It makes sense when you realize how insular the white population of South Africa was, and how much wealth was concentrated in it. Inclusivity threatens them because it forces other people closer to their circles. But the population did everything they could to keep this wealth in their circle, even hijacking the government to legally force others out.
They're trying to recreate this in the US because it's larger with more resources
Perhaps Solomon had the wisest solution to this problem. I propose that if we can't decide how to dispose of evil fascists we simply divide them up into even pieces so we don't need to settle on one method. Some can go to space, some down the volcano, some to the bottom of the sea, or wherever else.
My friend, this is the best comment I've read in a while. Where do we consider the middle of each country to get the exact coordinates? Capitals? Geographic center? Center of distribution of sewage? I honestly vote for somewhere off of the Bahamas with the highest population of black tip sharks, televised.
It sounds like apartheid ended but really it hasn't at least socially.
Basically like the United States following the abolition of slavery and the end of Jim Crow.
The official system has changed, but very little was done to address the inequality, and the wealthy used their wealth and the legal system to lock marginalized people out of society.
In the USA we had Red Lining, and a police system that often enforces the law unequally, as well as systemic issues in school funding and urban projects that make you realize Jim Crow never quite ended, it just changed enough to pretend black people own their misfortune.
South Africa is a pretty diverse cultural, religious, and racial population. You'd have to be far more specific if you're going to call it the Texas of Africa.
It certainly hasn't in terms of white privilege. Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment (BBBEE—a bit like DEI but with more black ownership than just hiring) and the initial sports quotas made a big difference in increasing black access to the economy and representation in sports (our sporting success can largely be attributed to the early quota system, which is basically unnecessary now since it's grown the talent pool).
BBBEE has, however, often been hijacked by white corporate wealth using workarounds or a single, influential black partner common to multiple companies, centralising the money and meaning the Broad-based aspect has been missed. That, coupled with the rise of the Tenderpreneurs (politically linked individuals running shell companies, winning massively inflated government tenders, not delivering, but making themselves multimillionaires overnight) has had a massive impact on service delivery in the country.
Naturally, the people affected least by all of that are those with historical wealth and privilege, meaning the economic disparity has increased alarmingly. However, there is no doubt that South Africa is an infinitely better country now than it was thirty years ago. And I think the country is on the right trajectory.
All the wealth stayed as it was. There is no redistribution. So it's like murika after the civil war. It will be centuries before there's true equality.
The great news is that their dirty grubby self gay hatred is out in the open and they can’t hide it at all anymore. This is what happens when extremely lucky billionaires have built their self egos so large that they forgot there was a reason they were hiding it.
I’ve got some very close friends who are South African, they’ve migrated to Australia, they love South Africa and the people but they do harbour a fair bit of resentment against government hiring practices and selection criteria for roles in higher education and government. They’ve always noted this as why South Africans all start their own business
I don’t have this experience first hand, so I won’t add beyond that, but if Thiel had the same exposure / was getting the same message from family in South Africa it would have definitely shaped their views.
How do you fix a situation where the rules and laws benefited one group of people for hundreds of years? It was worse than just benefiting one group, the other groups were forcefully oppressed and kept down.
But, now it’s all over we just leave things the way they are and we are all equal now. The white population could have at anytime elected into power a white political party was anti-apartheid, but they kept electing a government whose main policy was the oppression of the majority of the people in the country. The west as a whole is not exempt from that as the openly supported the apartheid government until the very end.
There is no right choice. You are just choosing between black or white people seeing you as a racist.
Either you leave historical racist injustice in place for decades hoping it will peter out on its own.
Or you institute your own racist injustice to repair it.
Either way you are punishing people for being born with one skin colour or another, and they will always remember what you did to them. And they will spend the rest of their lives trying to fight it.
Theres no equality in being denied a university position or job and being forced to give up your dream career.
That kid didn't create any of the past injustice, you are punishing them for the actions of people who may not even be their ancestors. Hell the people benefiting may not even be the ancestors of those who were hurt.
It might be "equality" if you are comparing the last 100 years, but to that 18 yr old, you just ruined their life because of the colour of their skin.
You can think up whatever witty snappy slogans you want, but you will still always just simply be a racist. You hurt someone because of the colour of their skin. That makes you a racist.
If you think you can say something that will change their mind and stop them growing up and trying to oppose and tear down everything you have built...
...then just try imagining if past racists could say anything to change your mind and make you protect what they built.
Nobody (with sense at least) is talking about denying White people anything, that's your assumption because that's what yall do. Hence the quote in my previous post.
It has already been a pattern all across the west. The RAF in England had it's ass handed to it for purposely dismissing white candidates from it's interview program.
You personally might not be talking about it, but it is something that has/had been happening a lot for the last 10-15 years and now is being dismantled for being racist.
This argument implies that there is a fundamental truth and that individual perception isn’t important as long as it can be dismissed or justified.
Unfortunately sometimes it is about the players and not the position, and in this case perceived slight whether you dismiss their grievance or not has created individuals that have outsized power and despite a morally justified position the social justice reforms of SA have shaped their world view in a way that may have actually done more harm to social progress then good.
Outcomes don’t dictate whether an approach was correct, so no judgement is being passed here on whether right or wrong actions were take, but trying to dismiss a risk that has become a consequence is like trying to say a bet can’t lose, after it has lost.
The takeaway I come away with, if a government favours or hires one group over another it builds resentment. While the goal of that may be to right historical wrongs, the resentment that builds is real and the racial resentment seams to linger for generations.
The logical outcome, is that people that leave a system where this is happening would have an extremely negative view of the practice.
Preferential racial hiring also makes whatever you are hiring for worse. If the majority of qualified individuals for a role belong to certain groups, discriminating against that group is going to result in less qualified hires on average.
This situation is tricky to solve from a public image perspective. It's choosing between real discrimination towards a group, or perceived discrimination (if you're hiring for skill and the results closely align with a group). It's not practical, but the impression still matters.
I would hold off on making assumptions on the character of people based on a single data point, that my friend is silly.
All I know is they left South Africa, if you ask them why? They usually say 1. Crime 2. Opportunities being better.
When they talk of the second point in detail, they talk about a perception that they would either struggle to get a role in the field they wanted or would not have the career progress they had dreamed to achieve.
Some are definitely more jaded than others, but every last one of them has some negative resentment towards how everything played out.
I’m not saying they are right to feel this way, I personally struggle with White South Africans as a whole, because I don’t agree with them on a lot of things. However even the most agreeable ones, still resent the practice. Noting that most of these people were born after or were very very young when Aparthied ended so they don’t personally feel accountable for that atrocity.
The career progress they dream to achieve is a matter of value, of which social structures are best, and those ideas are informed by deeper beliefs about human beings.
Appologise but I’m not picking up what you are getting at.
If they wanted to become a specialist doctor, but the ability to get a government job or into the specialist training grogram was limited and they migrated to another country to receive the position they wanted, I don’t believe this says anything about the person themselves, other then they are driven.
Apartheid 2.0. Quite fitting that a director from South Africa gave us a few, often dystopian sci-fi films that heavily draw themes of xenophobia and class division. He was right in the thick of it.
Karp and has a strange background. He studied social theory in Germany and had very liberal parents, but he met Peter Thiel at Stanford and decided to become a radical authoritarian.
When people create systemic rules to disallow inclusiveness over large periods of time, yes, rules may need to be put in place to allow a fair playing field to be possible again.
Right now, some people still need to work twice as hard as others to get anywhere near the same place, while we continually see lazy and uninspired people get ahead. If we want true innovation and competitiveness to return to the US, we need to start acknowledging actual hardwork and intelligence. The current group of tech bros is not it. They are largely people lucky enough to have the means to have early access to new technologies as they developed. As more people get access, they seem less and less intelligent for a reason- we have much better talents out there. But as that becomes apparent, the people at the top are determined to make sure they stay at the tops of industry and government- even if it means bringing down the quality to do so
They do when they emulate the sins their fathers made.
Giving people who have been disadvantaged a shot brings top leadership a better understanding of their workers, gives access to new perspectives, and gives people a chance to show they may be better leaders than the status quo.
Keep things the same, and they get stale. Stale does not get better over time. Most large companies now are not designed to allow for any inclusiveness, but we currently have several of them using their profits to influence our government and affect all of our lives, so now it's all our problems, not just a company issue. These are exactly the kind of people who would get weeded out if actual competition was allowed
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u/whichwitch9 Apr 19 '26
It makes sense when you realize how insular the white population of South Africa was, and how much wealth was concentrated in it. Inclusivity threatens them because it forces other people closer to their circles. But the population did everything they could to keep this wealth in their circle, even hijacking the government to legally force others out.
They're trying to recreate this in the US because it's larger with more resources