/ 28 October 2011

Pity is a black and white issue

Does some art and music suggest that, since blackness has taken over, there is serious exclusion of economic participation by whites?

Not so long ago, I bumped into a white hobo. Looking at him with pity as one would, I asked myself as I made off, what fuels my pity? If he were black, would the value of my pity be the same?

I suppose one could find easy answers under ideological umbrellas. For one, we know that “cats” like Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko urged black people to confront their own state of blackness in relation to the other. In this way blackness becomes not merely the presence of pigmentation, but a condition, or if you like, a lived experience.

Perhaps there lies the rub of grand projects such as those of nonracism and nationalism. These projects offer the view that, collectively, we are far better off pursuing the same goal of oneness as opposed to racing after the road less travelled.

On that latter road, the condition of blackness becomes a starting point in discussing who or where we are as a country, as opposed to erasing the fact of blackness because it is ­dangerous.

Some would argue that by assuming the non-threatening position, that is, by affirming the collective experience irrespective of colour, one silences the traumas and pathology that being black readily affords.

However, this pathology is most celebrated if it emerges from the point of view of whiteness.

There is a hip-hop group that calls itself Die Antwoord that has taken the international arena by storm. This band portrays the white-trash factor, displaced and marginalised out of the social economy, as its selling point.

At first, there is probably nothing wrong with the prostitution of your poverty as an access point into the very economy in which you wish to participate. But on closer inspection, this trademark of white poverty suggests an even more dangerous ideological position. It seeks to claim that, since blackness has taken over, there is serious exclusion of economic participation by whites. The so-called swart gevaar assumes a new interpretation, popularly known as affirmative action.

These new instances of white crisis, epitomised by the brilliant art of Roger Ballen and David Goldblatt, could be the very fire that is needed to boost right-wing campaigns. A journalist called Brendan Seery complained not so long ago on the pages of the Saturday Star about the few opportunities that exist for his children.

This is in spite of a survey in the Times newspaper that affirms that whites still earn more money than their black counterparts. He concluded his column by suggesting that we should not be surprised when white folk migrate to Australia.

In short, it seems that whites still find it hard to accept the grave injustices of the past and, by extension, it is difficult for them to comprehend the means of recourse that exist in remedying them.

And so they are unwilling to empathise with the view that generations of blacks are still trapped in the incapacitating cycle of poverty.

Whites have to accept that the ills of the past will not be washed away by amnesia and blacks have to refuse to feel pity for those who beg in the name of their whiteness.