Its a Rrrace! I'm wiiinning!!

I can't remember the movie or the actor but it’s a line that used to make me laugh. I think it was a character mocking some eastern accent. But it was hilarious, and he was ridiculous...it was funny cause of some racial under current too I'm sure but that's what humour's about sometimes....Ratrace! That’s it.

This post's not about that. It's about the other Race. The one we're losing. So Cape Town's a mess racially. Not everywhere, not all the time, but often.

Kids in my street don't wave back at first, look at me funny when I run past. The shop owner started off suspicious, barely greeted me. Because I'm white. And not because the kids and the shop owner are all rascist. They just expect whites (I HATE that word...white people...its an adjective I can live with but a label I hate) to behave a certain way. Mostly a bad way. So it's deep prejudice. This city is drowning in it.

Good news is that is falls away quite quickly. People warm up. As we all do. We are all prejudiced and we all make space for exceptions. I want people to get off the high judgement horse a little.

So here in this little blog I want to order some thoughts and make a few arguments about how I think we all work. It ain't no term paper but it's got a thought or six I want to get out from the hangover of the previous post.

Why do this to you all? Because I am sick and tired of ‘Whites’ feeling like victims. It’s crippling us, and its fuelling our own prejudice, and its causing all kinds of unnecessary shit. Sure there are some policies that in the one on one can be down right unfair and racist, sure there are some people who have serious beef with ‘whites’ and spew it across the broad sheets…or pick fights with ‘whites’ in bars….

But that shit has nothing to do with you. Don’t take it so personally. Kick it in the face. Prove its rubbish. Make some friends and some money the hard way and work for it dammit. 9 times out of ten the people with the most beef will be the most prepared to look past their rubbish and get you half way. The problem with most of us, us whites, is that we sit and wine on the 22. We never gonna score and make this place ours or win fans if we’re never in the other half, four five six.
How many white capetonians you think complain and judge the mess of shacks wedged between the highway and the flats but have never driven in to see new houses, new flyovers, new malls, new rugby clubs, new train stations, old restaurants, old markets, thousands of homes……not shacks but homes with families and picture albums and weddings and graduations and savings and the same little lives you winge about…

Stop feeling so god damn sorry for yourselves and so self-righteous in your selective downward spiral doom and gloom rubbish.

Ah. Now I feel better. Let me illustrate how the prejudice works for 'us' with two simple stories. And after you've read them think if you've ever benefitted in the same way. If you have maybe you'll feel less of a victim the few times the prejudice counts against you...

Story One:

I was a White SRC President at Wits and I could often walk the talk. Not because I was so damn brilliant but often because I was white. I could smooth over secretaries, bowl over sport directors and woo old school academics like it was nobodies business. Even with long hair and flip flops I could inspire confidence in two minutes of talking and cement it in two paragraphs of SRC letterhead.

Anything I EVER did as a ‘student leader’ (yuck) at Wits would have taken me twice as long if I was black and four times as long if I had a Northern Sotho accent. Forget that I had a rock and Roll beige ’89 Opel Monza that would take 20 cases of emergency beer for bar stock, or cash from my weekend jobs to bank roll a crisis clean up crew, or contacts at 5fm and Y, or experience organising events in London or a hundred other things that made me good at what I did and many very much because I was white. You with me? You starting to pick up what I’m putting down?

Story Two:

At a party a few years back I ran into an old school mate who’d never done ‘varsity that had just landed a plumb job. He was white and male. The job was an open affirmative action appointment but he’d thrown his name in the hat anyway. His name’s Kirsten, he was mistaken for a girl and made the paper cut. Come interview time it became clear that he was pale and male but by now the MD had seen he was from my school. A school he new to be a good school, a hard, traditional school. He called him in for the interview. He blew everyone’s socks off. He got the job.

The MD wasn’t racist, I’m sure. The MD picked the guy that hit every right button, that oozed the right kind of confidence, that he KNEW in his GUT would get the job done. Am I wrong to say he got the job because he’s white? Yes. But he got the job. And he’s brilliant at it. But he could have been crap. Being white was no guarantee. But the MD’s leap of faith was just that little shorter than had Kirsten been Nomandla from Dobsonville….you feel me?


I’m gonna let you stew on that. Thoughts?