I Don’t Care For Black Rage

I don’t even know why some of you so-called black people are mad at Penny Sparrow and friends. Seriously! 

I don’t agree with what Penny said earlier this week, in fact I don’t care, but I have no sympathy for most of you black people that have opted to cyber manifest your rage over Penny’s utterances. Here’s why:

Okay, before I get to explain my stance, a quick rehash on Penny Sparrow. She is the 68 year-old South African woman who clearly benefitted from all that the brutal legacy of Apartheid stood for. 

She probably has truckloads of Apartheid paraphernalia in her nicely-trimmed oversized farm somewhere there in Scottsburg, KwaZulu-Natal, where she lives. 

Penny made international news headlines this past weekend after she posted on her Facebook that she was incensed and disgusted at the monkeys that are black people for leaving South Africa’s beaches filthy with dirt, some of it created just by their sheer presence on the coast during the December holidays. 

Her ‘friends’ (whom Penny should consider relocating to Orania with) were quick to applaud her for the rightness of the eloquently articulated shared sentiment.

Penny is also a member of South Africa’s official opposition party; the Democratic Alliance (DA) which ironically is led by a black man in Mmusi Maimane. I suppose this is why her cyber rant indicated just as much as a grain of respect for the ‘few educated blacks who try’. Shrug. 

I don’t know how relevant it is to anyone that Mmusi is married to a white woman but I’ll put it in here anyway.

So many people got mad at Penny and friends for their remarks. It seemed to me that most people were offended by two key things; 1) that Penny called black people monkeys 2) that she had the audacity to publicly state this about black people.

Black Penalty

Honestly, none of these two things offend or disturb me. In fact, I prefer overt racists like Penny than closeted ones who will smile and clap for you when they’re in your face and then *Pennylise you behind your back. 

This is the same reason why for instance, I don’t have time for gossipers in the workplace and their need to gossip about people when I can directly address those concerned where I feel the need to.

I also prefer to call out racists and other wrong-doers directly rather than report them to the human rights commission or Jesus or whatever other authority. 

The best redress I often craft for myself is to consciously boycott any experiences that will see me have personal financial transactions with unrepentant violators of other people’s dignity and human rights.

So calling out perpetrators without the necessary corrective back up action is tantamount to gossip in my books. 

And by corrective action I’m not referring only to the legal punishment of racists as some have suggested at the height of this Sparrow debacle but the personal and conscious steps each individual can take to rid society of such bigotry.

Secondly, I’m having difficulty with black people because they Pennylise each other every chance they get – and I see it every day in South Africa. 

Here goes a small-scale illustration (and all of life’s problems start with small-scale incidences): Two years ago I took my son to the local public clinic in Midrand, South Africa where we live.

Service was unusually slow on this day and people started to complain to the staff, reminding them about the healthcare charter and permissible waiting times. 

In reaction, one of the clinic staff, a middle-aged looking black (I hardly use this as a descriptor unless necessary) woman, started preaching to us about how it was the patients’ fault; “Some of you leave your local clinics in Tembisa to come here.  

Some of you have medical aid that you should be using to go to private hospitals but you’re here, crowding this place”, she said, while side-eyeing possible offenders accidentally-on-purpose.

Celebrating White Supremacy

For me it’s always this simple. If you’re comfortable prescribing to others where they should and shouldn’t go for their needs and wants then you should be comfortable when others do the same to you, whether they are black or white or whatever people.

Think about it, if (or should I say when) the attitude of this healthcare worker is multiplied by just one million, one easily ends up with fatal attacks on fellow humans like we have seen twice already in South Africa over the past 10 years – people who were attacked simply because they ‘do not belong here’.  

And obviously the victims of these attacks could only be black Africans because often white supremacy/people are only bowed to by black people, hardly challenged.

White supremacy nowadays, and especially in Swaziland, is often exercised subtly and while the blacks are applauding jubilantly. 

Black people will easily brag about anything white or Non-African – from the ‘white wedding’ to sending their children to Curro Schools (where repeated racial discrimination has been publicly reported), to how former cabinet minister Roy Fanourakis is ‘my white buddy’. Why not just ‘buddy’, buddy?

Drowning blindly in white supremacy will continue to happen because even though black people know their history, they do not honor it. 

Look around you – at this rate, even white Jesus might be unable to save all of the black people of this world. Black man you’re on your own as Steve Biko says.

I say, human beings should always remember that they are human first before a certain race, culture, religion, class etc. 

I will clap from Kilimanjaro and back to kaLanga the day my child becomes the ‘first person to…’ as opposed to ‘first black person…’ because this is what I subscribe to – Humanism – and not white or black supremacy or anything in between.

*Pennylise: the act of penalizing someone for your own internal and unresolved issues bordering on self-hate and self-destruction. The word was coined after one Penny Sparrow of the Sparrowism kind of racism.