The Big Read: The rush to cry 'racism!' exposes the hypocrites

The hypocrisy is staggering. Among these sanctimonious voices are people who probably have different cups and plates for the gardener and domestic, writes Jonathan Jansen

It is a scene that plays out hundreds of times a day across South Africa. A driver in a bakkie offers a lift to someone on the street. The lift-seeker jumps onto the back of the pickup to be dropped off closer to his or her destination. Just another day in Mzansi, you would think, when a man in the Eastern Cape offers a lift to a woman who needs to travel 60km to her doctor's appointment in Cradock. And then all hell breaks loose.

Someone takes a photo which is posted online. Oh no. The man is white and the woman black. The driver of course sits in front while the woman sits on the open back of the bakkie. The woman is pregnant and occupies the open sheep's cage that fills the back of the bakkie - there is no other place to sit. Titillating its audience, the media pounces with the suggestion of racism. Shortly thereafter the woman is interviewed and makes it clear that it was her choice to sit at the back because of the intolerable heat inside the vehicle.

• 'No one sits in the front seat with umlungu' - caged woman, family speakThe family of the pregnant Linda Steenkamp, who made headlines last week when a picture of her inside a cage on the back of a farmer’s bakkie caused a social media storm, says they have been hurt by what happened and just want the matter to pass. 

Too late, South Africans were salivating once again as we put our teeth into yet another public incident of racism - like the time late last year when a black waiter lost his job for "race profiling" when he wrote "two blacks" on the invoice to identify patrons at the busy restaurant where he served.

I put out the case of the bakkie driver on my Facebook page and invited discussion about whether this was, in fact, a case of racism. The responses were as crude as they were predictable. Black and liberal voices piled into the driver who was so obviously racist. He should have insisted the woman sit in front - regardless of her own wishes (no contradiction here). He should have found a pillow and made her comfortable in front. He should not have offered her a lift if she did not want to sit in front (no, really). Perhaps he should also have bought a hand-held fan?

• South Africa must take heed: ignoring inequality and race got Trump electedWe don’t know what a Donald Trump presidency will mean for South Africa. But what South Africans should know is that America has just elected its most dangerous president ever because it has not dealt with two problems the country has also ducked: inequality and race. 

The hypocrisy is staggering. Among these sanctimonious voices are people who probably have different cups and plates for the gardener and domestic. Who do not take their workers home at night to the front of the township shack. Whose children call elderly black people by their first names. And who do not cover the health insurance costs of pregnant workers. But here they all are engaged in publicly shaming a guy who probably thought he was doing something worthwhile.

More disturbing are the assumptions about who the driver is. To do all the good things suggested - like finding cushions for the pregnant woman - assumes a degree of enlightenment among rural bakkie drivers that can only come from exposure to racially just white parents, teachers and dominees who would have ingrained such profound values in white people from the day they were born.

On what planet, pray tell, are the critics of the driver living? We cannot project onto the bakkie driver our progressive ideals for how to transport a pregnant woman - especially when our own lives hardly reflect such generous care.

• Broke KZN guest house owner to sue government, media for labelling him a racistControversial KwaZulu-Natal guesthouse owner Andre Slade‚ who is facing hate speech charges over his views that whites are superior to blacks‚ plans to sue the government and media for branding him a racist. 

The problem here is what my American friends call optics. It just looks bad. I have seen white women and men on the back of a bakkie; when you live in the Free State, you see that a lot. So the argument that he would not put his white mother on the back of a bakkie is simply nonsense - visit the rural areas. But this is South Africa where our history stalks us at every turn.

So with this history of racial inequality bearing down on us, and still unresolved in school and society, where do we put all our anger? On artwork in universities, on a horse memorial in Uitenhage, and on a bakkie driver who made the tragic error of offering a ride to a pregnant woman. We turn on a single white driver because the more obvious question overwhelms us - why is there not safe and affordable public transport for the pregnant woman in the first place?

Giving the driver cyber-slaps in the social media might offer gratification for some but resolves nothing for the future. Changing the ways we learn respectful behaviour - such as towards black women in this case - is the real challenge. But we cannot do that when most schools fail in the duty of academic learning (subject competence), and when all schools struggle with the duty of social learning (race relations).