Whilst South Africa (and, let’s face it, the rest of the world) still battles inequality and major racial tensions, we are often inundated with letters, articles, posts, comments and the like regarding the black vs. white debate in our country.

Often, they can raise the temperature of the reader, resulting in harsh comments and back and forth excuses and blaming.

Finally, Vershani Pillay has graced us with a fair piece of writing in the Mail & Guardian.

To quote her, she starts her article –

Apparently some white South Africans still think the rest of us should get over apartheid and, in their phrase, “move on”. I know what you’re thinking: another column about race, kill me now. Guess what? I’m pretty tired of talking about race too but I’m even more tired of people pretending that certain facts don’t exist.

Here are the facts, plain and simple. Some are a bit generalised, but some also ring slightly too close to home.

1. Generational wealth
Here’s how this works: most white South Africans’ parents or grandparents were able to buy and own property and businesses or shares in business. They were able to pay off their properties or expand their businesses thanks to preferential treatment and employment.

They were then able to leave the proceeds of this wealth to their children, our contemporaries, as either an inheritance or a financial jump-start in life.

Most black South Africans have no such jump-start. They stand and fall on their own efforts alone and there is very little safety net if they don’t make it. Family wealth is already thinly spread to cover those who have nothing.

When my black friends say they’re broke, it means family debt, circling loan sharks and the horror of truly going under. When my white friends say they’re broke it usually means they may have to dip into their savings or swallow their pride and ask their parents for help.

I won’t be getting any inheritance, a policy that pays out a nice lump sum at some point in my life or a paid-off flat with little or no rent. These are the reserve of those who have had generations to build this kind of wealth and pass it on.

2. Social capital 
When I was growing up I used to watch the Joshua Doore adverts on TV and think: well, at least I have an uncle in the furniture business, if nothing else.

Most white South Africans have so many resources they can draw on, that are not strictly financial. They have educated family friends and extended family in high-level positions across various industries. They can get amazing advice, mentorship and a hand-me-up when needed.

Social capital is difficult to define or clearly appreciate but it’s pervasive.

It’s the spare laptop your parents let you use, the nice clothes you have that make an impression at a job interview, not to mention the nice manners and accent you learned along the way.

It’s the fact that you can reference the right music or literary joke that your superior education afforded you, earning you an in with the boss. It’s a family culture of success and an environment that is conducive towards it.

And it’s not something you earned.

3. Early childhood development 
There’s a reason it’s so newsworthy when a black child from a poor background makes a huge success of themselves. The biggest odds they’ve had to overcome are largely invisible. Forget the physical disadvantages of living in a township or rural area.

Most white South Africans had parents educated enough to know to give you healthy food, develop your motor skills as a toddler, and help you read so that by age five you were already leagues ahead of your black peers from the township, an edge that would give you exponential returns as your education developed.

Ask any early childhood development expert: the advantages you were given before the age of five, before you had to do one iota of work, would have set the course of your life very favourably. So don’t give some young black person crap about not expecting hand-outs and working “like you did” for everything you have. You have no idea what you have.

You can read the rest of her article HERE, in the M&G