Are all racist scum equal?

“A R10 000 reward has been offered to anyone who identifies the racist scum who marred Saturday’s Springbok victory at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park.”

It was an opening paragraph designed to attract attention and it certainly caught mine. I was appalled by the boorishness of the drunken yobs who picked on Ziningi Shibambo and told her: ‘You bloody k*****s, you took over what was the only exclusively white sport in South Africa.’”

But something about this story bothered me. Why the use of the words “racist scum” in what was supposed to be a report on the incident? Surely judgment should be reserved for the opinion pages?

Of course, it’s unlikely that anyone will call The Times out on using this kind of rabble-rousing tabloid language. Who would seriously defend “racist scum” (an expression which, incidentally, is only ever associated with one particular race group)?

Let’s face it; it’s easy to hate those dooses at the rugby. They’re the spiritual heirs — and quite possibly the direct descendents — of the 1960’s rugby fans once described by Hans Pienaar. Writing for Denis Beckett’s now defunct Sidelines magazine, he described how he watched a black woman being pelted by naartjies as she walked past the hostile crowd and managed to maintain her dignity. These people are troglodytes, stupid bullies worthy of nothing but contempt — but back then, of course, they were contemptible bullies with political power and now they are contemptible bullies who feel under siege by a combination of crime, cultural marginalisation and black nationalist politics.

That their behaviour was repulsive is without question. What I am interested in exploring further is why a mainstream publication should deem it appropriate to use such inflammatory language. What is it about racist incidents — incidents where, moreover, the assailants are almost uniformly white, the victims non-white — that gives licence to reporters and editors to abandon the rules of good journalism?

Is it because it sells more newspapers? Is it because white-on-black racism is something that can unite a broad cross-section of The Times readership in condemnation, a return to the comforting ideological certainties of the past?

Black racism towards whites is seldom reported, and even then, it tends to be constructed as criminal rather than racial. To report black racism as such in the mainstream English-speaking press appears to be an unspoken heresy. The Media Monitoring Project has found that when a white person is racist towards a black person, the incident is far more likely to be reported than if the reverse is the case. Similarly, if a crime is committed by a white person, the race of the perpetrator is highlighted, but, again, not when the perpetrator is black; race is somehow relevant to white criminals but not to black ones. This is in part because crimes committed by whites are considered to be relatively unusual (early this year, for example, the Rosebank Killarney Gazette reported with undisguised astonishment that a Parkhurst resident was robbed by two white men).

The Times fell neatly in line with the MMP’s previous reports on the subject. The paper clearly felt that denouncing the “racist scum” at the rugby would earn it some kind of Noddy badge from the reading public. How easy to grandstand about something that, stacked up against South Africa’s more pressingly overwhelming problems — venal politicians, feral criminals, feckless public servants and deadly viruses — actually doesn’t matter that much any more.

That’s the thing: those stupid drunk rugby fans don’t matter any more.

That’s what they couldn’t handle and that’s why they picked on Ziningi Shibambo.