Valencia.Maseko 🪬🪬

Why I Reject “Xenophobia” as the Master Explanation I reject the automatic description of this movement as xenophobia because I do not accept that hatred of Africans is its principal cause. Black South Africans do not generally encounter African migrants as an abstract racial or cultural category. They encounter them materially, inside overcrowded townships and an economy defined by unemployment, landlessness, low wages, failing services and competition over extremely scarce opportunities. The conflict is therefore not adequately explained by fear or hatred of foreigners. It is produced through competition over work, trading space, housing, customers, public services and economic survival. Research that uses the language of xenophobia frequently acknowledges that conflict is driven by competition over jobs, housing, healthcare and other resources. The economic foundation is therefore admitted, even while the moral label is elevated above it. My argument is not that no person has ever expressed hatred towards migrants. Nor am I saying that no act committed during this mobilisation can be motivated by nationality. I am saying that xenophobia is analytically inadequate as the name for the movement itself. The term takes a material struggle and converts it into a psychological defect. It changes the question from: Why are historically dispossessed South Africans fighting over shrinking economic space? to: What is wrong with Black South Africans that they dislike foreigners? That transformation is ideological. It relocates responsibility from economic structures, immigration policy and government failure into the supposedly diseased minds of the poor. Xenophobia as a disciplinary construct In the South African context, “xenophobia” has become more than a description. It has become a disciplinary category. It is repeatedly used by sections of the political elite, the professional commentariat and the NGO sector to instruct the poorest South Africans about which grievances they may legitimately express. The migrant may speak about hunger, displacement and economic necessity. The South African poor must remain silent about hunger, displacement and economic necessity, because speaking may expose them to the accusation of xenophobia. The migrant’s search for opportunity is humanised. The South African’s defence of opportunity is criminalised. The migrant is understood structurally—as a person shaped by economic conditions. The South African is judged morally—as a person corrupted by prejudice. This is an unequal distribution of compassion and political agency. I therefore regard the indiscriminate use of “xenophobia” as part of the ideological machinery through which the Black majority is disciplined. The term can be valid when it describes a specific act: an assault motivated by nationality, the targeting of a documented person because of an accent, or collective punishment imposed upon people simply because they are foreign. But it becomes deceptive when it is used to erase distinctions between violence and protest, between nationality and legal status, between lawful deportation and arbitrary expulsion, and between hatred of Africans and opposition to uncontrolled economic migration. Once these distinctions disappear, the label no longer clarifies reality. It governs which parts of reality may be spoken about. liberation begin with sovereign, organised peoples rather than with the permanent circulation of dispossessed populations across a continent still governed by neocolonial power. This is a rewritten for social media consumption- from my paper: Beyond Xenophobia: The Dialectics of Class, Borders and Black Survival

There is a small but extremely industrious class of South African progressive intellectuals whose primary occupation appears to be diagnosing the political illnesses of people they have never met. Let a group of Black citizens gather outside a government building and demand land, jobs, functioning borders or economic sovereignty, and somewhere an academic’s laptop immediately begins to glow. Within minutes, the nation is warned of a dangerous outbreak of nativism. If the crowd grows, it develops into populism. If somebody sings, it becomes ethno-nationalism. Should an elderly woman wave a stick, we have entered the early stages of authoritarian majoritarianism. By sunset, a webinar has been convened. The title will be something like: “From Democratic Discontent to Subaltern Chauvinism: Interrogating the Proto-Fascist Grammar of Post-Liberation Majoritarian Affect.” Nobody knows what this means, including the panellists, but everyone agrees that it is deeply concerning. facebook.com/share/v/1CkqdDf… Read full piece heretomorrow!

‼️WATCH VIDEO. Trigger Warning! Extreme racism & violence! In July 2021, over 30 Black African South Africans were publicly murdered in Phoenix. The country witnessed it, yet no comparable national industry arose to pathologise Indian South Africans collectively or subject them to endless moral correction.