White Privilege - a South African fable

After the evil Apartheid empire fell and a commission of truth and Reconciliation did it's thing to round up the bad guys and seize their ill gotten gains and jettison them into space or whatever they did with them, South Africa became the rainbow nation paradise. The new government, headed by the saintly Nelson Mandela, a benign gentleman in hawaiian shirts, promised that black vengeance was only a myth and that black and white would be as the ebony and ivory song, to international applause. Blacks, Whites, Indians and the progeny of their clandestine mixings were now all living together in a beautiful melting pot of vibrant colorfulness.

Except everyone had to get up and go to work the next day. If you were an investment banker, you still had to crunch the numbers to keep up the magnificent property you had in Houghton, and if you were a cleaner, well the floors weren't mopping themselves.

And soon it became obvious that the melting pot wasn't melting. The cleaners were all black and the investment bankers were all white and they weren't hanging out in the same bars getting to know each other.

So the concerned government invented Black Economic Empowerment, or BEE as it soon became known. This meant, that if you were a hot shot investment banking firm only employing the cream of the crop, you needed a giant injection of espresso in there to keep doing the same kind of business you did before.

And then, a small portion of cleaners suddenly found themselves in nice suits and nice cars with not very much to do, since they weren't allowed to actually touch anything, well, for obvious reasons.

And so began the myth of the White Privilege. The former cleaners, coasting along with fortune and occasional fame to go with it, could report to their closest former peers that white people had indeed been living like kings off the backs of slaves, they did nothing and they grew rich, some unholy magic was afoot.

Further exacerbating fears, nothing seemed to work any longer. Electricity and water regularly switched themselves off, houses were being built but somehow never seemed to be given to those who needed them. Children were going to school but not being educated. The rise in the cost of food was a killer. There was theft and there was violence, the police were too dim-witted to be effective, and hardship and misery were growing. They implored their new government who seemed too busy to listen, and they were soon to find out why. Those politicians had learned the way of the white devil, getting money for nothing and drowning in the luxury they found themselves in, were deaf to the plight of their people.

The melting pot began to boil, enough that officialdom began to notice, and become concerned, for they quite liked their new mansions and plush vehicles and beautiful women. They sacrificed one of their own, a hapless man who had perhaps had never even had the skill to be a floor cleaner before wealth and fame were gifted him. The politicians blamed him, and some Indians who had been seen talking to him, although it was not clear how they managed to communicate with his obvious language and reading difficulty.

But the mob was only temporarily placated and finally, they felt they had no choice but to cry that it was ALL White People's fault. A half-truth perhaps, nevertheless a supreme treachery after the promises they had made, but they did not listen to White people's folklore and didn't know about selling your soul to the real devil.

And the black people's understood nothing except that they had found their true enemy, a supernatural force of malevolent whiteness, while the devil whispered in ears and danced for joy when their thoughts turned to murder.

White people, tempered by a long history of experience with this creature, would warn that the more it feeds the more it needs, but their voices were silenced, and the Indians, also knowledgeable, were silenced too.

And here ends the fable, for it is a story of a time that has not yet come to pass. Who will save the land? Will it be the children of all the colors? Will a mighty king emerge, with a pure heart to defeat the devil? Will gluttony cause the devil to explode before anyone needs to do anything?

That is another chapter for new age.