Why Do White People Despise Blacks!
There is not doubt that the recent social media posts by white supremacists referring to blacks people as animals and uneducated dirty mass are mere symptoms of a much entrenched phenomena of racism. Anti-black racism has been the order of the day in South Africa and our twenty two years of democratic rule have dismally failed to uproot its causes. Why do white people despise blacks? Why is it that they find it easy to look at us with disgust and undermine our humanity?
The answer to this question lies in the structural organisation of blacks lives, the material conditions that have been made exclusive to black people. What colonisation and apartheid did, was to make poverty, hunger, under-education, landlessness and cheap labour part of the exclusive identity of black people from generation to generation. It did not matter that one black person, or a family, or a group were educated, maybe even better than other few whites, as long as the majority of black people lived in conditions of squalor, this remains the identity they all share.
A black revolution should therefore be about the structural transformation of the black condition as a condition of inhumanity. Until such a time, it is futile to expect any white person or white people as a group to respect black people or treat them like human beings.
The attitude of white supremacy, the idea that white people are brought up with, that psyche of being above blacks, rests on their privilege and advantage over black people. It rests on the reality that each day of their lives, from birth, their lived experience as a collective is to be served by blacks. From the people who clean their homes, streets, and schools, to the people to serve them in restaurants, markets and those that do all the menial work in the country. They are raised, some directly and others indirectly, to believe that blacks exists so that they can live a better life.
The point of the colonial project was precisely to achieve this fact, that as much as possible, there must always be millions of black people available as cheap and easily disposable labour for the advancement of the privilege of white people. The sooner we accept this as a country the closer we will get to the resolution of anti-black racism.
We will not uproot the attitude of white supremacy unless we deal with the black condition, because white supremacy is founded on the black condition, which maintains and reproduces it. One only needs to look at how cheap a black life truly is to white people by compering the fact that 34 black mineworkers get massacred in broad day light, and white people never even ran a petition online. But rhinos get poached daily, we do not even see poachers poaching them like we did with the police that shot and killed workers. Yet there is a big campaign and a huge investment about saving the rhino. People have statues of them everywhere, they even organise marathons where they “run to save the rhino”.
This tells you, right here in South Africa, a country with majority of blacks, that black people are of a much lower worth than the rhinos. If you do not buy the rhino story in relation to mineworkers who were massacred by the ANC government in protection of white monopoly investment, then the other example is white people’s domestic animals. Here, you find that the dogs and cats of white people have medical aid, whilst the black garden and kitchen workers do not and cannot afford it.
To ask whites to view black people as human is therefore an impossible request from their structural point of view. If you were in their position you would be the same, because it is indeed impossible to look at Gugulethu or Alexandra and see a human image. What you see is not different to how rats live; congested areas where people live with their dirt in absolute proximity.
Each day we ask white people not to tell us that this is the case and they are shocked. We say to them; do not tell us that we live like rats and in absolute proximity to dirt. Each time we say it is racist, they do not understand how could naming facts be a bad thing. But what they all forget is precisely that they as a group are the cause of the suffering and animalisation of black people.
Today we know that they have no remorse about what they have done from recent pronouncements even by De Klerk. It should have been clear in 1994 when De Klerk took his oath as second Deputy President to Nelson Mandela in Afrikaans that he is not apologetic. It was a sign of arrogance shown to the whole nation that he is not remorseful of white supremacy and its legacy.
What then is to be done? Economic freedom is the only answer to the transformation of the condition upon which white supremacy rests; the day black people attain economic freedom, white people will not only lack the basis to despise us, this despise will not affect anyone’s access to means of subsistence. Economic freedom means the distribution of land to end congested townships and lead agrarian reform; nationalisation of mines and banks to fund free quality education, housing, sanitation and healthcare to name a few. This will restore the dignity to black people and any other project that does not focus on this will only result in cosmetic changes. It will result merely in silencing whites whilst they continue to live their lives as white supremacist uninterruptedly.
This article by CIC Julius Malema was first published on Sunday Times, and subsequently issued by the EFF, 10 January 2016
