Canada: Mounties, Mountains and Mounting Racism?

(CNN) — South Africa’s ruling party has denounced a decision by Canada to grant refugee status to a white South African man, calling it “racist.”

South Africa is a strange place.  For years the ruing party had an official policy of racism against the black native inhabitance (under the apartheid system).  This has the state with a very odd and somewhat extreme attitude to racial issues.  Many a white South African still holds to the old ways of white supremacy.  This isn’t exactly surprising as apartheid only ended in 1994, so even relatively young thirty-year-old South Africans will have lived more than half their lives under Apartheid.  The echo effect is counter racism by the South African regimes post Apartheid, which basically seeks to discriminate positively in favor of black South Africans in order to rebalance things.  The result of this official racism is that there are jobs that white people can not get in government and education particularly.

What then must we make of the South African government calling the Canadian government ‘racist’ for giving a white South African who felt discriminated again asylum?  Racism is an easy card for the South African government to play and a strong one politically.  Thus we shouldn’t be surprised to find it being used, although its frankly difficult to see how offering asylum in once specific person could possible be considered racism. Further more the South African government does, as mentioned, practice a policy of officially sanctioned re-balancing racism, so the men’s claim could well be justified.  Furthermore, it is possible that the person in question has specific ground, or issues that compelled the Canadian government into its offer.  These are between the individual and the state so we may never know exactly.

What I think is clear is that the South African governments claim of racism is not only unfounded, but is an insult to those black South Africans who gave up life and liberty for a genuine cause.