Thread by @joshbudlender

So obvious that it feels absurd to even engage with this, but some statistics re the extreme economic position of white South Africans, in one of the most unequal countries in the world:

[Note to non-South Africans: I refer to typical SA racial classifications here: black African, coloured, Indian/Asian, white. "Coloured" does *not* have same meaning as the outdated & offensive American term. It is a complex & contested 🇿🇦 identity category; you can Google it!]

Firstly, yes it is about apartheid. One way to see this: racial classification was (is) messy business. Many were on edge of being classified one way or another. Impact on men of being classified white rather than coloured? Huge income increase which explains >90% of observed gap

What do those observed income gaps look like? How about poverty rates by racial group, from the 2014/15 LCS (2022/23 data coming out later this year):

Black African: 61%
Coloured: 39%
Indian/Asian: 6%
White: 1%

61% of black Africans live in poverty. 1% of whites live in poverty

A big cause of this disparity is jobs and unemployment. And it's impossible to look at the numbers below and not see that it is directly a continued apartheid legacy (and main South African problem is *insufficient* redress & support to black South Africans, not other way round)

At top of income distribution it's about jobs but also (generational) wealth. SA is obscenely unequal. And the top is absurdly white.

This graph shows racial composition of each part of SA income distribution, from poor to rich.

Source here & next tweet: amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/Chat…

Has been decline in inter-racial inequality, but almost all driven by changes at the top. There are ~same number of black African people in top 10% as whites. But this is a country where black Africans are ~80% of population, while whites are ~8%. And look at that top 1%...

And I mean, let's just look at South African wealth inequality, in international perspective, with this in mind

(source: ) amory-gethin.fr/files/pdf/Chat…

There are a million more things one could show here. The claim is so factually absurd it would be never-ending. South Africa has many serious challenges. But the idea that persecution of whites is one of them is just pure fantasy, laughable if it weren't so grotesque...