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    Blacks Can't Be Racist
    Blacks Can't Be Racist
    Blacks Can't Be Racist
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    Blacks Can't Be Racist

    By Andile Mngxitama

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    About this ebook

    “Blacks can be a nasty lot. We are capable of mass murder. Think of Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, vicious apartheid Bantustan leaders or of toyi-toying comrades with their fiery necklaces. Just last year, here in South Africa, we killed more than sixty black Africans in an anti-black rage others call xenophobia. Think about those blacks who helped whites catch members of their own race into slavery. We blacks often brutally oppress our own. We betray our prophets and kill for the enemy... Black political, economic and academic classes, correctly called the comprador, are murderous, corrupt, consuming, conniving and docile in the face of white aggression. They are adept at hiding its evil nature behind big words such as ‘democracy’, ‘constitution’, ‘good governance’, ‘independence’, ‘rule of law’ and ‘elections’. And if colonial anthropological reports are anything to go by, then blacks are cannibals too – we eat human beings! But racist? Oh hell no!”

    BLACKS CAN’T BE RACIST was first published in July 2009 as the third volume of the monthly radical journal New Frank Talk: Critical Essays on the Black Condition. Since then, it has become a cultural phenomenon – what some have termed ‘the Illmatic of race discourse’ in South Africa – inspiring thinking and movements just the same. This reprint includes a new preface examining the decade that followed the initial publication of the essay, a foreword by Ziyana Lategan, and a critical appraisal by Ndumiso Dladla.

    ANDILE MNGXITAMA is South Africa’s foremost intellectual klipgooier. He has contributed his unique insights and analysis to all major media outlets in print, radio and television for almost two decades. A leader of the intellectual vagabonds – all those who refuse to dull or dilute their thinking for a home in the institutions of power. He is the co-editor of the seminal Biko Lives!, publisher, series editor and major contributor of New Frank Talk, co-author of From A Place of Blackness, and author of the novella Fools of Melville. He is currently a president of Black First Land First, having served and led in Azanian Students’ Movement, the Landless People’s Movement, Blackwash, September National Imbizo, and the Economic Freedom Fighters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMpho Matsitle
    Release dateMar 21, 2020
    ISBN9781990932533
    Blacks Can't Be Racist

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    • 1/5
      I expected a more serious Marxian analysis by Mr. Mngxitama but found an argument based on disappointingly superficial assumptions and a disingeniously narrow understanding of racism and its destructive impact on the individual and on society.

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    Blacks Can't Be Racist - Andile Mngxitama

    Contents

    Blacks Can’t Be Racist: A Text and its World

    Ziyana Lategan

    Blacks Can’t Be Racist Is Ten Years!

    Andile Mngxitama

    An Introduction

    Andile Mngxitama

    Blacks Can’t Be Racist

    Andile Mngxitama

    Interview with the Mail & Guardian

    Andile Mngxitama

    Blacks Could Be Racist: A Note on Historical Power

    Ndumiso Dladla

    Blacks Can’t Be Racist: A Text and its World

    Foreword by Ziyana Lategan

    In April 2011, thirty-three-year-old Andries Tatane was shot dead by the state in a service delivery protest. In post-1994 South Africa, service delivery protests have been the most common form of registering political dissatisfaction with the democratic order because democratic institutions are neither available to nor effective for the demands made by black people. On one level the institutions do not work because they are not intended to work for blacks, but also because of the inarticulability of black demands for dignity. State sanctioned violence, and the threat of violence, is an ever-present feature of black life. For the post-1994 state, violence is the only mechanism of maintaining its precarious performance of power.¹ Some sixteen months after Tatane’s murder, in August 2012, thirty-four black people were killed in protest and at least seventy-eight were wounded by order of the now highest-ranking civil servant in the country, President Cyril Ramaphosa, the chief representative of white capital and an overly on the nose depiction of the trope of ‘black tongues speaking white’.² The Marikana Massacre is an algebraic stationary point of inflection – the point at which everything stopped. For a moment, the fantasy of the rainbow nation was exposed as a lie to anyone still nesting comfortably in the delusion of ‘unity through diversity’. Marikana was our missed encounter with the Real.

    Suddenly all the words in Mandela’s vocabulary reserved for celebration of the miracle of democracy and forgiveness began to wilt, and the dictionary of forbidden words, the thought-crimes of the preceding years acquired a new currency. Even the Marxists had to admit that if the slain of Marikana were white mineworkers, they’d still be alive. Anti-black violence, white privilege, structural racism… the Blackwash language that was once only jumping off the anarchist infoshop walls in Plato’s echo-chamber of a cave, reared its head at least once in every public debate. By the time the students hit the pavement in 2015 calling for decolonized and de-commodified education, the myth of the rainbow nation was commonplace, and the idea that structural racism was the core of South African society, an idea articulated in Blacks Can’t Be Racist, was clear as day. 

    The ideas expressed in Blacks Can’t Be Racist are part of a long intellectual history that concerns itself with black freedom from colonial domination, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy. Its arguments were not new, but in the wake of Mandela’s magic trick of the New South Africa, they were considered divisive, harmful, and impossible to speak about. Blacks Can’t Be Racist was the most accessible persistence of an updated Black Consciousness unwilling to rest in the archive of South African resistance history. But Blacks Can’t Be Racist went from being unintelligible at worst, and controversial at best prior the Marikana Massacre, to being obvious almost overnight. Those public ‘intellectuals’ intent on proving (by logical fact no less) that racism is the mere product of personal prejudice, picked up the mantle of decolonization without recognizing a single strand of inconsistency in their thought. This phenomenon is illustrative not only of the anti-intellectual posture of the South African intellectual space, but also of our collective pragmatism and disrespect for history.

    It was as if the textual life of Blacks Can’t Be Racist was as impossible as the revolution it hoped for in its closing lines. Always too early because the conditions are never quite right, and at the same time too late, constantly trying to keep up with itself. For Rebecca Comay, this untimeliness is crystalized in the French Revolution as a historical event.³ But rather than always being too early, European bourgeois revolutions necessarily lag behind the turmoil in the colonies, precisely because the colonies make Europe possible. Putting Hegel to use on black soil, Fanon’s famous Black Skin, White Masks opens with the recognition of this exact temporal impossibility: the explosion will not happen today, it is either too early… or too late.⁴ Fanon’s explosion is, of course, much grander and infinitely more brutal than the French Revolution. Fanon’s explosion is violent, it is absolute,⁵ and it seeks to end the very foundation of the modern global order: the colour-line.⁶

    Blacks Can’t Be Racist dared to bring the idea of revolution back into the popular political nomenclature, it dared to point to an unaddressed historical injustice that required reckoning with, and still does. Not only in its substantive content, but also in its performance of untimeliness, Blacks Can’t Be Racist provided a softly unsettled youth with a mode to articulate their oppression, the effects of which would only come to be seen years later in forms it could only partially have foretold. Blacks Can’t Be Racist was what Fanon would have called ‘literature of combat’,⁷ from a collective and historical black pen. Being black, its author arrived on the scene already dead, relying solely on a collective assemblage of enunciation,⁸ past and present, to make its argument. It reflected a black national consciousness in a stripped-down language of combat directed at undoing the mechanisms that naturalized the black condition. More than providing the impetus for later events, the publication of Blacks Can’t Be Racist was itself an event, moving many to maintain their fidelity to its message – to repeat its prescriptions and failures, to constantly return to the audacity of the text to speak b(l)ack in its most arrogant and rightfully assertive register. More than many essay form text produced for a popular audience at the time, Blacks Can’t Be Racist was explicitly worldly and actively enmeshed in circumstance.⁹

    Whilst Blacks Can’t Be Racist and the New Frank Talk series newly introduced old challenges to the post-1994 discursive terrain, the past twenty-five years have not seen any substantial waning of white arrogance. The removal of former President Jacob Zuma from office is a clear indication that white discomfort and unease need not last any longer than necessary. If anything, the racist conservative sect of civil society gained a renewed sense of vigour under his reign, enflamed by a perceived threat to their status as sole citizens, lawmakers, owners of South African land. Zuma was no Gaddafi – as Black First Land First (BLF) came suspiciously close to arguing – but he brought to light the fundamental antagonism that popular opposition parties are hell-bent on obscuring. The fundamental objective of Blacks Can’t Be Racist is to clarify the nature of racial antagonism as the first principle of South African society, and of racism as more than a personal attitude of bigotry, but as prejudice plus power. Significantly, the piece explained that individual acts of anti-black racism were effects of the larger structural (what Mngxitama had called ‘institutional’) organization of society. For as long as the structure was maintained, for as long as we deferred the Fanonian explosion to a time that would never – could never – arrive, these individual instances of racial violence would persist to much fanfare and faux surprise.

    In the interview by Ferial Haffajee appended to the original publication of Blacks Can’t Be Racist, we see Haffajee’s incredulity toward Mngxitama’s posture and position. She wonders whether his mode of combat is the product of a deeply psychological fear of recognizing a world that is profoundly more complex than the black and white picture he insists on.¹⁰ All the while, incidents of racial antagonism and anti-black humiliation continue, with a ferocious compulsion to repeat, but always as if they are aberrations to the average innocent well-meaning white psyche. Mngxitama responds, where you see complexity, I see black suffering.¹¹ The impulse to complicate the terrain is a method of postponement, an unreflective will to prolong suffering by rendering it invisible, inconsequential, or secondary. What kind of maladjustment produces the assertion that ‘it’s complicated’ in the face of widespread human suffering? What degree of evil must this text write against? How insurmountable is the difficulty of communicating black pain? Mngxitama recognizes the impossibility of the text as soon as he begins, already in the preface

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