Steven Friedman critiques the public criticism of Peter de Villiers:

The problem is not that people criticise De Villiers — or Percy Sonn or Norman Arendse or black lawyers and business people whose names come to mind: in a free society everyone can criticise everyone else. It is that they are reduced to buffoons, butts of ridicule, much as smiling minstrels were in the days when prejudices were expressed more directly because they were the law.

It is possible that some who are reduced to comic cutouts in this way are as foolish as those who denigrate them claim. But it seems highly unlikely that there is a law of South African life that decrees that all black people who gravitate to posts many whites believe to be beyond them, or express views many whites would rather not hear, happen also to be clowns. It seems far more likely that some end up saying injudicious things because the constant sneering of detractors convinced that black people are simply not up to particular tasks take its toll — and more than possible that some are not foolish at all but are lampooned in this way because this enables some whites to convince themselves of their own superiority and to console themselves for their loss of power.

I think there are several problems with this. First, Friedman speculates on peoples’ motives, which automatically makes his argument suspect, because the inner motivations of any person are inherently unknown and unknowable to others. As a matter of courtesy, our default position should be to assume that others are arguing in good faith unless we a very good reason to believe otherwise. If someone criticises the public pronouncements of Peter de Villiers, we should generally assume that they are making a good-faith critique of his suitability as coach, rather than a bad-faith critique designed to camouflage some form of racism. If we don’t make a default assumption of good-faith argument, we effectively lose any possibility of having a civil discourse, because we replace arguments about issues, which can be at least obliquely tested against some kind of objective reality, with arguments about motivation, which can not.

As for the substance of his argument: Friedman contends that blacks who succeed in traditionally “white” fields are pilloried as buffoons, and that they “are lampooned in this way because this enables some whites to convince themselves of their own superiority and to console themselves for their loss of power”. But this assertion simply doesn’t stand up to empirical examination. I could come up with a long list of non-whites who have succeeded in white-dominated fields and have not been portrayed as buffoons. Pius Langa, Barack Obama, Tito Mboweni, Richard Maponya, Lewis Hamilton, Jonathan Jansen, Bryan Habana and Tiger Woods have all succeeded in traditionally “white” fields, and have all been the subject of respectful (and often adulatory) coverage by the South African media. Conversely, George W. Bush was “reduced to a buffoon” and turned into “a butt of ridicule” with far greater severity and frequency than Peter de Villiers.

If George W. Bush, Peter de Villiers and John Hlophe are portrayed as buffoons in the media, while Barack Obama, Bryan Habana and Pius Langa are not, shouldn’t we apply Occam’s Razor and assume that the negative coverage of the former group is driven less by race than by the nature of the public statements they have made?