It’s a case of give and take
IN THIS deteriorating media/political environment there is one good reason to preserve some residual respect for the drivel dripping out of the Let’s Be Racist Again side. That’s the objectionableness flowing from the logically correct but (frequently) humanly disgusting Put Race Into The Past gang.
The apostles of Blackness tie themselves in knots. Declaring their devotion to the holy cause of non-racialism, they scurry to kick more white people out of jobs.
Cyril has just given that cause a new highwater. Politicsweb’s Raceballs, the “Official Almanac of the People’s Republic of Racial Lunacy”, puts it neatly. He said “as a matter of deep and profound principle, the ANC is both for and against race domination, and for and against non-racialism”.
Cyril’s starting-point is that a company is racist unless it is correcting the ill that 79% African people occupy only 15% of top management.
He’s speaking to companies who are re-taught daily, by his government, that allocating jobs by race delivers collapse, corruption, and “Fitness to Hold Office” inquisitions that put the victim on trial instead of the politician who appointed them. Surrounded by evidence of the route to ruin, the president urges “take this route… for the sake of non-racialism”.
One can get disheartened, and inclined to point angry fingers at the government. But then you bump into what they’re up against and empathy takes over.
Social media can do that. There’re fewer turds in the river, anonymous bitterheads befouling the chatlines. But that’s from more policing, not people getting nicer. What features can be super-ugh, and worse when it’s pale persons telling dark ones “get-down get-down”.
Occasionally, too, daily life delivers a royal flush of ugh.
Formerly the ultra-ugh factor was crude stuff. Now we have people who get loud on yes-put-race-behind-us, but as a technique to feint the ANC rather than an honest attitude.
Thus did one G deride the eloquent female spokesperson we saw during SAA’s strike. He mocked her for speaking English too well.
G used to love mocking African accents as in “bed” for “bird” and “wekker” for “worker”. Now, on his second Johnnie Walker after getting high on the righteousness of race blindness, he’s ridiculing an African mouth producing round vowels.
He, of course, talks emigration. So much that I suppress my regret at the haemorrhaging of our nation’s skills to wish he’d go right ahead. Rather her society, sliding down the economic tubes but with a good heart, than his odious belittlement. The big irony being: we don’t need either.
That Cyril’s crowd will come to rue transformation is as certain as that Verwoerd’s crowd would come to rue apartheid. It just needs a few twists of the mixture screw. Like that we figure out a real way to let your ordinary decent African person feel “Ah, yes, this liberation thing means something”. Which isn’t black faces in big offices for a proud moment before disgrace cuts in.
And it isn’t the brain-dead portion of the pale population working off their personal demons on their countrymen. What I need of my society and what the odious belittler needs are the same – a two-way sense of common cause, with two-way respect, two-way affection , two-way love, for the nation around us.
There’s a lot of it about, despite politics’ endeavours.