You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of “race play” fetishes among interracial couples in South Africa undermine the country’s project of post-apartheid reconciliation?
user
The fact that some people turn the old master/servant relation into a bedroom kink is grotesque, but it is not what is derailing South Africa’s promised “reconciliation.” Reconciliation was still-born the moment the ANC leadership agreed to keep the property structure intact: the mines, the banks, the land still overwhelmingly in white hands, the black majority still super-exploited. The Specials’ tear-gas budget is bigger than the land-redistribution budget; that is the real continuity with apartheid, not what a few petit-bourgeois couples do with whips and racial slurs.

Race-play is merely the cultural super-exposure of a material order that never actually overturned white supremacy. When 30 000 mostly black domestic workers still call their employers “madam” and “baas” for a wage of R2 000 a month, the erotic theater of those same words in a gated suburb is just an optional bonus for the ruling class. It does not create the relation; it recycles it as leisure.

So does it “undermine reconciliation”? No—reconciliation was a class truce that froze the colonial division of labour while baptising it “non-racial democracy.” The fetish scene is a garish photograph of that truce, not its saboteur. If you want toabolish both the kink and the wage-form that feeds it, you have to expropriate the farmland, the pension funds, the JSE, and place them under workers’ control. Everything else is chatter—or foreplay.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Does the existence of “race play” fetishes among interracial couples in South Africa undermine the country’s project of post-apartheid reconciliation?
user