Black Racist Bitch: How social media reveals South Africa's unfinished work on race

by Thandiwe Ntshinga

Critical whiteness studies is an offshoot of critical race theory that Thandiwe Ntshinga believes is desperately needed in South Africa.

She pokes holes in the belief that leaving whiteness undisturbed for analysis creates justice and normalcy. Instead, she says perpetually studying the 'other' hinders our development. 

The title of this book comes from one of the first comments she received on Tiktok when discussing her findings and research.

200 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 25, 2023

Reviews

[Anschen Conradie · Rating 4 out of 5]

#BlackRacistBitch – Thandiwe Ntshinga
#Tafelberg

In February 2021 the author posted a video on TikTok that received 271 comments, 3930 likes, 66.2k views, and was shared almost 200 times. Not all comments were positive, on the contrary, slurs such as the title of this book, were hurled towards both the poster and other participants to the conversation in the comments section. At the center of the controversy was a quote of DF Malan in 1913: ‘The Black Peril would not exist if it were not for a White Peril that is a hundred times greater.’

He was, of course, referring to the ‘poor white problem in South Africa’ (armblankevraagstuk) that became the object of a report by the Carnegie Commission of Inquiry in 1932. In simple terms: The Government of the day was concerned about the fact that (cheaper) Black labour prohibited whites impoverished by the Anglo Boer War from being gainfully employed, but also, heaven forbid, the risk of Black and white cohabitating in proximity due to economic challenges of the ‘poor whites.’ The whitelash that followed was instrumental in the creation of this book, to the extent that the Acknowledgements include ‘And finally, let me not forget my ‘white haters’ on TikTok. Without you this book wouldn’t be here, thank you for delivering your racism to me for analysis.’ (178)

The book is about so much more, however.

The introductory chapters investigate the history of classification and division based on race. Initially the lines were drawn by religion, not by race, but (no) thanks to physicians like Franҁois Barnier who distinguished between four races in 1684, and Carl Linnaeus who allocated prejudicial characteristics to the groups in 1767, racial division was created. Then followed, amongst other things, the scramble for Africa and the arrogance of colonialism.

A very important theme in the book is the study field known as ‘critical whiteness studies’ (CWS). This is not at all limited to skin color, it investigates and exposes whiteness as a concept producing a mythical master race for which dominance and privilege are birthrights; as well as the particular power structure that it creates, the resulting ‘fragility of whiteness’ that leads an highly sensitive, intolerable state that over reacts whenever (white) racial comfort is challenged; a sense of entitlement, and institutionalized racism that has become hidden in plain sight.

CWS must be understood to grasp the reason why Black people cannot be racist. Prejudiced, yes, but not racist. Racism requires power to back up prejudices – something that would have been impossible under Apartheid. To claim that ‘Apartheid belongs to the past’ is a typical example of the inability of those burdened with whiteness to grasp the reality of continued racism, even in our democratic society. The crux of the matter is: even though Apartheid has been abolished in legal terms, it lives on in ‘intimate spaces and behind closed doors.’ (11)

As a (white) reader the book evoked various emotions within me. At first indignation and the temptation to defend myself, but that would mean that the reading is done with the intention to respond, instead of with the intention to understand. The next stage was the discomfort experienced when seeing yourself from a less than flattering angle in a mirror; no matter how you turn around, you still look bad.

A quote by Steve Biko (included in the text) allowed the penny to drop for me: ‘No matter how genuine a liberal’ motivation may be, he has to accept that, though he did not choose to be born into privilege {Black people} cannot but be suspicious of his motives.’

I still cannot claim to understand, that would be a ‘whiteness’ response. But I am striving for better comprehension. And I understand why the author chose to cap Blacks and Coloureds in the text, but not whites. This book has convinced me that I do not know nearly enough. To rectify this, I will endeavor to obtain and read ‘Ties that Bind: Race and the politics of friendship in South Africa’ (NYU Press, 2016). It is, at the very least, a start.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ #Uitdieperdsebek

[Tutankhamun18 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!

In this conversational, yet incredibly well referenced, book she shares her academic path into social anthropology and critical whiteness studies. Along the way she references her tiktok account and reactions on social media and provides context for attitudes around race and racism in South Africa today.

- “On social media, posts, comments and memes circulate with the phrase ‘Race is a social construct, it does not exist’, however that can be misconstrued. It is not the same as ‘Racism is a social construct; it does not exist”
- “Racism will exist so long as people — regardless of race — subscribe to ideas of white racial superiority.”
- SA “While we strive for a non-racial South Africa, we recognise that after 26 years of democracy, a strong correlation remains between race and socio-economic standing…We cannot pretend that race is not a primary determinant of the future prospects of many South Africans. We must act as one to address this historical inequality.” (new parties like ActionSA replace ANC with good ideas/anti racist ideas)
- “For white people to separate themselves from whiteness is a luxury of individualism that white people demand in research that doesn’t extend to other racial groups.”
- “There is no logical reason except for the privileges of whiteness that forces distance between the white individual and whiteness as the construction of the white race, white culture, and the system of advantages afforded to white people across the globe through government policies, media portrayal, decision-making power within corporations, schools and judicial systems, etc.³⁸ One reason for this is white people have been taught an incapability to conceptualise whiteness as a state of being, preferring to keep whiteness unnamed and rather as representative and objective.³⁹
- “White culture, white identity and the evils of whiteness are inseparable. Critical whiteness studies reverses the colonial gaze by making white people and ‘white things’ – things that produced whiteness such as oppression, discrimination and fragility, to name a few – the subject of analysis. The insistence on individualism serves to erase history and silence unmasking whiteness’ ways of white domination in aspects like wealth distribution, generational accumulation and basic human decency.”
- “To critical whiteness studies writers, whiteness is ‘an unearned social privilege that has allowed a stratum of people unequal access to financial resources, educational opportunities, health care, property rights and so forth’.⁴⁶ In South Africa, unequal access can be seen in every aspect, including the very basic right to water where apartheid policies aimed solely advancing of the white minority has meant that Black people were not positioned to benefit from the country’s crucial water resources”
- “Psychoanalysis connects race in the imagination and in the formation of identity. Findings from the psychoanalysis of whiteness suggests that white racial superiority, white privilege and denials of white racial identity are forms of pathological narcissism driven by a need to win at any and all cost”
- “The backlash to lessening racial hierarchy to favour whiteness is resourceful in everyday speech that is adopted and legitimised in mainstream culture. We have a rich and established legacy of conservative speech to draw from. These are the white South Africans who are always complaining about a societal decay with the strategic purpose of legitimising white governance as well as garnering intellectual and moral support for white domination. The complaints cast South Africa as a hopeless country riddled with crime and in moral decline. Being able to list any fault of the ANC without admitting to the corruption and crime against humanity that was apartheid, this speech highlights the racist belief that white rule makes for an effective, corruption-free society where current attempts to right the wrongs of the past are somehow worse than the original faults of the society”
- “ South African anthropology truly, and prematurely, prides itself on its critical self-reflection. Anthropology is known to be the ‘handmaiden of colonialism and imperialism’⁷⁸ – a child of colonialism and imperialism designed to furnish the West with information to better exploit Asia, Africa and the Americas.⁷⁹ The history of anthropology in South Africa is one of colonial origin that later followed apartheid’s dominant ‘power’ logics claiming it had to succumb to the regime ‘perniciously dictating what should be written by both its supporters and, significantly, its opponents’.⁸⁰ Research on ‘natives’ and ‘Bantus’ only served to justify ideologies of white supremacy. This was taught to me as anthropology’s ‘shady history’. The white anthropologist was a knowing subject and the Black cultural other an ignorant object.⁸¹ One of the leading African social scientists, Bernard Magubane, wrote that in colonial ‘intellectual’ inquiry, Africans were studied and conceptualised by anthropologists therefore ‘the study of Africans grew up as an applied discipline, conducted by anthropologists for the purpose of managing them so that they could be controlled and exploited.”
- “In a critique on anthropology in South Africa, Francis Nyamnjoh, former head of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, observes that ‘there is very little published research by white anthropologists in South African universities on white South Africans’.⁸⁴ He then adds that ‘the relatively little anthropological curiosity regarding whites in South Africa might suggest that South African whites are – regardless of their internal hierarchies of purity – beyond ethnographic contemplation’.⁸⁵ By this, Nyamnjoh points out a lack of critical whiteness analysis where white South African anthropologists honour whiteness as an untouched racial identity, not to be probed by research.”
- “What I enjoyed about this reading was that it made visible explicit racism in white identity which would later remain a consistent observation in critical whiteness studies. An identity that presents itself as fearfully waiting for attack – vulnerable to Black retaliation with Black political power without absolute governmental protection. It was an identity written not as victor but as fragile, that found its strength in institutionalised and systemic racism and was threatened by the ideals of democracy. It was a study that reflected my experience and understanding of whiteness in Stellenbosch at that time. It also brought to the fore racist aspects of white identity that I felt Black students were accustomed to but that never made its way into assigned literature.”
- “What the National Party did in 1948 was to further colonise South Africa when colonisation was getting out of moral style in the West and when Africa as a whole was moving towards independence from colonial control. Afrikaners made racism too loud for the liberalism of the time. For that they have been punished, leaving them with a disgraced identity for something that Afrikaner nationalist ideologies indoctrinated as morally, ethically and intellectually sound.⁹⁴ They have also been used as a distraction from continued racism in the West by their counterparts. Westerners make themselves seem morally and ethically superior to white South Africans without much to show for it”
- “ In response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022, the EFF released a media statement that circulated online succinctly summarising what I could find. In their public statement the EFF wrote:
-
-   We do not mourn the death of Elizabeth, because to us her death is a reminder of a tragic period of this country and Africa’s history. Britain, under the leadership of the royal family, took over territory that would become South Africa in 1795, from Batavian control, and took permanent control of the territory in 1806. From that moment onwards, native people of this land have never known peace, nor have they ever enjoyed the fruits of the riches of this land, riches which were and still are utilized for the enrichment of the British royal family and those who look like them.”
- “In a very detailed analysis on South African whiteness, as it relates to poor whites, in comparison to numerous paragraphs dedicated to the historical contextualisation of Afrikaner whiteness, Finnish researcher Annika Teppo writes,
-
-   In 1795, the British invaded the Cape Colony. They found a colony of approximately 25 000 slaves, 20 000 white colonists, 15 000 Khoisan and 350 ‘free blacks’ (freed slaves). Power was restricted to a white elite in Cape Town, and differentiation on the basis of colour was deeply entrenched. The British influence grew, and more British immigrants arrived, many of them soon becoming urban dwellers. They began to dominate politics, trade, finance, mining and manufacturing, while the Afrikaners, or the Boers, remained in the countryside. The whites were now split into two competing language groups, and into two different cultures.”
- “One such group classified as Coloured who at one time would have been absorbed in the white community' but did not, are Basters. Basters, meaning 'bastards', were Dutch-speaking Khoe and mixed-race people who adopted a more European way of living with a higher economic, cultural and social status than Black Africans by playing the role of supervisor of other servants and confidants of white masters. Many were direct descendants of men of the white families they worked for. There are claims that some of these relationships were family-like, however it reads more like something not too far from a house slave or 'house negro' in the US where there was a favouring of lighter-skinned slaves over dark-skinned ones. This privileging resulted in lighter-skinned house servants having higher status than their dark-complexioned counterparts that worked in the fields. This advantage of proximity to power was not without cost as it also left domestic slaves vulnerable to greater abuse in the homes of white masters, especially sexual abuse.”
- “Moreover, within Cape Town's Cape Coloured communities there are Cape Malays (known also as Cape Muslims or Malays) that are descendants of enslaved and free Muslims initially from present-day Indonesia and other Dutch colonies of Southeast Asia which in the 1800s began to include all practicing Muslims regardless of origin. The Malays held an interesting place within colonial and apartheid clas-sifications. In the words of 1950s apartheid prime minister DF Malan: The Malay community ... form one of the oldest elements of the South African nation. They came virtually at the same time that the white man and experienced the same history as the white man . . . The white man did not come here to give the Malays civilisation. They were always civilised, and came here after they had adopted the white man's civilisation. Together with the Dutch-speaking white man they developed that language [Afrikaans]. Their places of origin could also be Madagascar or India, coming to the Cape during Dutch and British rule. It is noted that 'The Malays are Muslim, yet so are Coloureds who are not Malay'166 With ancestry that is composed of KhoeKhoe people as well as ancestors from South and Southeast Asia, a connectedness to their Muslim identity is viewed as more salient to their Malay identity for many Cape Malays.”
- “Diminished usefulness of Coloured people to the white economy with the entry of Indian and Black groups led to a reversal of fortune whose privileges were based on a general white accep-tance. By the mid-twentieth century, Durban's Coloured population was no longer white.”
- “Ordentlikheid (decent), refers to the expectations of white Afrikaner middle-class identity. The processes of poor whites'
- "rehabilitation and upliftment' into 'good whites' involved specific performances of socially acceptable whiteness such as keeping a clean home, a stable marriage and harbouring anti-Black sentiment that continue to be rewarded - through donations and other means - by the white dominant class.”
- ““Unlike apartheid South Africa where overt racism was the order of the day,  the status quo is now to conform to international whiteness by making whiteness  ‘invisible’, unspoken and never to be challenged.”
- “To expect white people to be anything other than provoked by the field of critical  whiteness studies, its aims, focus and results, is to not give enough credit to the  pathology of whiteness’ commitment to the established racial hierarchy that en-  dorses white racial comfort – at the expense of everyone else’s oppression and dis-  crimination. Within academia and beyond, there is a persistent backlash against  the field of critical whiteness studies by white people – a ‘whitelash’, if you will. The  reason behind this displeasure is quite straightforward – having made every other  racial group in the world a spectacle for its own exploitative endeavours, plagued  by greed, violence, misery and disease, whiteness has been conditioned to repel  being the object of analysis. Whiteness and white identity has therefore been as-  sumed as too grandiose, too supreme, to examine. Its superiority and the succes-  sive privileging of white people, in any instance, is not to be scrutinised.”
- “One should not think that as late as 1948 the engineering of apartheid and  its accompanying racist Afrikaner ideologies was from a secure position. Afrikaner  identity has formed itself around subaltern whiteness that ‘may have shifted over  time’ but has generally ‘remained prey’ in the lengthy struggles with the British in  ‘white-on-white overlordship’»
- “The presence of poor whites had long been a threat, challenge and embar-  rassment to South African formations of white identity. In the 1900s the  issue around poor whites, “the poor white problem” or “poor whiteism, as it  was known, had reached international heights. Published in 1932, what is ar-  guably known as the largest enquiry into South African poor whites is the  Carnegie Commission of New York’s investigation into the Poor White Prob-  lem. It was this “scientific study” into the poor white problem which later  provided the blueprint to apartheid’s segregation policies and institutional  racism. «
- “Claims of reverse-racism in South Africa have been around for as long as there  have been affirmative action initiatives. Moreover, the invention of Black people  wanting revenge and thus targeting white people via crime exists, while simulta-  neously refusing to confront the conditions that lead to crime that affects every sin-  gle person living in South Africa. South Africa is a dangerous country. We all risk  our lives daily in this beautiful land. White manoeuvres sensationalise Black-on-  white or Black-on-Black violence while various types of white-on-Black or white-on-  white violence (including ‘white collar’ violence) are buried somewhere deep in  their psyche. The attempt at deflecting racism by calling Black people in anti-racism  racist is not just incorrect, intellectually and morally, but also ridiculous»
- “as South Africans, after the end of the apartheid system, we never had a con-  versation about what is apartheid, what did it do to us as a people and how  do we more forward? And because we didn’t have this conversation, as  South Africans we do not have an agreed definition on racism. We don’t  have agreement on definition, about how do we engage each other but also  on how do we engage children on what happened in apartheid, who partic-  ipated in what way. Due to this it comes as a shock to hear ugly truths about  colonialism, apartheid and slavery. «