I am happy that Jacob Zuma now knows that there are poor whites among us. It augurs well for all of us when (it increasingly appears to be ”when” and not ”if”) he becomes our next president.
You might wonder why his communist friends did not alert him to this reality earlier. Better late than never, I guess. The communists have, after all, set up house on the premise that societies are about one class exploiting another and that race is merely incidental to the whole evil plot.
The significance of Zuma’s epiphany gives hope that we will no longer dwell on comfort slogans to define what is wrong with society and who is responsible for it.
Glenn Agliotti is proof that a criminal mastermind need not necessarily be some guy, born and raised on the Cape Flats, with tattoos all over his body.
Society is far more complicated than policy makers let on. Things refuse to fit nicely with the neat diagnosis of who benefits and who is on the periphery of society.
We cannot continue sloganeering with a clean conscience.
How can we honestly tell a child who comes from a white squatter camp that he is not ”previously advantaged” and therefore can’t access the social security cushion?
How do you tell that child’s father that he can’t do business with government or that he should forget about getting a job because his ancestors were Europeans?
Albert Einstein is credited with warning that a problem can’t be resolved while inhabiting the same mindset as when the problem was created.
It might be a lesser of Einstein’s famous theories, but it holds as true for societal discourse today as it did when the genius said it.
In South Africa our problems are courtesy of thinking that the obvious physiological differences between skin, colours and sex determine that the ”others” should be treated worse than ourselves.
Having thought long and hard about it, our local geniuses once decreed that whites and men deserved to be at the top of the food chain.
In trying to redress these obvious wrongs we have adopted the same mindset we had when we got into the whole mess in the first place. Now, instead of white males, you have blacks and women.
Skin colour and gender cannot, in a non-racial society based on freedom and justice, adequately justify why some people will be excluded and others not.
Zuma’s poor whites are proof of the shortsightedness of this way of thinking. So is the continued craze about taking ”a girl child to work” to the exclusion of the boy child, regardless of his social background.
Like the belief that white necessarily equals privilege, ”take a girl-child to work” ignores the role of social classes in accessing life opportunities.
If we followed the logic of boys being necessarily better off, it means that, as a shepherd boy growing up in Nkandla, JZ himself would be assumed to have better life chances than a bright little girl named Naledi Pandor.
Pandor comes from a pioneering academic and political family. Her grandfather, Professor ZK Matthews, was the first African in South Africa to obtain a BA degree from a South African university. Pandor’s grandmother, Frieda, was the first black woman to obtain a Junior Certificate (equivalent of a grade 10) pass in South Africa.
Pandor and her father, Joe Matthews (former deputy minister of safety and security), boast the rare distinction of having been sworn in to the same Parliament, though for different parties.
As Zuma discovered in Pretoria West — and Pandor proves — gender and race are no greater predictors of life’s chances than class.
We can’t, in the name of being revolutionary, use some of these indicators (gender and race) and pretend that others don’t exist.
One could correctly argue that policies are not created to suit the peculiarities of individual families but to address a more pervasive social issue.
But even by this argument we have to recall that redress laws were meant to benefit blacks and women, not because they were black or female but because these categorisations placed them in an inferior socio-economic status.
We don’t need to hurt the chances of blacks and women to address social ills based on socio-economic factors instead of race or gender.
But it does not end there. The victim mentality and culture of entitlement across the board must come to an end.
Which is why I hope JZ told the poor whites or their representatives that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it.
They can’t want to be integrated into greater society, enjoy its fruits and still lay claim to the exclusivity that still makes them believe they’re entitled to a whites-only settlement — even if they are squatter camps.
If we can’t take advice from Einstein and reconsider where we were when we thought what we thought, then we probably have bigger problems than we imagined.