Xolela Mangcu - all human beings are not capable of racism

Mhambi really likes Xolela Mangca, South Africa's celebrity intellectual-cum-assassin. His acerbic assault on and sharp analysis of Thabo Mbeki was entirely warranted and long overdue.


Xolela Mangcu
Originally uploaded by BOOKphotoSA.


But I find his recent hairsplitting statement about the current violence very odd. He said in the article Calling a spade a pick digs a big hole.

"...which tends to be the way many white people treat racism. It is simply the view that all human beings are capable of racism. This then makes it easy to dismiss the black experience of racism by simply saying “you were not the only ones affected”. What I would counsel Wolpe is that we need to respect the integrity of all of our historical experiences.

Racism was a specific historical experience invented by white people to subjugate black people. The Holocaust was not racism, it was the Holocaust; ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia was not racism, it was ethnic cleansing; genocide in Rwanda was not racism, it was genocide; tribalism in Kenya was not racism, it was tribalism; xenophobia in Alex is not racism, it is xenophobia."

OK then Xolela. Can we have a term then for discrimination against Palestinians by Israel, what Afrikaners suffered from the British, a name for the massacres of Matabele's in Zimbabwe. The discrimination against Tibetans by the Chinese.

To say that a view that all human beings are capable of racism is wrong is very odd. Unless you want to use it to justify something, something horrible.

I noted that on the UK' Guardian's Cif blog site today somebody called Horrorshow commented in relation to our violence:

I find it interesting that mainstream news organisation in Britain often describe "native" white attacks on white immigrants as "racist", example.

Yet they have NOT used this terminology in reporting the current violence in South Africa, instead calling it "anti-immigrant" or "xenophobic".

Since this is treating what is essentially the same situation differently on the basis of skin colour this double standard of the BBC and others would indeed meet the definition of racism itself. So what does it say about how the British media establishment view the concept of racism and do not apply it equally irrespective of skin colour?


What do you make of that Xolela? Seems the media agrees with you. The same media that ignored these racist oops... sorry xenophobic attacks for months.

It's true to an extent however, I myself have argued that not all examples of racism are the same.

But let's not split hairs when people are dying.

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