Is it an act of racism to despise members of one’s own race? There’s not one of us who hasn’t indulged in racist feelings. But whatever I might have disliked, condemned or pitied in races other than my own, it comes nowhere near the flawless contempt I have felt for some of my fellow whites.
While admitting to this, I add the entirely necessary caveat that some of my best friends are whites. Some of them are even Afrikaans or Jewish whites. Also, the whites I scorn are not necessarily South African — think of really unctuous white sediment like Tony Blair or Bob Geldof. The main thing is that they are fellow honkies, and I wonder whether reviling them renders me a racist.
According to a wise friend of mine, racism can only operate outwards. You aren’t allowed to be racist sideways — unless you’re a Xhosa, of course. Yet another friend, a sensitive, highly intelligent and perceptive Jew, bristles with anti-Semitism, molten contempt for a social level she calls ‘that morass of gevilte-minded middle-class yiddles I come from”. When I asked her why she felt so strongly about her own, she gave a thin grunt and replied: ‘You have to be of them to know how to hate them.”
For such forthright honesty we should be grateful. What is not hard to predict is the reactions her scarifying opinions of other Jews would encourage from those indivi-duals who have set themselves up as arbiters of inter-racial demeanor. These days you can’t listen to the radio for more than five minutes without some virtuous white soul flinging open his or her stainless macintosh to expose yet another glistening conscience. These are the whites who feel obligated to undertake public acts of onanism on behalf of all other whites, and whose contributions are among the most pitiful of the white, post-apartheid guilt colloquy.
To attempt to distance oneself from being a typical white South African — as these apologists do — is not surprising. Judged by the utterances of South Africa’s post-transformation politicians and their commentators, white South Africans are, and will continue to be, unreconstructed racists, bigots, supremacists and anything else unpleasant that can be attributed to them. Mr Thabo Mbeki has been the enthusiastic cheer-leader in this generalised vilification, what with his ‘two nations” fulminations and his almost seamless condemnations of whites and colonialists. Recently he seems to have slacked off on this — chronic jet-lag must be slowing him down a bit. But others of his political clan have not. These days, white South Africans are reviled as a matter of policy. To the South African liberation politician, white villainy is a default value. Whites no longer belong in Africa, we have become some sticky diaspora of either English, Dutch or, gratefully, French origins; every last one of us a dyed-in the-wool racist, clinging to ill-gotten privilege and riches. We are the whites of their eyes, as it were.
Taking all that as a given, I, as a white South African, am left with the question I asked at the beginning of this column. It would seem that if I am a racist then, automatically, I primarily judge all people by race.
I admit openly to having had, even quite recently, sudden feelings of outwards racism, things which, like cars in Baghdad, suddenly go bang. I fight these feelings off as dauntlessly as I can. But they are very deeply entrenched, a complex reflex action, remaindered prejudices from the then accepted codes of my childhood. My fears, my disappointments and many other factors contribute. But these days my feelings of racism are mostly because I am continually being reminded, either by official decree, direct indictment, implication or allusion, that I am a racist.
I also find myself indulging in quite genuine acts of racism, in that I feel pleased, my conscience pleasantly massaged, when someone of different race to mine is successful. I get an extra thrill when a black rugby player dots down a try. That is a plainly racist reaction. A writer in The Spectator once observed that to say that black men are better footballers than white men because they have congenitally quicker reaction times, is to make a racist statement. It’s like the patronising phrase about black musicians having a ‘natural sense of rhythm”.
But, in truth, I have never felt more disgusted, more appalled, often more doubled up in laughter than I have at the truly grotesque human behaviour I’ve seen and experienced among my fellow whites. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that white South African politicians were, or are, more contemptible than black ones but then, by any objective definition, all politicians are measured on some sub-moral scale. I also believe that, as atrocious as they were, the white South African politicians of the past were more honest, more overt about their intentions than today’s democratic hustlers. Certainly when it comes to treating the ordinary mass of poor black people badly, leaving them to rot and starve in squatter camps, uprooting their shacks with bulldozers and ‘red ant” invasions — in mid-winter — today’s ANC could have taught Vorster’s thugs a thing or two.
Red ants, indeed. There I am, being racist again.