Antjie Krog and Rian Malan reportedly had a very colourful exchange at the Franschhoek literary festival about whiteness in democratic South Africa.

Their respective takes on the phenomenology of whiteness differ sharply. In the one corner there is Malan, who articulates a lived reality of a pale citizen who feels that his entitlement to speak has been obliterated by virtue of his pale skin. His opponent, Krog, speaks to a white reality that is one of continued privilege, thereby challenging the assumption of lost power inherent in the moaning and groaning of the Malan-types.

Yet, upon reflection, these two narratives are equally tragic and unhealthy. Whiteness has become trapped between victimhood and self-flagellation. This stops white South Africans from fully integrating into democratic South Africa in a way that retains their agency fully, sans Krog, but at the same time acknowledges their continued privilege, sans Malan. We need a white consciousness that transcends the embarrassing Krog-like yearning to be black - as if becoming the bantu that you had formerly oppressed is the ultimate mark of atonement. On the other hand, the Malan-like moaning festival needs to be exposed as less an expression of a profound truth about loss of citizenship than - to the shock and horror of too many whites, still - the democratisation of public space.

Putting some meat to the bones of his various contentions, Malan cites an example or two, including his own attempt at making a contribution to government debate on issues of education policy failure, on assignment for the Daily Sun, which has met with silence. The conclusion he draws is that bona fide attempts by white commentators to contribute towards important national conversations fall on deaf black ears.

Another example is the report about electoral reform, authored by the brilliant politician and political analyst, the late Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, which has been shelved for almost a decade. Again, a white person's attempt at contributing to democracy is seemingly met with ominous silence.

One should, of course, assess the general point these examples are meant to support even if one deems them unconvincing. But in this case the examples betray the crux of the problem with the Malan narrative. First, it is not just white commentators who are often not heard; black ones are ignored too. This has nothing to do with Malan's whiteness, but everything to do with dishonest state machinery that tries to evade tough criticism from an active citizenry.

It is not clear why Malan insists on interpreting this experience as uniquely revealing something about the place of whites in the new South Africa. Should the example not rather be read as revealing an equally sad but nevertheless different reality, that of a government and state which still need to learn the meaning of responsive government? Why else do organisations like Equal Education, which are black-led outfits based in townships, also not get through to government?

Second, the Slabbert report has been shelved purely because of political calculations about the ANC's interest in agreeing to replace the party-list, proportional representation system with some mixture of proportional representation and a constituency-based model. Even if that report was written by a black ANC sympathiser, it would still not have seen the light of day. Race is the wrong prism through which to see why Slabbert's report gathered dust.

The big question is not so much whether these examples succeed in proving Malan's phenomenological account of whiteness, but rather whether that account is compelling in any way. It seems to me that Malan's view of the place of whites in post-Mandela South Africa is not convincing. In particular - and hence the reason I unpicked the examples he gives us - much of the first-person narrative of whites who feel excluded from mainstream national dialogue is a result of how they construct society. In a sense, exclusion is in Malan's head. Hence the misplaced racial analysis of why his views on education were ignored. This paranoia becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at the point where he, and others of a similar bent, then imagine that they may as well withdraw from the public space. And, in a fit of circularity, they showcase their retreat as evidence of exclusion. The genesis of such retreat is not black agency marginalising white voices, but white voices not knowing how to deal with no longer having exclusive rights to speak.

This is not to deny dangerous undercurrents among the intolerant within the political arena. It is shamefully true, for example, that when the ANC Youth League responds to deputy transport minister Jeremy Cronin not by engaging his brilliant polemic on nationalisation but by dismissing him as a white racist, they are affirming Malan's fears. But Malan exaggerates these pockets of intolerance.

Equally important, Malan overlooks the reality that critical black voices are also subjected to this intolerance, such as Native Clubs which exclude natives who are not sufficiently in love with the government. This is not to say that these trends should not be condemned, but such trends speak more to state power gone mad, in a colour-blind manner, than to state power gone mad solely in relation to white critics.

Does this mean that Krog is onto something when she reprimands fellow whites for not being aware of their continued privilege? After all, as Krog points out, the mere fact of being at a literary festival, wining and dining while millions of mostly black people are starving, or reflecting on those people without ever working with them or engaging them directly, smacks of a lack of critical self-awareness of how (white) privilege continues to reproduce itself long after the loss of political power.

Krog makes a profoundly important observation. And, in a sense, my own deep discomfort with the tone with which she makes these observations, including in her book Begging to be Black, is less a challenge to the truth of her claim than it is an unease with what I fear might be lurking beneath the self-flagellating moralism. One gets the sense that whites should be "oh so grateful that the darkies have not driven us into the ocean"!

The danger with this perverse sense of gratitude is that it dehumanises us all. It dehumanises whites by impoverishing their agency with the moral injunction that they should think thrice before speaking up because it is "their turn to speak". It also dehumanises blacks by inadvertently imagining that "they" are not capable of handling robust intergroup dialogue as a result of a spontaneous post-traumatic crisis that they might suffer on hearing the former baas getting tough with them, again. Actually, blacks are perfectly capable of hearing out an angry Malan and engaging him. Krog need not protect blacks from Malan.

The good news, in the end, is that white consciousness can emerge from all of this in healthy shape by locating itself between the Krog-Malan dichotomy. It can take the good from each of these thinkers and discard the unhealthy bits. From Krog, whites can learn the importance of acknowledging and understanding how white privilege continues to reproduce itself. But they must reject her well-meaning but wrong-headed motif of encouraging a reduced role for white agency in a deliberative democracy. From Malan, whites can learn the importance of asserting an unqualified entitlement to speak. But they must reject his exaggerated sense of a loss of power and privilege.

White consciousness, like its more famous counterpart, black consciousness, is urgently needed in contemporary SA. It is critical that we keep this truth alive.

• McKaiser is an associate at the Centre for the Study of Democracy. He also hosts a weekly show on Talk Radio 702