is that they occupy the same economic space. Most whites continue to enjoy leafy suburban homes in suburbs with well maintained parks, public swimming pools etc, access to first world amenities like private vehicles, fast internet, megamalls, and so on, and white-collar work. While most Blacks are still blue-collar or unemployed, commute via a haphazard public transport, and either live in shanty-towns or the packed estates of low quality government houses that have been built in the millions since the end of Apartheid. This can be partially accounted for to social networks in business that had their genesis in Apartheid, as well as inherited gains, even though 17 year old white teenagers about to enter the marketplace are part of the "born-free" generation.
But there has been a massive implementation of AA, with the state sector expanding to over a million mostly black employees and tremendous legislative pressure place on large companies to implement various empowerment initiatives. As a result there is now a black middle class at least as large as the white middle class, but considering whites are around 10% of the population, its not much. In gross terms, the black population passed the white population for spending power several years back, but that's distributed over a much bigger demographic. There is massive inequality. We've also implemented the largest welfare state in Africa. These measures have acted as a finger in the dike, but there is growing restlessness and dissatisfaction at the moment, which occasionally explodes into community violence (which also pits the cops against normally law-abiding citizens).
Its not entirely about inherited material advantage either. Black apartheid education was deliberately designed to equip black people to have only basic literacy and be laborers, something the Apartheid authorities were quite honest about. It was through mission schools and a few limited Universities that many of the older generation of struggle heroes like Nelson Mandela were able to get professional degrees. Whites (and Indians who are concentrated in the Natal province and are about 2% of the population) have a much higher average level of education and there has been a lot of ineptness in fixing this, despite education being the biggest budget item for several years.
We see regular reports of poor (and invariably 99% black) schools where teachers have close to 100 students in a class and have basically given up trying to educate more than a fraction of them who are putting in the most effort. Teenage pregnancy and dropout rates are enormous. The better schools are racially integrated and have a lot of Black as well as White, Indian and Coloured kids (I realise that's an offensive term in the states but another result of Apartheid is that mixed race communities were historically isolated from both black and white and mostly self-identify as "Coloured" here, as well as speaking European or European derived languages like English and Afrikaans - a derivative of Dutch - at home). Poor, failing schools, however, are overwhelmingly black.
The upshot of all of this is that, while there's a lot of resentment, there appears to have been remarkable acceptance and pragmatism among the poor that a lot of the better paying professional and technical jobs are going to be filled by Whites and Indians and the occasional Black until education levels improve. In my profession (analyst/programmer) I'd estimate one Black programmer for every eight White programmers. Its hard for me as a white guy to gauge just how far this generous attitude to the privileged extends, we all speak different home languages (although English is the lingua franca of government and commerce) and in my latter years I don't have any close black friends, only casual acquaintances and Facebook buddies. The Black people I regularly interact with both in business and casually have for the most part embraced capitalist ethics and dismiss populist ideas about crude methods of redistribution, as do many public Black intellectuals and commentators in the press. But they're part of an equally small black elite and I'm never certain how much their views coincide with the other 60-70% of the population. Casual conversations with blue collar workers seem to indicate a range of views.
I offer all of this as background because the occasional American or German or Chinese person being parachuted in to fulfil some corporate role doesn't tangibly, visibly affect the working poor. Some, like the Chinese, are seen as creating jobs and opportunities. But Mozambicans, Zimbabweans (SA is now host to more than 3 million, thanks to Mugabe's abysmal record in that country), Malawians and poor Nigerians live in the same shanty towns and RDP housing, they compete for the same blue-collar jobs. And while Black South Africans are very familiar with the raft of labour laws that require minimum salaries and decent basic working conditions, immigrant labour from other parts of Africa are willing to ignore that and take pauper's wages, a fact that unscrupulous businesses are eager to exploit. This drives anti-African Xenophobia, which extends into the police force, since many of them come out of these communities.
Simple demographic ratios, high youth unemployment and the continuing (although no longer intentional, but more emergent from economic factors) segregation of poor blacks mean that young Black men are the majority of perpetrators of crime, and Blacks are the majority of victims. There's a perception that Africans from other countries are more likely to commit crime, since many of them are undocumented and can disappear easily or, like the Nigerians, have a reputation for organised crime (this is slightly unfair since Nigeria also sends us a lot of doctors, engineers and lawyers). But after foreigners, disaffected and jobless young Black South African men are also, it seems, seen as more suspect, which is why I think these categories suffer in the order given from the most police brutality.
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