BLACK ANGER
JONNY STEINBERG: Moving through whiteness to prosperity
‘It is when black people find they are complicit in fuelling a sense of white superiority that the deepest wounds are opened’
If we want to get to the root of the anger felt by black middle-class people about white racism, the most obvious examples are the wrong place to look. It is not the likes of Penny Sparrow’s outburst that hurt most, I don’t think, nor Helen Zille’s remarks about colonialism. It is when black people find they are complicit in fuelling a sense of white superiority — and that there is nothing they can do to stop their complicity — that the deepest wounds are opened. And I think black middle-class people find themselves in this position all the time. Take the sphere of education. In a recent article published in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Mark Hunter, one of the most perceptive social scientists working on SA today, writes about the desegregation of schooling in Durban over the past quarter of a century. When formerly white public schools started competing fiercely with one another in the early 2000s, Hunter observes, many began investing heavily in rugby. Some parents were ou...
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