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| Gareth Cliff |
Responses to Cliff's "Letter to the government" on his website have exposed that most South Africans cannot decode white supremacists' texts and actions.
Cliff, the Radio 5 DJ, has written an anti-black manifesto which ironically is celebrated as a statement for clean government.
He has achieved what the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging and other right-wing racists groups have failed achieve -- normalising white supremacy.
He dresses it up as humanist concerns for good governance and service delivery. Cliff is the new paternalistic white liberal Biko so despised.
Unconscious racist
What makes Cliff so effective is that he is not a conscious racist. A basic mistake is the misreading of white supremacy as the preserve of neo-Nazi lunatic elements and not part of the whole reality that naturalises white privilege at the expense of blacks.
This is written into our history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. White supremacy is taken as a given and the unearned privileges it bestows on whites are never seen or questioned.
Cliff's genius as an effective agent of racism is in his usage of "the truth".
When Manto Tshabalala-Msimang passed on, Cliff used the "truth" of the ANC's murderous HIV/Aids denialism to launch a brutal, racist attack on her. He wrote: "Manto is dead. Good. A selfish and wicked bungler of the lowest order. Rotten attitude and rancid livers -- all three of them …"
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