There is a renewed white arrogance staking a claim to influence in the public sphere. It is fuelled by a swing to the right and needs to be contested
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.here are racist hallucinations that run unbroken through the centuries, but racism is also a dynamic phenomenon.
There is no way for a white person to use this sort of language to discuss a conflict between people racialised as white and people racialised as being other than white without drawing from the foundational logic of racism. There seem to be two primary sources for this renewed sense of moral superiority. One is the turn to the right across the wider white world in response to an accumulating challenge to racism. Ideas drawn from this turn to the right in parts of the world such as North America, Australia and Western Europe are imported into South Africa.
A second primary source for this new sense of moral superiority is the collapse of the ANC into a kleptocratic project under Jacob Zuma and its worsening failures of governance. Something very similar happened in the United States after the end of slavery when black governance in the South was relentlessly lampooned in the press and its many successful aspects ignored in favour of a relentless focus on corruption. This eventually enabled a restoration of white power.