One half of a debate in South Africa’s Mail and Guardian on white supremacy and understanding racist discourse:

We are told that Cliff is not a “conscious racist”, in other words, that nothing Cliff could possibly say would persuade Mngxitama that his analysis is false. We are informed that what might appear (to someone less tuned-in to reality than Mngxitama, perhaps) to be “humanist concerns for good governance” are in fact evidence of Cliff’s racism.

But I have, of course, already fallen into one of Mngxitama’s cunning rhetorical snares by using the word “we” in the paragraph above. This word (when used by Cliff and probably by other white men like myself), is in itself racist because it erases the “differential realities of blacks and whites”.

One cannot speak of a reality one does not live in, according to Mngxitama’s argument, and “blackness” in itself defines a reality, whether we’re talking about Tokyo Sexwale or a township dweller with no education. They are the same — and Cliff has a slave-holder’s mentality with respect to both of them.

[…]

I regret that I’ve never drunk as deeply from the well of postmodernism as Mngxitama has, because this decoding appears to fall outside of my sphere of competence, leaving me with only the suspicion that he’s talking nonsense.

It’s certainly true that there are “differential realities” and that many South Africans might be incapable of and/or unwilling to understand the reality of someone else’s life. It’s also true that many of these breakdowns of understanding are manifested in race, because race is still our best proxy for class difference, with class difference being the true cause of such mutual misunderstanding.

But these differential realities do not preclude communication or understanding across racial lines, neither do they preclude the possibility that when Cliff says “we”, he actually means “all South Africans”. He could perhaps be fully aware of the historical reasons whites are (generally) richer than blacks, and the exploitation that this inequality is premised on.

I’m amazed that ‘race’ continues to make South Africans  expend so much hot air. But I’m more amazed that they do so to a degree of sophistication that would simply not be reached by writers in Australia’s media (and nor, do I suspect, by writers in New Zealand’s, Canada’s, or the USA’s).

And we might ask why.