Saturday 1 November 2014

Why it's racist to blame black people for apartheid, duh.

Steve Hofmeyr, that asinine blonde amoeba, is using the world’s most simplistic rhetoric device to avoid culpability for his bigotry: he’s going ‘prove it’. It’s an old, hack trick that has its strength in the idea of incommensurability. We don’t share a common set of agreements over what constitutes prejudice, so in Stevevillefontein just about nothing is racist, unless that exact same thing happens to a particular type of right wing white person *, then it’s nuclear meltdown stage 9. How do they pull off being a victim and oppressor at the same time? Being a dominatrix in AfriForum (Steve’s official fan club) must be very confusing.

As you may or may not have heard, depending on whether you care for the intellectual Jurassic Park that is Stevo’s twitter feed, Steve believes that “Blacks were the architects of apartheid”. So then now, I know in the common sense world the rest of us live in it’s patently obvious that this is racist, but nope, not for The Steve and his merry band of morons. So now, painfully, I will explain why it’s fuggen racist.

Just to be clear, I am not explaining this for Steve. His head is too far up his own ass to hear us anyway. I am explaining this so fence sitters will stop sitting. The discourse that Steve is spewing is part of a cultural narrative that maintains the insane inequality we face today. When a white bigot with huge public presence starts telling black people apartheid was their fault it’s time for us to block his access to socially accepted public platforms. With the minimum of publicity we need to tell his umlungustan that they have a right to a racist mindset, but it’s gonna cost them. Kyknet, I will be asking your CEO for an LNN interview about what side of this line you are choosing. Neutrality on this is not neutral.

Is “Blacks were the architects of apartheid. Go figure.” racist?

Firstly, what’s racism? Simply put, racism isn’t the consciousness of race as much as it’s the prejudice against people based on race. As every B grade quasi intellectual white conservative type likes to whine, yes, in South Africa we obsess on race when the problem is often both class and race, but that move has been well explored as a white-guy-avoids-the-race-issue move. If this is confusing Andile Mngxitama lays it down here: http://mg.co.za/article/2014-09-26-class-theory-finally-decolonised

Next, what is apartheid? Apartheid was a system of laws that did some wonderful things to black people, to name just a few:

It took away their land and wealth in the Land Act.

It totally deprived them of any effective vote – no political rights.

It made black people live in ridiculously small rural outbacks with no way to eek a living but to come hundreds of kilometers to work on white owned mines, etc, for a pittance while their families scraped by in poverty.

It gave black people substandard education for decades, and even tried to force them to learn in Afrikaans, often a 3rd language. How the F do you learn algebra in a 3rd language? Imagine we made your kids learn in Shangaan Steve?

It blocked them from ever being able to advance in their career. To this day 75% of SA CEOs are white. We also on average earn 6 times more than black people, so our paranoia that we are under attacked is simply untrue.

It bullied them into peripheral city outskirts where they had to get back to by a certain time or face jail or deportation to homelands.

It made people carry evil little books called passbooks, which if you didn’t have meant jail.

So, for the sake of common human decency, let’s agree at least that apartheid was itself racist. So now, “Blacks were the architects of apartheid”. Obviously they didn’t vote for apartheid themselves? And obviously they didn’t send the trucks that dragged people screaming from their homes? Yup, this is that wonderful dynamic sexist pricks do when they blame the victim instead of the rapist. Basically Steve is telling us it’s black people’s fault because they were asking for it, in their tight pants and short skirts. If you are a Steve fan right now and you do not feel the deepest sense of shame then you should seek help because your soul has been expropriated without compensation.

However, Steve tried to build some credibility around this claptrap on his Facebook page. First, he said ‘go figure’ at the end, which he thinks means it’s our fault that we didn’t see it like he sees it. If Juju said “All whites must die. Go figure”, Steve’s little brain would have exploded all over his Pick n Pay sponsored face, so no.

Steve then tried to explain that if nobody wants to play with you, then it's probably your fault. Ja, Steve, I am going to shove that logic so far down your throat you gonna have to sing through your privileged behind.

Let’s go. Steve said: “If the world doesn’t buy into African systems, mentality and reputation, it isn’t always their fault”. Let’s start with the awkward fact that he stole his entire language from black people. Afrikaans was first written in Arabic by an Iman translating the Koran. Salaam alaikum, Oom Steve.

If you want more info: http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-08-14-i-will-touch-you-on-your-language-rescuing-afrikaans-from-the-right-wing/

Second, cultural assimilation in our country happened at the end of a gun, a historical truth Steve and his team just love to ignore. Secondly Afrikaans boer culture, as it went through SeSotho and SiPedi lands took on a variety of African cultural features to survive. Damn that must annoy him. However, what we really need to unpack is the incredible bigotry underlying the cultural superiority he’s invoking, white supremacist that he is.

Steve’s argument is older even than the language he’s saying it in. Colonialists arrived here and needed to explain their place in the world in terms of both their claimed decent Christian values (I know, hilarious), their interaction with the newly discovered Darwinian science of evolution, and their desire to exploit these ‘new’ lands to the absolute maximum. They saw themselves as being at the peak of an evolutionary hierarchy: everyone else was closer to being an animal. It’s much easier to brutally steal a country if the people living there have been denigrated to animal status. Black people could try and climb this hierarchy by adopting western cultural norms – we are just so generous. We also did kindly stuff like force them to hut pay tax or go to jail, so they had to involve themselves in our economy, an economy in which they would never be given access or equal social status. Assimilation to western norms was not a choice for black people. So saying that we didn’t assimilate to African norms is both untrue, and severely assholish.

However, the XXX strength racism Steve’s using here is that he still buys into the black-people-are-closer-to-animals rhetoric. His entire discourse is one that suggests that black people are less evolved.

For e.g.: ‘If women, toddlers and grannies complain about your contribution to the rape rate, it isn’t always their fault’. Firstly, this statement is a bald faced misrepresentation, as the people who work in gender rights can attest to. Secondly, he is selling the old idea of black men’s sexual insatiability, which comes directly from the animal-like narrative. Gender violence is a huge problem in our country. Using it to serve a narrow right wing agenda is evil.

Regarding the mythological cultural evolutionary hierarchy, apart from the fact that Africans were building universities when Steve and my ancestors were still grunting around in bear skins, western colonial domination and sciences were a result of ideas they jacked from everywhere else and just being more vicious. If Steve wants to apply his own logic to himself he will find that stuff like penicillin, electricity, railways, etc, actually happened while his dudes were busy voortrekking themselves so they could keep their slaves, so all they invented really was biltong. Of course, I would never apply Steve’s bigoted logic, so I completely reject that last sentence. Stop being such a self-hater, Steve.

I hope the millions of awesome, warm, hard working white Afrikaans people, including the likes of Max Du Preez, Zelda la Grange, Antjie Krog, Pieter-Dirk Uys, etc, can take the incredible contributions their culture has brought to the world away from this schmuck of a bigot.

So, yes, we have proved, that “Blacks were the architects of apartheid” was supremely racist. Pick n Pay will realize this eventually, because if Steve had said, “Jews were the architects of the Holocaust” he would be out on his ass by now.


Finally Steve said in his excuse of a FB update that “If folk did not want to share a country with you, why is it always their fault?” We will remind him of these words as we remove his sponsors from him one by one. No bakkie, no cry, eh, Steve? Go figure.