POOR WHITES...

Poor whites in South Africa

There's all this racial tension emanating from the US presently - more divisiveness, more hate-speech, more bullshit.
Having grown up in South Africa during the 70's, at the pinnacle of apartheid, I can assure you that exposure to that dynamic was beyond bizarre.
Apartheid was and remains an ethos of white supremacy even though it may have been sanitised and watered down during its tenure in South Africa - at its heart it was purely and simply about a ruling elite governing through a system of racial inequality, the bulk of the ruling elite at that time of the belief that the "black person" was of an inferior and less evolved stature than their white counterparts. This to the degree that racial profiling was compartmentalised into a variety of ethnic groups - black (African), coloured (mixed-caste), Indian (Asian Indian) etc.
Now there is nothing more insidious or dangerous than an uneducated, socially inept white minority believing they are better than everyone else and somehow (in many cases) engendering within them an ersatz authority and a license to act out their incipient bigotry through despicably brutish behaviour.
In many senses, this was a contemporary form of societal slavery.
That being said, however, with the slow (and unarguably brutal) transition from a subjugated society to that of a (so-called) democracy (I'm unapologetic about my disdain for this euphemism that purportedly describes an open and free society), it is indisputable that the lot of the South African black person (I also see no negative connotation in using the word black or white to variably and generically describe ethnicity - if I find the epithet "white" merely descriptive and inoffensive, I see no good reason that the word "black" isn't regarded in similarly innocuous terms) elevated across the board when one-man-one-vote became law and for the very first time, every citizen of the country quite rightly had a say in their lot.
Understandably, there were fears of violent reprisals during the transition from the Afrikaner dictatorship to the open voting dynamic yet this change was (to many) surprisingly peaceful. Mandela became the first democratically elected president of the "new" South Africa and the nervous whiteys collectively breathed out - nobody had introduced martial law nor dragged them from their beds to face tribunals (instead Archbishop Desmond Tutu championed the traumatic, humane and wholly cathartic [TRC] Truth And Reconciliation Commission hearings)  to answer for crimes against humanity - crimes which had undisputedly been perpetrated by the thousand against (mostly) black protestors, protestors who in the new dispensation would have been regarded simply as truth tellers. Back then, in the dark days of apartheid, these were dangerous subversives who spoke out against the state. If anyone is getting that old Nazi feel about this narrative, it's most likely because that's exactly what we were dealing with back then. I'm going to throw something in here that will most likely rankle but frankly I don't give a rat's ass as I believe it to be true. Someone in an earlier post on another facebook friend's page had announced his intention to unfriend the poster who had quoted someone else pertaining to animal rights - this seemingly impinging on his right to elect to consume meat as he saw fit. The post did no such thing but the vehemence of the resignation seemed to me to be a classic case of the lady protesting too much.
As someone who has through choice been a carnivore, an omnivore, a vegetarian and a vegan, remaining the latter to this day, I believe I have the right to an opinion on those topics (as do we all) and quite frankly anyone who objects, as this man did, to being accused of being a supporter of wholesale cruelty through dietary/lifestyle choices is, I'm afraid, living in abject denial. That isn't to say (and the poster never did) that anyone and everyone does not have a right to eat and live as they choose - of course they do - however, to imagine for one moment that the animals which are harvested daily for their eggs, milk, flesh, skin, bone and offal have the right to choice and don't undergo unimaginable trauma (even in the euphemistically named organic or "free-range" environments we create for them) is labouring within a profoundly delusional reality. We sanitise those realities, we lie to our kids about farms and abattoirs (if in fact, we ever discuss those facets of the dinner table fare at all) and we go about our daily business pretending that this is the best we can do when deep within us we know that it isn't. Again, nobody is saying don't consume what you want to consume but what I constantly assert is - don't bullshit yourself about it and pretend that those choices don't support cruelty and trauma - they do - period. The same thing obtained within the apartheid dynamic in 70's South Africa - everyone knew what was going on but only the brave and outspoken did anything about it - the rest of us just got on with daily life with that discomfort sitting in the back of our minds, gnawing away. For those that clung to the belief that this was right and holy and simply the way it was meant to be - fair enough - that's what they believed and they had every right to believe it. A young aspiring Austrian artist had a similar burning conviction during the 1930's...
The point I guess I'm trying to make here is that we have through time and experience had the opportunity to learn and evolve and ultimately make choices that serve a greater good without the marginalisation of any group of individuals whether this be ethnically, religiously or even species based.
I feel that we could and should be looking to confront any of these issues, unashamedly evaluate them utilising a premise that's based in choices that serve the broader good and does little or no harm to anyone or anything. Anything less than that isn't, in my view, living up to the potential that we all possess. Fear of giving something up does, however, seem to pose such a challenge to us - even when it's pointed out that such abstinence can be regarded as a tool of empowerment rather than one of deprivation.
I think when we get to that point, many of these volatile issues will simply evaporate.
I have spoken to many Afrikaners during and after the apartheid era where they admitted to being pathologically fearful of losing their cultural identity when the black government assumed power, when in reality the new constitution was conceived to enshrine and protect those very tenets of freedom that had so long been denied to millions of South Africans under the yoke of that same Afrikaner culture, the essence of which they sought to protect.
And now in South Africa, the social climate has assumed a mantle of reverse racism disingenuously accorded legitimacy in order for it to be proffered as political capital and a smokescreen for the more immediate and insidious blight of corruption and nepotism - the real reasons the previously disadvantaged South Africans (read: blacks) continue to be marginalised socially and financially.
These "poor whites" depicted in the piece above are just a by-product of the dysfunctionality that is South African society whereby the democratic saviours have systematically driven the economy into penury while feathering their own nests, unemployment running at around 28% across the board. They have sadly and simply embraced the lifestyle that the vast majority of black South Africans still endure 30 years on from the yoke of apartheid servility. That they have a say at the polling stations is true, that they are no longer suffering the humiliation of being barred from the white-only infrastructure built on the backs of their own labour - that too is true. What is similarly true is that there exists a more covert subjugation of the broader South African populace by a flawed government than had occurred under the blatancy of apartheid and both scenarios are despicably shameful.
The difference being - the Afrikaner nationalist government never lied about their policies and actions whereas that's all one gets from the ruling ANC.
The average South African in my experience is not an innate racist but the governments that have held office to date sure are.
And therein lies the rub.