South African's Attackin The Wrong Group of People

"Archbishop Desmond Tutu's dream of South Africa as a "Rainbow Nation" of exemplary inclusiveness is being negated. Fourteen years of ANC rule have failed to reverse many of the deep social inequalities inherited from the apartheid era, and the strain caused by mass unemployment, poor sanitation and limited services in many townships has now erupted in a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing. Last November, the South African Institute of Race Relations estimated that 4.2 million people were living on $1 a day or less in 2005, up from 1.9 million in 1996. Even when it has managed to suppress the current upsurge in anti-immigrant violence, the government faces a monumental challenge in transforming the poverty and despair that has fueled the hatred"

United by Hard Times: Workers Organize Across Race Lines

I’m feeling relieved. For a while it seemed like the historic election of our first African American president would give legitimacy to the idea that we live in a “post-racial” America. The idea that race is no longer a part of people’s daily experience is not merely false. It’s potentially dangerous when a majority of people are struggling to understand what’s happening to them economically.
What people are experiencing is exactly what’s supposed to happen to them under capitalism and its current variant, neoliberalism. That economic system is grounded on the idea that society must have winners and losers. It has convinced people that those categories are based on race: that people of color are, in the natural course of things, losers; and that white people, regardless of class, are supposed to win.
When hard times hit, as they have recently, people who are losing their grip on their middle-class status—or those who were already poor and are getting poorer—look for someone to blame. They fall back on the official story: White people’s troubles are caused by people of color; the troubles of people of color who were born in this country are caused by immigrants. It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy that keeps people who are natural allies on a class basis from looking at who’s really causing their trouble: the people who run the capitalist system.
This moment presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to get people with shared economic interests working together—to get them past learned racial divides. As long as poor and working-class white people remain convinced that they win by keeping people of color on the margins, all workers will continue to lose economic ground. The opportunity is to use this economic crash as a way to find common ground among those who are the real losers—regardless of race—in the existing system.