Leftover Whiteness in South Africa

10.5.08

Max du Preez is an outspoken Afrikaner columnist who has spent a large part of his professional and personal life as a critic of apartheid and the apartheid mindset that still persists 14 years after Mandela proclaimed "us" free in South Africa.

From time to time Du Preez gets his analytical teeth into the shortcomings of the African National Congress led government but he is at his best when he takes on white bigots and naysayers who think that white South Africa was the right South Africa.

A few days ago he wrote a column that had him confessing that he and all whites, even those born after apartheid, benefitted from that horrible system of white abuse and privilege.

Du Preez knew that many whites would come out of the denialist woodwork and protest by claiming that Blacks practice reverse racism via Affirmative Action and, of course, crime, among other spurious laments.

You can read the Du Preez's column here and please do venture down and see some of the comments.

While we think through the structural weight that apartheid has bequeathed it may be helpful to look at employment and earnings data among the races.

Economist, Mike Schüssler, has just completed a report that sheds some important light in this regard. He comments:

"The white population group had the highest income which is about 450% more than black income and 400% more than coloured income.

Indian people earned 70% of what white people did."

Schüssler also says that white workers earn 5.5 times more than black workers.

The point here is not to deny that Blacks, coloureds, and Indians, are not making advances in employment and earning power. They are, and Schüssler's report shows this movement.

His report also references a growing number of whites who are becoming poorer.

The point is to contest the prejudicial argument among many whites that Blacks are the new high earners and that white life is characterized by a backward slide in terms of wealth and access to wealth and its structures.

The truth is that the vast majority of people in South Africa who are poor, and destitute in all life-indices terms, are exactly the same people who were so created and sustained under apartheid.

I also fully expect that if we weighed in data on unemployment, and underemployment, Blacks would be the most affected, and grossly so.

Nothing has changed in these terms. The economy may have aspects that illustrate the penetration of a Black economic and political elite but that hardly detracts from the truth that 14 years on we are the same country that apartheid created.

What is also the same is the fact that most white South Africans are hardly ready to recognize the brutality that apartheid created to ensure that white life was the right life under apartheid.

It is for these reasons that I am not impressed or intimidated by white South Africans who scream and shout about their new found oppression 14 years after Mandela let them get away with their inhumane deeds.

I am also not impressed by whites who tell me they never voted for the apartheid government or that they were just children when apartheid 'ended' in 1994.

Apartheid is not over and neither are the racial disparities that it created.

Du Preez is too quick to point out that he hears this argument only from uppity Blacks and not poor Blacks.

This is patronizing to say the least.

My suggestion to Du Preez, whom I respect, as well as the apartheid trolls who keep sending racist comments to my blog, is to engage our post-apatheid condition with nuance and not to speak on behalf of Black, coloureds, and Indians in South Africa.

I don't expect that too many whites will see sense in my point. For most, it is more comforting to see themselves victimized by an irrational Black onslaught.

For this reason, I expect that many whites will want to call me a racist and a hate monger (again) for pointing out that they mostly live in the lap of luxury in Black South Africa.

I am used to this kind of abusive nonsense. There has not been a day in my entire life when I have not had to deal with the weight of whiteness.

I am, therefore, very aware that most whites find it easier to deny their historical and structural relationship to apartheid, still.

Ridwan Laher