Blacks are racist too!

American stand up comedian, Chris Rock says blacks are the worst racists because they hate each other too. It was a joke worth laughing at but in retrospect one comes to realise that the word racism is not an exclusive description of some white people but it can also be used on some of our black brothers and sisters.

Saying a black person is racist is surely opening a can of worms, putting yourself in the line of fire but this is a fact that has been deliberately overlooked because apartheid and all injustices in the third world that happened since the slave trade have the index finger directed at the whites as the ones who are racists.

Matter of fact! Apartheid and the slave trade were wrong and there’s no justifying them, we cannot find any cause to condone such diabolic thoughts, systems and machinery.

When Marcus Garvey, Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr and other such revolutionaries stood up against the racist system of America, they dreamt of a society where blacks and whites could live in harmony. They did not dream of black supremacy.

The founding heroes of the Rainbow Nation: Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu had a dream; they longed for an equal opportunity society, a free country where love and brotherhood knows no colour and language. The Bishop Desmond Tutu led truth and Reconciliation Commission of the early 90s served to realign South Africa towards this ideology.

Matter of fact! The axe always forgets the trees it chops but the tree stumps never forget about the axe.

The scars of apartheid are still there and to say one should ignore them is rather insensitive and almost unimaginable. Scars are wounds that have healed and they remind us of the past and the past helps shape the future hence the need to know where we are and where we are coming from.

The recent hate speech trial of ANC Youth Leader, Julius Malema, explicitly showed that some blacks are as equally guilty of racism as other white South Africans. The issue here is not the legality of the “dubula ibhunu” song but the remarks and messages said and displayed by those without the courtyard in solidarity of Malema.

Dubula ibhunu is a revolutionary song and as AfriForum also concedes, there is deleting it in South Africa’s history but the timing of its singing is currently inappropriate considering the rate of deaths of white farmers. But this is not argument that many would expect to be written in support for a black man because today’s Rainbow nation looks at issues on racial tones.

Did we fight apartheid so that we could be racist ourselves? Did we fight hurt and discrimination so that we could do the same? There are still economic and opportunity career imbalances; that’s a fact but was “The long walk to freedom” premised on the idea of an eye for an eye and revenge.

Mzwakhe Mbuli once said an eye for an eye makes the world blind which is true in current South Africa. A case in point that highlights this is the recent nationwide municipal plebiscite.

During a phone in discussion after Election Day in one radio station a young black man said he was happy that he had been able to exercise his democratic right of voting and was also glad his voted had counted as the Democratic Alliance (DA) had won the seat in his constituency. What followed after his comment were callers saying he wasn’t black enough, how could he vote or a white man’s party with some accusing him of being the spoilt brats who do know anything about the struggle. Election statistics later showed that about 13% of the black electorate had voted for the DA.

Politics is not only about history but also about future and progress. It would be folly not to consider history in making decisions in as much as it would folly to only base your decision on history as the present and future also need to be considered. If DA’s policies are better than that of ANC why not vote for what will improve the community, the same goes for ANC policies if they are better than that of DA.

A friend said I don’t love my family and there was something wrong with me after telling her that if I was eligible to vote I would have voted DA. She said she will never vote for a white man and she will not waste her time reading a white man’s manifesto. She says there’s nothing a white man can do for a black man and that Helen Zille is as guilty a racist as some racist members of her party.

But everyone knows that Zille fought apartheid during her days as a journalist and going into politics was a means of better fighting it. Not all whites are racists; one cannot vouch for Zille and her comrades but facts are that within her camp are clicks of whites who are racist and see the DA as a white party. Within the ANC there are influential figures that are racist: ask Trevor Emmanuel about Jimmy Manyi, the government spokesperson and fellow who wants Cape coloureds evenly distributed across the country as was done to blacks during the apartheid era.

A colleague at Voice of America’s Studio 7 concedes that blacks are also racists but he brings an interesting dimension to the discourse saying racism by blacks is reactionary unlike that of whites that is driven by the wanton disdain of blacks.

The emotional hurt, in fact, the trauma due to emotional and social discrimination in work places by racist white employers and colleagues has driven many a black working middle class woman and man to quit their jobs. A friend recently changed jobs because the superiors and her former job were so bluntly racists that she could not take it anymore. It is this emotional abuse that drives us to also hate but the only difference between black racism is that blacks do not have the means at a large scale to dominate the white person. Whites own large conglomerates and there’s no other better racism machinery than the economic muscle.

Surely you cannot expect a black brother who has been racially abused to just turn a blind eye, walk away and hope that it does not happen again. But then the holy book teaches to forgive at least seventy times seven times in a day.

But when all is said and done, racism in whatever form that it presents itself in is wrong and cannot be condoned. Racism by a black man despite its reasons is as diabolic as the racism perpetrated by the likes of Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd and his cronies.
-Article first published in www.ziyawamag.com
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