The Study of Racialism

anonymouse · Wizard Joined: 09 Oct 2007 {Posts: 661 }

A Stir Over a Faraway View of Black and White
By BARRY BEARAK
Published: September 9, 2009

JOHANNESBURG — These days, South Africa’s most talked-about citizen is a man who would prefer to be a citizen somewhere else, a 31-year-old former sprinkler system salesman named Brandon Huntley.

However adept Mr. Huntley may have been at selling sprinklers, it is generally agreed here that he deftly sold a bill of goods to the Canadian immigration board that granted him refugee status on Aug. 27.

In seeking asylum, Mr. Huntley said he had been robbed seven times in his homeland — incurring stab wounds to his side, stomach, hands and right eye — while being derided by black assailants as a “white dog” and a “settler.”

South Africa has a dreadful crime problem, and its thieves seem especially prone to cruelty, so this part of the story appeared plausible enough. But Mr. Huntley attributed the robberies to more than serial misfortune. He called them part of the continuing persecution of whites by blacks, a phenomenon, he alleged, the South African government treated with indifference.

An immigration board member, William Davis, evidently believed this premise of black-on-white racial oppression. In his ruling, he wrote empathetically that if Mr. Huntley was sent back to South Africa, he “would stand out like a ‘sore thumb,’ due to his color, in any part of the country.”

To most South Africans, white and black, this was preposterous. With 4.5 million whites living in this country, Mr. Huntley surely would require something far more rare than a pale complexion to qualify as a sore thumb, especially in Mowbray, the rather quaint place from which he hailed. It is a Cape Town suburb with a very sizable white population.

Many here considered the decision itself to be racist. The governing African National Congress issued a statement insisting just that. A spokesman for the Home Affairs Ministry said the government was “disgusted” by the ruling, and, for a time, all of Canada — from Whitehorse to Halifax — was being blamed here for the actions of an independent immigration board, which by law operates at arm’s length from the decision makers in Ottawa. Canadians were portrayed by cartoonists as imbecilic Mounties and lumberjacks.

A full diplomatic brawl between the countries seemed to be averted when the Canadian government said it would challenge the board’s decision in Federal Court. In a statement that could be taken as a contrite apology, Ottawa praised South Africa for “promoting a tolerant, multiracial society.”

But a question lingered among South Africans: How was such a ruling made in the first place?

Certainly the answer involved Mr. Davis of the immigration board, Mr. Huntley himself and Mr. Huntley’s lawyer in Canada, a South African expatriate named Russell Kaplan.

Because refugee matters are confidential, Mr. Davis said he was obliged to keep quiet. Mr. Huntley also refused to comment, though at one point he told The Ottawa Sun: “I can’t go back now. I’m just hoping nothing goes wrong with all that.” He was concerned about the Canadian government’s challenge of the board’s decision. That process may take months to resolve, but if he loses, Mr. Huntley could eventually be deported.

Mr. Kaplan, feeling less constrained about confidentiality, handed reporters several pages of Mr. Davis’s ruling. That, along with some gumshoe work by South African reporters covering the story, filled in many of the gaps in the Huntley story.

The unemployed salesman, a brawny rugby player and martial arts enthusiast, had moved to Canada in 2004, work permit in hand and a job awaiting him with a carnival. When the permit expired, according to the ruling, Mr. Huntley tried to stay in the country “by attempting to join the armed forces and by marrying a Canadian citizen.”

The refugee claim was a final resort, it appears, and the supporting evidence he provided was a gruesome and one-sided portrait of South African life: rapes, murders and victims tortured with boiling water and red-hot irons. Corruption was said to be epidemic. In fact, Mr. Huntley said he distrusted the police so much that he never reported even one of the seven robberies.

Affirmative action policies had stripped qualified white people of jobs, Mr. Huntley furthermore claimed. “White poverty” was a “new phenomenon.” Whites were fleeing the nation, he said. South Africa was on “the brink of civil war.”

But with Mr. Huntley unavailable for debate, the conversation was left to other South Africans, who have largely set aside the customary griping among themselves about crime and racism to better focus on the inflated complaints made by Mr. Huntley. Was there a grain of truth in what he said?

Well, perhaps there was, many here agreed. But a grain is not the same as a heap.

The South African Institute of Race Relations, a research group, took notice of the allegations and issued a statement. Yes, it said, South Africa is “a very violent society,” but there is no general pattern of racial attacks against whites. Rather, blacks are most often the victims of violent crime.

As far as economics, the statement added, the unemployment rate for blacks is five times higher than that for whites — and on average white households earn five times the incomes of black households.

Other responses to the Huntley case tended more toward satire. Hayibo.com, a South African Web site that contrives news stories in the same vein as The Onion, reported that Canadian authorities had been warned to expect a deluge of “young, unemployable white South Africans” after an immigration panel “made up of white folk who had never been to Africa” granted refugee status to Mr. Huntley.

“There won’t be enough pubs and restaurants in Vancouver and Toronto to employ them all,” Hayibo reported an unnamed Home Office source had said.

caribj · Suspended Joined: 14 Mar 2007 {Posts: 612 }

If the sole criteria for refugee status is being attacked by criminals and having the police display no interest in resolving the problem almost every South African, regardless of race qualifies. Most certainly urban poor blacks are way more victimized by crime than any other group. And maybe by the police as well.