“Ooh, aren’t we whites awful! – except for me.” This thought has become the obsession of many privileged whites in South Africa, especially journalists, academics and staff in human resource departments. It is widespread among the white elite in the USA.
The SAIRR recently mounted a street poster proclaiming “Racism is Not the Problem”. It was based on the truth, found from survey after survey, that for most people in South Africa, including blacks, racism is low among their concerns. Among blacks the biggest concern is unemployment, followed by corruption, crime and education. Racism is of little concern. This finding horrifies privileged whites, since the racism of their fellow whites is madly important to them.
“Racism” here does not mean prejudice by one of the thousands of human races towards any other. It means only prejudice by whites, about 1% of human races, towards all others, about 99%. (About 300,000 years ago modern humans evolved in Africa and produced a vast number of races. A small group from one race left Africa about 60,000 years ago and radiated around the world to Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia. They consist of a very few races, one of which is “white”.) The wokistas say “Blacks cannot be racist”.
When one black race, say the Tutsi in Burundi, systematically slaughters another, say the Hutu, purely because of their race, this isn’t racism. The wokistas never explain what it is. They say that blacks cannot be racist because of “historic power relations”. This is puzzling since blacks have held power in Africa for most of the 300,000 years of human existence, and hold power in every single African country now. Be that as it may, for woke whites and supporters of Critical Race Theory (CRT), “racism” means only white racism against blacks.
The whites in South Africa’s mainstream media are dominated by wokistas. Their political views are just variations of the UK’s Guardian or the USA’s New York Times. They believe their fellow whites are racists responsible for all their country’s ills. But they themselves are somehow different: morally superior, sensitive and brave. They tell you they joined the End Conscription Campaign, or did something similarly noble and heroic. Some of these white journalists have done excellent work in exposing corruption in South Africa, even when it is committed by blacks, but they seem edgy about this, anxious to get back to their main preoccupation, which is disparaging their awful white compatriots. You can see them puckering their brows at every disaster in South Africa, wondering, “How can I blame the whites for this?” In the middle of a cruel Covid lockdown in South Africa, causing immense harm and loss of life to poor black people, a super-woke white writer thought the most important need was to mock white surfers.
South Africa and the USA did indeed have brutal “systemic” racism in the past. Neither has any now. When Ibram X Kendi, the wealthy prophet of systemic white racism in the USA, is asked to give examples of extant racist laws he cannot give any. But he is unabashed. The essence of CRT is not facts and instances, but impressions and feelings. Vagueness is its guiding method. Whites are so profoundly wicked that they don’t even realise when they are being racist. “Subliminal racism” controls their dark souls without them realising it. Let me give an example.
A white man passes a black man in the street, and says, “What a lovely day!” It sounds innocent to the uninitiated but not to a CRT expert or a white diversity professional. They would immediately spot the white devil’s intent. By “lovely”, he meant “hot”. He was suggesting that black men like hot weather. This is because he thinks they are apelike, having only recently descended from the trees of sweltering jungles in tropical Africa. He thinks all blacks are still half-apes, and should be confined to Bantustans. Once this subliminal racism had been explained to this wretched white man, he would be overcome with shame, admit his systemic sin, acknowledge the “hurt and pain” he had caused the black passer-by, take the knee, and make a public confession.
Why does the white elite draw such comfort from the sins of their less distinguished white fellows? Why do they find white people so interesting and black people so boring? In their eyes, a black person only comes alive when in contact with whites; they yawn at inter-tribal massacres in black Africa. Is it because they realise they themselves are disgusting, racist hypocrites – for example praising affirmative action and employment equity, but carefully sending their children to posh schools with white teachers?
The answer, I think, lies in human evolution, when we suddenly became far more intelligent than any other animal, including our fellow apes. High intelligence brought us all types of madness, including I think white self-hatred. Evolutionary Psychology is a new science but an important one. It might eventually explain this article.
[Photo: REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly]
The views of the writer are not necessarily those of the Daily Friend or the IRR.