Why are some White South Africans caught up in a perpetual state of victimhood despite the statistics showing how good they have it compared to other races in South Africa? Afrikaner rights organisation AfriForum has long spread the dangerous myth of white genocide, recently resulting in US President Donald Trump threatening South Africa. The CEO of the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation, Janet Jobson, offered a compelling take on this issue in a Twitter thread on Wednesday. Read it below.

I have been interested for a long time in how economically/socially privileged groups tend to assume a state of ‘victimhood’. The situation with white South Africans is particularly striking.

I remember at school in 2000 (just six years into democracy!), fear amongst White girls that they ‘would not be accepted to university’ or ‘would not get jobs or opportunities’ specifically because they were White. It’s a narrative that has continued ever since 1994.

But how is it sustained against all of the evidence and statistics that show an immense opportunity, wealth, and life outcomes gap between Black and White South Africans? These narratives have no basis in reality.

Just thinking about unemployment, the unemployment rate for Black South Africans is around 37%; for White people, just 8%. There’s a similar gap in access to quality education, access to tertiary education, etc.

I was once told that Black and White South Africans understood forgiveness and reconciliation differently. For White people, it was a complete washing away of their brutality and sins. For Black people, it was extending an opportunity for White people to come to the table and make amends.

I have great sadness that I cannot name a White counterpart to Tutu and Mandela, who chose to actively lead White people into the new South Africa.

There were many incredible White activists in the struggle; but few (any?) public figures who took on a role dedicated to specifically bringing White people to the table to make amends, and to fully enter into our democratic future.

There are many incredible White activists who work for equality and justice for oppressed Black people today, too. But few (myself included) in White communities who target their work on shifting mindsets, discourse, and sense of connectedness to the project of true democracy.

This obscene mobilisation of faux White victimhood shows just how much work we have to do as White people to bring us all into a beautiful, diverse, just, and engaged South Africa. A place where we are all each other’s keepers, not subject to narrow-minded chauvinism.

Janet Jobson was a Mandela-Rhodes Scholar at Rhodes University, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and has twice been named on the Mail & Guardian’s list of top 200 young South Africans. As per her bio on the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation website, Jobson embraces the role of CEO as a profound opportunity to advance justice, reconciliation, and repair both in South Africa and globally.