Robert Kirby : Loose cannon
If you’ve kept your finger on the pulse, you will have been as delighted as I was to see that torturous old South African racism has at last taken a refreshing turn for the worse.
Like many pernicious things in our history, racism has always had a tendency to flourish only in the prejudices of a highly select host species. Now, after many years of mutating into really vile proportions, racism has started to move out of its traditional ecospace.
It is now appearing in alarming dimensions among so-called Asians, or at least those Asians who work in the South African Police Service. I think it was National Commissioner George Fivaz, in one of his three-volume epigrams, who revealed that black South African policemen are being discriminated against, favoured less and, in some appalling instances, even bribed less than their Asian fellow law- enforcement officers.
This is, of course, disgraceful. Happily, it was also to be expected. Speaking as a previously advantaged white South African, I cannot express what a relief it is to see that good old-fashioned racism is now capable of surviving without any further help from us honkies.
True, we’ll stand at the fence and encourage our Asian neighbours in their fumbling endeavours as hybrid supremacists. What we won’t have to do is to keep racism all to ourselves and not let anyone else sip of its illicit delights.
A study, published in London last year by the Baroness Blackstone’s Institute For Public Policy Research, has revealed that this new South African trend is already old news over there. The study showed that so- called Asian Britons were three times more racist than so-called white Britons when it came to being bigoted about so-called Afro- Caribbean Britons.
When it came to sanctioning mixed marriages, the study revealed that redneck whites were the most tolerant. When asked whether they would ”mind a lot” if a close relative were to marry an Afro-Caribbean, 32% of Asians and 29% of Jewish Britons said they would. Whites came in a poor third at only 11%.
When it came to close relatives marrying a Jew, Whitey did even worse. Only 5% of his number would object, whereas Asians offered 30% disapproval and Afro-Caribbeans 10%.
It would appear that the ethnic substance of the target of the racism bears strongly on the specific gravity of the projector of the racism. It is now being argued that it’s far easier to detest an Indian less than to hate a black man, unless you are a white presently despising Arabs.
Of course, if you are the Arab involved, you have to make some changes to this formula. For instance, you can only call your victim ”blacker” since you are partially black, and so on.
Which is a long way of saying, isn’t it nice to see that we white South African racist pigs have at last been given the chance to extend our sty? Those who have to live downwind of our expanded pork palace will now be able to blame the smell on a lot more shit.
That all-points racism is on a roll is evident. Even Mr Mandela is trying out some of Thabo Mbeki’s spray-on ”Blame-The- Palefaces-For-Everything” underbrain deodorant. In his recent five-hour polemic, the ”Mafikeng Comrades”, Nellie-Wellie set his moral guns strongly ‘gainst white South Africans. He hardly let a pejorative escape him which wasn’t in some way incriminating of white people.
There’s only one bluebottle in Mr M’s healing racist ointment. It’s something which future social historians might call the acquired victim syndrome (AVS), a condition of reduced self-respect in humans. One of its most prominent symptoms is the tendency in sufferers to cavil endlessly about how others are being nasty to them. Eventually they start to believe what their tormentors are saying, and their self-respect undergoes morbid erosion.
If someone persists in calling you ugly, you’ll eventually believe that, to at least that person, you are ugly. Everything metastasises naturally from there.
In any event, people in Mr Mandela’s position should know better than to emulate the proudest sins of apartheid.