ARE you aware of this whiteness pandemic? It is on the march. Once it merely crept in a low sort of way, but now it is here, among us, its blanched head held high, full-blown and demanding recognition as an object of reproach.
The whiteness should not be surprising: ours is not a nuanced world, but one destined, it seems, to be forever seen through a narrow racial prism. Whiteness, once relegated to the margins, is now back in the mainstream, a pox of our own making.
Those who paid attention to them would have noticed how, over time, politicians have recklessly flirted with whiteness. There has been grandstanding, and soapbox stuff about class, privilege, colonialism, European laws, being clever, even the very accents with which we spoke. And so the whiteness seemingly grew in insurmountability.
Even this week President Jacob Zuma was at it. In an interview with Bloomberg news agency, he admitted there was a “serious struggle” in trying to reduce unemployment and boost economic growth. This, naturally, was no fault of government’s.
He declared the student protests were not an indication of any unhappiness with the ANC – God forbid – but rather part of demands to ensure that blacks gained equal access to an economy still dominated by whites.
Julius Malema, meanwhile, has been white-goating, too. First there came his oft-repeated accusation that the ANC was “in bed with white monopoly capital” and then the ultimatum to said white monopoly capital when the Economic Freedom Fighters dropped by the mostly white Johannesburg Stock Exchange.