Our best schools, the few schools where black children receive a good education, are under assault in a racist campaign that has been termed “School Capture”.
Highly paid activists of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) invade these schools and set about demoralising the staff, stirring up racial hatred, telling the white children they are intrinsically evil racists even if they don’t know it, and the black children that they are helpless victims of white racism and must spend their time not studying hard but complaining about white racism. The DEI gang are desperately looking for real white racism, but seldom find it, so they have invented an entirely fictitious form of white racism that they call “micro-aggression”. (Actually they didn’t invent it themselves, they borrowed it from the USA, the home of Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory and White Fragility.)
A micro-aggression is an unconscious act or word by a white person toward a black person that only DEI experts can interpret as being racist. It has the huge advantage for DEI that it is impossible for a white teacher or a white pupil to say anything to black pupils that cannot be condemned as micro-aggression. I shall give examples. But first let me ask you a question about dire problems in the South African education system.
Here is a list of some incidents and conditions in our school-going population. Please name two that you find most shocking and important.
In 2023, a four-year-old girl drowned in a pit latrine at a primary school (she was not the first to die in this way). Report after report, including recent ones, show the appallingly low levels of literacy, maths and science among most of our school children; 80% of our Grade 4 pupils (about 11 years old) cannot read for meaning in any language. Last Monday three men armed with machetes and assault rifles broke into a primary school, seized screaming children and took them away (apparently in a custody dispute).
At a Pretoria high school, 12 white girls formed a WhatsApp group discussing problems at the school and one girl said she was nearly crying at being bullied by black girls.
Last month, 12 schoolchildren were killed when a minibus taking them to school collided, overturned and burst into flames (such incidents where schoolchildren die while being transported to school are unfortunately not rare). At a school somewhere in South Africa it is alleged that a white teacher made remarks about a black schoolgirl’s hair.
In 2020, the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town reported that 27% of children under the age of five were stunted with “acute malnutrition”; this meant that their brain development had been damaged permanently, their schooling crippled, and for the rest of their lives they would never have proper mental acuity.
Judging by their public statements, the DEI activists thought that the two most shocking incidents were the one about the white Pretoria girls in a WhatsApp group and the one about the white teacher remarking on a black girl’s hair.
I have listened to DEI people, black and white, in South Africa and the USA, and never once heard any of them expressing any concern at all about the terrible fate of black schoolchildren at most of the state schools in South Africa, where all the teachers are black. They only seem concerned about the small number of elitist schools with mainly white teachers, where rich black children get the best education in South Africa and to which all the black elite, including ANC ministers such as President Ramaphosa and Dr Naledi Pandor, send their children.
Our mainstream media agree with the DEI mob. They thought that the recent incident at Pretoria High School for Girls (PHSG), where 12 white girls were accused of racism in a WhatsApp group, was far more important and worthy of glaring headlines and solemn editorials than black girls dying, starving and being denied proper education at our awful state schools. But I am not the one to write about School Capture. Richard Wilkinson of the IRR is. In the recent nasty incident at PHSG, he has emerged as a South African hero and a champion of liberal values and racial equality.
Wilkinson may have coined the term “School Capture”. It is a good one, describing the takeover of decent, excellent schools by a ruthless gang determined to make a lot of money by attacking whites and stirring up racial hatred where none existed before. Personally, I knew a little bit about the DEI invasions of schools by speaking to teaching friends in Cape Town and Johannesburg, and by reading an account in a local newspaper, the False Bay Echo, of a particularly nasty invasion of my old school, Fish Hoek High, by Ms Asanda Ngoasheng, who staged a “diversity training workshop” at the school. (I wrote about it for the Daily Friend in November 2022). She not only attacked white racism but Christian belief as well, and was quoted in the Echo as saying, “The disciples could have been queer, and the Holy Trinity some weird, twisted love triangle and the Holy Ghost transgender”.
But it is to Wilkinson that I owe, and South Africa owes, full understanding of School Capture and its sinister consequences for our education system. The recent case of the 12 white girls at Pretoria Girls High made headlines in the Cape Times here, and was the subject of angry editorials denouncing racism (by which they always mean white racism against blacks, never the racism of one black racial group against another). None of these media reports ever gave an example of what the white girls had said in the WhatsApp group, nor any background of events leading up to it.
The reports were all vague, full of slander and innuendo, devoid of fact. The Gauteng Education Department (GED) was even worse, immediately demanding that the girls be suspended but giving no reasons why they should be, and then launching a public offensive against the school.
The malevolent DEI gang rushed in to condemn the girls, without knowing anything about them, but no doubt hoping to make lots of money by instituting a racial witch-hunt against them. Ms Teresa Oakley-Smith of “Diversi-T” was one of them. A tribunal led by a legal practitioner has since found all 12 girls not guilty.
Richard Wilkinson played a big part in revealing the truth about these girls and exonerating them. Please read his wonderful, detailed articles of this and other horrible examples of School Capture in Politicsweb.
One such article, published by Politicsweb on 2 August 2024, is entitled “Then the vultures descend”. I urge you to read it. (My one and only criticism is the title. I think we must be careful with animal metaphors, although I understand the purpose of this one. Vultures only descend on corpses. The DEI predators descend on healthy living schools.)
Here are some extracts on the three phases of School Capture.
The first phase involves the publicising of an incident or a series of incidents of “racism”. The story usually breaks on social media, driven by students who allege that they have been victims of some kind of discrimination or abuse. The matter is then amplified by the mainstream media – print journalists as well as radio and television broadcasters – who generally apply very little scrutiny to the allegations, accepting every assertion at face value. This causes a firestorm of controversy which quickly leaves the leadership of the targeted institution fearful and panicky.
The second phase of School Capture involves an investigation undertaken into the allegations of racism. This is typically managed by lawyers who conduct interviews with complainants, witnesses and the accused. As I have recounted in other essays, the quality and probity of these investigations is often highly dubious.
Whatever the case, the key objective of the legal investigation is to get the “racist” label to stick to the targeted institution. For this then gives rise to a logical consequence: if a school is diagnosed as being a site of “systemic racism” or “institutional racism” then clearly it needs to bring in specialist consultants to fix the problem.
This constitutes the third and most destructive phase of School Capture. It leaves in its wake shattered careers and ruined childhoods, poisoned classrooms and polarised staff rooms, large piles of invoices and deeply damaged learning environments. In many schools, morale is severely impaired, causing staff and students to leave in droves. (My emphasis.)
Wholly accurate. For example, at St Mary’s Girls’ school, all six maths teachers resigned as a result of DEI assault. No doubt, Ms Asanda Ngoasheng, Ms Teresa Oakley-Smith and the GED were delighted, and will try to get rid of more white teachers. But here comes the deep central paradox of this racial problem: the parents of the black elite do not want to send their children to schools where all the teachers and pupils are black; they want to send them to schools where most of the teachers and some of the pupils are white; and then they want to accuse the white teachers and pupils of racism.
I confidently predict that if PHSG surrenders to the racism accusations of the GED, even after the exoneration of the 12 girls, and if all of the white teachers resign, to be replaced by black teachers, the black elite will withdraw their children from it. This is a profound question of racial psychology that nobody wants to address.
DEI activists have no interest at all in the suffering of black people, but only in attacking white people. This goes beyond education. When hundreds of thousands of black Africans are slaughtered by Arabs in Sudan, when Robert Mugabe systemically slaughtered tens of thousands of Ndebele in Operation Gukurahundi, when the Tutsis slaughtered Hutu men, women and children, when young black males kill and terrorise decent black people in the inner cities of the USA, the DEI people couldn’t give a damn. But the tiniest suggestion of white racism against black people provokes instant rioting and uproar.
Black lives mean nothing unless a white is involved. White racism everywhere, including the USA and South Africa, was once indeed a terrible problem, as the horrors of apartheid attest. But now in the USA and South Africa it is rather difficult to find open examples of white racism. No doubt in private many whites might have racist thoughts but these are seldom expressed.
So the DEI crowd invented imaginary racism: “micro-aggression”. This is any word or action that whites make about blacks that seems harmless but is actually racist – innately racist, subliminally racist, systematic racism, institutionalised racism. This is all wicked nonsense. It enables the racist witch hunters to interpret anything the whites say about the blacks as micro-aggressive. It is significant that the main white targets of DEI are liberal whites; in the same way, whites who fought against apartheid, such as Helen Suzman, were more hated by some ANC activists than those who supported it.
If you, a white person, ask a black person where she or he comes from, this is a micro-aggression according to DEI. Now I often ask white people where they come from, and they often ask the same about me. Whenever I hear a trace of Scottish, Irish or northern English in a stranger, I ask where they come from. Not once have they been offended. Every time they have been pleased to tell me the town and place where they were born and raised, and every time I was deeply interested.
I like it when people ask me where I come from. I feel flattered by their interest in me. Similarly, when I ask a black person where she or he comes from, I get the same delighted response: “I’m glad you are interested in me.” I have had wonderfully interesting and informative discussions in this way with Shona, Ndebele, Malawians, Congolese, Xhosas, Zulus and others. I am as interested in all these black people as I am in all those white people. According to DEI this makes me a racist
If you say, “Black people are good at sport”, this is a micro-aggression, suggesting that black people are purely animal and physical. If you say, “Black people are not good at sport”, you are an outright racist. The same if you say, “Black people are very good dancers and musicians”. If you say nothing at all about the prowess of black sports and music, you are sure to be told, “I find it so interesting that you say nothing about the outstanding achievements of blacks in sport and music”. In short, whether you praise blacks or ignore them, you are guilty of micro-aggression.
Last week, on SAFM radio, on the subject of PHSG, Jon Gericke interviewed Asanda Ngoasheng on the problem at the school. I don’t blame Gericke, a cheerful sort, but it is typical of our mainstream media that the only person interviewed on this matter was the leading exponent of DEI and that nobody (at least as far as I heard) was ever interviewed to present the case of the 12 innocent girls.
Ngoasheng was both comical and repellent. She was what black Americans call a “motor mouth”. She said that outright white racism has been replaced by micro-aggression. She gave the example of spoons in the canteen of some company. Apparently, at lunchtime in this company, there were knives and forks but no spoons. This apparently affronted the black staff, who liked to eat some food with spoons.
I was born in 1948 and spent most of my youth under apartheid. I heard the deep racism of most of my white schoolfriends and teachers. I learnt of the brutal racist atrocities of the apartheid regime against black men, women and children. (I’m not trying to pretend I was a brave white hero against apartheid. I was never that.) But now to be told by a DEI activist that the brutal racism of apartheid must be compared with the fact that a white-owned company did not provide spoons at lunchtime sickens me. It turns my stomach.
DEI in all its forms including School Capture is repugnant, destructive racism, deliberately intended to destroy racial harmony and spread racial hatred. DEI must be resisted by everybody who believes that all people, regardless of race or sex, are of equal worth and must be loved and judged in exactly the same way.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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