maybe Apartheid wasn’t so bad?

In Steyn’s work, Whiteness Just Isn’t What It Used To Be, which I’ve been writing about in the previous two posts, all the narratives she identified accepts that Apartheid oppressed black people, and that what happened to black people under Apartheid was in some way wrong. Even the hardliner colonial approach (probably the most vocally and blatantly racist in her spread of white narratives) she describes as acknowledging this:

Whereas a nod is made to the deleterious effects of Apartheid on black South Africans (“they were definitely MORE affected”), the major effect of Apartheid was to provice nurturing ground for the innate spitefulness and vengeful nature of the “others” (p60)

However, as I’ve mentioned last week, I believe things have changed since Steyn did her research, and one of these is that I experience a growing group of people who seem to deny the atrocities of Apartheid, and a group that are describing the current government as much worse for black people than Apartheid. Maybe these can be called a hard and soft form of a similar trend, both denying that Apartheid was really as bad.

As time seem to pass, it would seem that white people, at least a certain group among them, seem to reconstruct their whiteness by making the current government and the international press the culprit in depicting the Afrikaners and Apartheid as much worse than they were, and furthermore by implying, or stating out front, that continued Apartheid would have been a much better deal for black people in South Africa.

Maybe this is a trend only among younger people who talks from total ignorance. But it would seem that a group that is even more hardline than what Steyn described seem to be growing parallel with the hybridization that is also becoming more and more common among white people. It’s worrying trend, and a reminder that simply letting time pass is not necessarily going to guarantee reconciliation.

The hope that a next generation would automatically become “color blind” is totally shattered when we find young people that become even more racist than their parents were, and also when we find people over time growing more and more blatantly racist, and appreciative of Apartheid, instead of slowly working through the evil, and bit by bit acknowledging it and actively deciding to move even further away from it.

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