characterised as a non. Except through reflection by those you need to be visible, or reflection through your effort, organised or individual, that you exist and are in presence, the likelihood of embracing your invisibility as a permanent condition is high. This embracement might be intergenerational unless an intervention is made collectively—the invisibility of ‘othered’ professionals will be a norm.
In South Africa, it is still statistically black and African professionals which have mistakenly been treated as a soft issue despite its negative impact on social cohesion and nationhood as a condition for a thriving economy. The fact that we all wear the same uniform in a company, produce the same commodity, have a common corporate language, and speak an official language, should not mean that our cultural differences, which by the way, make others more visible than others and in most cases make black professionals invisible despite being in presence.
Because invisibility is an outcome of neglect, being ignored, being unnoticed, and being deliberately characterised as small or insignificant, and worse, being seen as a hewer of wood and drawer of water by those that are supposed to give you visibility, the chances of you being manipulated by how you are reflected into spaces you must be seen grow commensurate with your desperation to be visible.
Arguably, the structures and stakes that characterised Black Economic Empowerment transactions might be traced to such desperation. The intensity of this neglect, especially when it has a history of being lawful and thus has had standard operating procedures to enforce it as a human practice, has conditioned the invisible in the professional corporate space to put the needs of ‘neglecters’ above their own and thus making society to accept the one-sided relationships characterising corporate South Africa to be a norm.
Invisibility can also occur as a result of a deliberate program of scientific, social engineering such as apartheid, a well-thought-through strategy to exclude from advantage and opportunity, a socialisation condition of those that neglect or deliberately do not notice others, and in pathological parlance as an outcome of a social (political or economic) anxiety disorder. Compared to similar practices elsewhere, the South African version of making blacks professionally invisible is not only a social disorder anxiety of a special type. Still, it has a profound racial vector of justification. Its spatial demographic impact on how black professionals become integrated as a stratum in society, how it positions descendants of professionals in the employment and opportunity value chain of society, and how it has templated the resultant political economy has credentialled within the Hlengani Mathebula argued triad of capital, black professionals into what he aptly describes as “the black child (and this rendition also reads black professional) has no chance in hell".
THE CASE FOR VISIBILITY INTELLIGENCE
Except for congregating with a purpose and applying the best of project management disciplines during the funeral of one of their own, black professionals have not used their unique cultural capital to migrate onto other capital forms for the sake of all of them. Their greatness and contributions to the upliftment of the rest is a well-kept public secret only of being known, if not paraded when the opportunity to ask ‘How did you do it has been vanquished by the wrath that death can become.
The need to mainstream what is below the iceberg character of African culture and bring to the fore what is invisible to create a cultural majority that can undermine the calibrated invisibility of black professionals. If making black professionals invisible in corporate South Africa is a culture to be taken head-on, it cannot be disabled until our strategy to deal with it is etched on the understanding of our own culture that makes black professionals appropriately visible in their own spaces.
As a result of the numerical advantage of black professionals and the concomitant social capital advantage to redefine whatever value and supply chains that are templated to anchor continued dominance by spaces that makes black professionals invisible, it might not be useful to minimise cultural differences and should be useful to exaggerate them where they bring advantage, for as long as it does not breed chauvinisms. Because, as people, we create reality through our specific sieves, we tend to operate in the world we have built for ourselves. How we see others, which determines their visibility, invisibility, or otherwise, is either a self-generated matter or a deliberately institutionalised social norm through upbringing and educational occurrence.
The ability of black professionals to recognise how and where their concept of self has tampered with their perception of self will determine where they can harness and assert their visibility, including where they are rendered invisible, and in that way, take control of their sense of reality. The secret is to be aware and accepting of ideas, broadly pooled or otherwise, that strike them, in their perceived invisibility, for no reason, even if that seems crazy or goes against whatever we agreed is the grain.
The brute truth is, in their professional spaces, and because they still own (less. little, or nothing) of what they manage, the perception of the dominant view about the invisibility of black professionals will forever be financed to remain a distortion of advantage. Interpreting, with no blows bared, what black professionals experience would require much more than just demanding a change of demographics, but an overhaul of the entire narrative about our collective version of what is humanly correct.
Creating intelligence as a practice for black professionals should be a new terrain of engagement they must occupy themselves with. In one of his discussions with a team of professionals, Mandla Letlape, the author of the book Dream Delivered, asked why there is an MBA program dedicated to Woman Leadership in Business and none is dealing with Black Leadership in Business. Insights of the question include creating a visibility intelligence with a hypothesis for which practice should provide answers.
Visibility intelligence is in this rendition, and through a paraphrasing exercise of the work by Wachler, Visibility Intelligence is described as ‘how society (in this case black professionals) interpret and calibrate their experiences to respond only to the reality that defines them in respect of where they come from, where they at present, where they should be or have been by now, and where they are headed to.
The moral obligation to differentiate right from wrong within acceptable universal principles imbues black professionals to cultivate amongst themselves an ability to see short-lived gut phenomena and make correct decisions and calls about them at the right time. When adequately managed by institutions of higher learning such as the one Hlengani Mathebula works with and at, this will go a long way toward demonstrating whether black professionals will have low or high visibility intelligence.
The time for a new herd of visibility intelligent black professionals has arrived; the institutional framework exists in the form of academic deaneries at universities led by black professionals, think tanks established by black professionals, state budgets controlled and accounted for by black professionals, a growing number of private sector corporate social investment budgets presided over by black professionals, an emerging breed of socially sensitive billionaires that are inheriting old establishment money, and a state presided over by a significant group of professionals that can be recalibrated into visibility intelligent professionals.
The Visibility Quotient of Black professionals should have as visible monuments a change in the curriculum content at primary and higher education levels and the re-standardisation of the public service to respond to who the public is in South Africa.
These were matters arising from a rendition by Professor Hlengani Mathebula.
🤷🏿♂️Wa twa!!!
https://headtopics.com/za/the-invisibility-of-black-professionals-38496903
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