Sometimes it seems almost universally accepted among my white peers that whites can dictate the terms and conditions of the black experience of racism. Take the counter-trend which emerged in response to the tweet story over Zille’s “professional blacks” comment, #capetownisawesome. The fact that you as a white South African have not personally witnessed racist incidents in Cape Town does not prove anything. It is revealing. The only time I really encountered blacks growing up deep in the Southern suburbs of Cape Town was in the form of domestic workers and gardeners. In my matric year at Reddam House Constantia there were only 5 students of colour out of 120 students.
This was accepted as 'normality'. Racism went unsaid. Places like Constantia and Bishopscourt exist because of Langa and Blikkiesdorp. The difference is all the evidence needed about the racist character of Cape Town. The same geography that structured racial segregation during Apartheid remains firmly entrenched in Cape Town. The bubble of the white Southern Suburbs is jealously guarded by both government policy and private security. The safe CCTV filled cosmopolitan spaces of this 'World Class city' offered to tourists and foreign Capital still feel alien and taboo to black friends in Cape Town.
City housing policy has led to most RDP
housing being flung to the outskirts of the City, far away from paltry
job offerings in the city bowl. Though open land abounds in the Southern
Suburbs, it remains unthinkable for that land to be developed into
public housing. Policy is about hiding the urban poor from the gaze of
the rich and enriching a select cadre of politically connected real
estate developers.
The interests of real estate developers
and often reactionary housing or ratepayers associations seeking to
retain the contours of the Group Areas Act and safeguard real estate
prices rule local politics. The DA services these key constituencies.
The fear of falling real estate values all-to-often provides cover for
racism. In Hout Bay illegal squatters in Hangberg were shot with rubber
bullets for daring to build housing in a nature reserve while the big
real estate company that owns the Chapman's Peak toll road is given carte blanche to
construct a multi-million rand office block in a parallel nature
reserve across the bay from Hangberg. This is the double standard of
land use and abuse in the Cape.
Tellingly bus lanes on highways getting
people to work everyday are only open during the early hours when
workers must get to work on company time. The lanes close on the way
home, during worker’s free time, when people return to the Cape Flats,
making the journey far more time consuming. The same sense of blacks and
coloureds as nothing other than cheap labour for white employers to
exploit remains in effect. Policy services the white business community.
This sort of raced urban dynamic, the fruit of old and established
injustices, impacting people everyday, remains invisible to many whites.
Zille included. Instead we get mindless boosterism like
#capetownisawesome.
Sure the leader of the DA is human,
all-too-human in fact, but she has a need to get the last word in on
everything. She can come across as authoritarian. Doesn’t her excellent
PR team, which seems to have convinced the press that Cape Town really
delivers for all, realize that Zille's incessant tweeting and sad
attempts at toyi toying are making her enemies stronger?
She has managed to alienate HIV
activists in classic internet troll style, by comparing them to the
Gestapo, as well as getting her followers to denounce their local dealer
over twitter (true story). She displays the key characteristic of the
hardened DA voter: a combination of obliviousness and liberal white
denialism over racism. She even thinks she can dictate the terms and
conditions of black experience. Refer of course to the already infamous
reply to Simphiwe Dana, where she stupidly brought Jacob Dlamini's
description of Jimmy Manyi back into use.
I propose a counter-term: “the
professional white”. It refers to the legions of mildly irritated
suburbanites who write the same fucking whiny letters to the Cape Times
everytime racism shapes a national debate. All the time in other words.
Their complaints are invariably self-serving. The fact that their kids
can't get into UCT despite all the privileges afforded them by model-c
or private educations. There is always the shadow of reverse
discrimination across the page. And for the last time get over that
David Bullard bullshit over colonialism having saved Africa from some
primitive stasis and go read about the history of the Congo or the Wretched of the Earth just to get a little taste of what colonialism was really about!
I just don't buy that cheery myth of a
new post-racialism in my generation: “the born frees”. Race (and class)
continue to define post-Apartheid South Africa. Until there is some sort
of radical egalitarian re-distribution of South Africa's wealth or a
significant shift in economic power to the majority black population of
the country, we can't talk about any sort of post-racialism. Currently
economic power still remains firmly in the hands of whites and to avoid
this uncomfortable reality in our national political discourse, when the
issue of race arises, is the worst form of political mendacity.
A real debate over race on twitter is
still impossible because the vast majority of the country still has no
access to internet. The voices of the working class and poor who are
still waiting for the change promised in the transition to 'democracy'
go unheard. The ANC has so far failed to move beyond business as usual,
securing Big Business's access to markets. The DA is even more committed
to these same destructive interests.
