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Comment by tempytampy | Hacker News Reader

Good summary, thanks for adding it. One does feel obliged to mention one's "race", as it seems like it's the first thing that someone will assume (wrongly or not) in any conversation in SA. And saying that one shouldn't mention some amount of background really is along the lines of "all lives matter".

So, anyway, agreed with your arguments and thanks for the additional ones I didn't know about. It's important for all South Africans to understand the difference between background and your own future. Many other countries do have this kind of unity, but at historical price of a lot of wars. In SA we essentially avoided war at the cost of multiple identities, and this is something we should draw on for the better.

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South Africa is unique in the sense that there is a strong problem of racism and violence by black people against white people. This is something very hard to understand and accept in the current political climate of the USA, but what it really shows is that all people are basically the same and racism has no color.

From what I heard, in SA there is also black-on-black racism towards immigration from poorer African countries.

A super-interesting book this is Jonny Steinberg "A Man of Good Hope". The man in question is a Somali who, when he's being interviewed, does various jobs in the poorer parts of South Africa. And has interesting perspectives on things, and how they look "from below" as it were, as opposed to the more common outsider's impressions from people visiting from richer countries.

Actually, crime disproportionately affects the poor in South Africa and the poor are disproportionately black.

The “real” crime rate for middle and upper classes is far lower than reported numbers suggest.

This is not a constructive line of argument.

Why? The current mainstream narrative bothers me in several ways. First, you can often hear that racism against white people is not racism. Even the term "reverse-racism" was invented for that purpose! Second, Americans have a unique history and relationship between black and white populations, and they try to project the same relationship on other nations (there was a famous article by a black Brit who essentionally said, please don't involve black people in other countries into this).

I would hope HN is one of the few places where we can talk about sensitive issues like these in a civilized way, without microaggressions and trying to look at it objectively. I don't mind downvotes although I prefer rational arguments.

It depends on whether you understand racism as a systemic phenomenon that disenfranchises people, or as one group of people actively disliking another.

Your statement rests on the latter understanding, but that's inadequate for South Africa. There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling. Even unintentional prejudice now from white people ends up affecting black people in South Africa far worse than hatred that just stops at words.

The word racism can mean both. It only demonstrates that "racism" as a word, and a tool for communication, is inadequate for nuance.

> There has not been centuries of injustice meted out to white people in addition to name calling

Does that mean there was no injustice during medieval times, or before?

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