Researcher Kelly Rosenthal writing in the Mail & Guardian about witnessing the beat-down of a poor black homeless man by black security guards in a shopping mall in Cape Town while shoppers (both black and white) look on approvingly:
This is the true toxic inheritance of apartheid, the final trick played on us. Yes, we dismantled an elaborate legal apparatus of segregation and repression. Yes, we made the transition from repressive police state to democracy without civil war. Yes, we conducted a mass ritual to deal with decades of state-sponsored violence. Yes. We did all that. But we did not expunge from ourselves the terrible talent of seeing members of our own community as radically other, signified by some arbitrary feature. It used to be race. Now black people, too, can stand by and laugh when someone is beaten. That’s democracy. These days the more dangerous signifier is class. To be poor is to be inhuman. To be poor is to be a different kind of citizen. And, of course, race is never far from class in this country.
