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Gillian Schutte Correspondent
White privilege has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to real transformation in South Africa and it seems that black South Africans are losing patience.

Although since the negotiated settlement in 1994 there has been change, not much has changed for black South Africans in the systemic and institutional racism that still plagues this country.

This manifests both in high levels of racial incidents on our social landscape as well as in the silent scourge of the covert and insidious racism that black employees are exposed to daily in institutional attitudes by white bosses, co-workers and in daily interactions with whiteness in the general public. It is still most obviously seen in the gross economic inequalities between the races.

Given the proliferation of racist incidents over the past few months it would seem a prevailing attitude among the larger white community, 20 years into our democracy is one of entitlement over ownership of this country.

In many of the racist incidents which have occurred during the 20-year democracy, the obvious message has been that blacks are encroaching on white people’s territory and have no business being in their space. Does this mean whites feel a sense of ownership over the country and have turned the indigenous people into illegal aliens in their own land?

Many have expressed that this is exactly how it feels to be black in today’s South Africa.

Sipho Singiswa, director of Media for Justice, says: “As a black South African, I no longer feel welcome in this country. “Neighbourhoods all around me have been fenced off and if I go walking in one I am sure a security van will be tailing me within 10 minutes.

“Inside that van will be security guards who are often ex-mercenaries or soldiers hired from other African countries — hired by white-owned security companies to keep black South Africans out of white areas. The economy is still in white hands and the means of production in the media, film and corporate world (are) all still in white hands.

“Black people have been reduced to eternal juniors or trainees or managers of white wealth while being used to front their businesses or organisations so the money keeps flowing their way.

“My people are still subject to separate development and are left to rot in concentration camps called RDP settlements. There is no justice in this and black people are kept in a state of infantilism and servitude to whiteness.

“Worse is that our black government has done nothing to change this state of affairs. Those who have managed to break the iron ceiling are so grateful that they lose their will to fight for the rights of their black brothers and sisters . . .”

Much of this lack of progressive change can be put down to the nature of the transformation process in 1994, which fell in line with both local and global white capital corporate will.

In a recent interview, Numsa’s United Front co-ordinator Dinga Sikwebu points out that what has emerged after 20 years of democracy instead of freedom and equality is the most unequal society in the world. Poverty is rife and all those who had privileges, whether the white community or corporates, continue to enjoy the benefits they had before the 1994 breakthrough.

This is, of course, at the expense of transformation and equality and it is the black majority who have become the fallout. “We thought we could negotiate black economic empowerment charters where the white capitalist class in this country would willingly hand over and share their economic power. But like in all settler countries, those who have power are willing to open the door to the others as long as they remain behind the driving wheel.” This, of course, becomes a race issue as wealth and privilege remain squarely in the hands of the whites.

“If you look at statistics about levels of unemployment and at the bottom rung of poor people in this country, they are (in the) majority black,”

The United Front and Economic Freedom Fighters, as well as various social movements, are still making overtures to white people, saying they are welcome so long as they are here in the spirit of genuine transformation.

The idea of a non-racist future is still bandied about in transformation language alongside the call from people to now take what belongs to the masses and people’s power. But how will the larger white population fare in a potentially revolutionary landscape?

Will they transform their attitudes or continue to be their own worst enemy? Will they continue to perpetuate the dominant white discourse and obstinately refuse to budge from protectionism of white privilege and wealth in place of transformation? Will they continue to participate in an ongoing manufacturing of an “other” in an anti-black narrative, which serves to maintain the status quo?

Nothing has yet managed to move or transform this obdurate collective whitist psyche into an “ubuntuesque” phenomenon ready to share capital, property and opportunity with the black people.

Instead whiteness has learned to create storylines that reinscribe the myths about a difference between white and black races. — Independent Online.

These narratives will covertly or overtly insist the rational and morally superior white population is under siege and vulnerable to the marauding masses of irrational black people who will surely steal, rape and kill them in the night.

By peddling this discourse, blacks become a homogenous mass of inferiority and whites maintain their higher status to which they believe they are entitled.

Mistakenly, many people think that this is a supremacist discourse manufactured by the right wing. It is not. The fact so many self-proclaimed non-racists remained silent on the Marikana massacre and a host of other issues in which blackness and black people’s rights are at the centre is indicative of the fact that it is often in what is not said where we find the truth about prevailing attitudes.

Twenty years into a democracy we are finally clear that racism is not only the illness of the loony fringe. In a contemporary so-called post-race Rainbow Nation, it is fine upstanding white citizens, who may even consider themselves non-racist and liberal, that feel entitled enough to slap a black woman for having the temerity to stand on a pavement early in the morning in “their” suburb. – Independent Online