Nah. You are just overthinking it. Resorting to breaking a phrase or compund word down into its constituent parts is a really poor way to approach any such discussion. That is the sort of action that leaves gay bashers exclaiming that they have no “phobia” of homosexuals or Jew haters denying that they are anti-semites because they have good relations with Arabs, Assyrians, or Indian Sayyids.
It is not a technical term and was never meant to be. It is informal. It is a term that is intended only to call attention to a general situation so that people can be more aware of the ways in which various social assumptions harm different members of society. Simply being aware of the situation is generally sufficient to reduce the problems associated with it. It provides a shorthand way of calling attention to matters that are not overt racism but that still have the potential to inflict harm using racial assumptions.
Trying to build some large and detailed sociological structure on the phrase will certainly fail, because it was never intended for that use. Attacking it on those grounds is rather like writing a 10,000 word monograph attacking the use of the term WASP in non-academic settings on the grounds that we can find ethnic Celts and French and Germans and Scandinavians who are now considered to be WASP. The original acronym had a useful meaning that still conveys a general idea, even if it has outlived its original definition.
The answer is a qualified “yes.” Qualified because even South Africa partakes of the larger Western culture, and so our default action heroes and TV stars are overwhelmingly White. But since the fall of Apartheid (Whites were also a minority before, but had absolute control of the media, so the situation wasn’t “normal”) White is no longer the “default” for local media. They haven’t been excluded, by any means, but aren’t the baseline for advertising or local TV shows. The biggest remnant is no doubt the continued prevalance of English over local languages, but even there, it’s not as it was.
I think my last real awareness-raising event in this regard was the Bantu-language ads for sex chat lines on late night TV
,y husband came from poverty, never finished high school. He worked on wall at as a clerk and worked himself to VP…he is the first one to tell you if he hadn’t been a white male, he never would have gotten where he is.
People get all upset over affirmative action as though it is something new. We always had it…but white males were the recipients. We didnt have a name for it. Just think they didnt have to compete with half the population to get Into Harvard or Yale. Etc doors were opened to them and now these same people whine when other groups that are leveling the playing field
