Johannesburg — A BLACK baby shot when a white boy goes on the rampage; white journalists locked out of a meeting of their black colleagues; a video showing white students compelling black workers to take part in a crass statement against the racial integration of university residences.

The soft underbelly of racial prejudice in SA has been exposed. In all the recent incidents whites have emerged as the perpetrators, raising the question, can blacks also be racist?

A young student at the Human Rights Commission public hearing last week to debate whether the newly resurrected Forum of Black Journalists (FBJ) was constitutionally allowed to bar whites, stood up and said no.

"Basically, if you make the concept of racism elastic, you make nonsense of it," said Andile Mngxitama, who identified himself as "a black person living in SA". "When white people say they are victims of racism they again reassert their dominance and displace blacks from the centre of the debate."

The whiteness of South African society is so entrenched that white interests almost always overrule those of the black people in SA. The fact that Talk Radio 702's white news editor, Katy Katapodis , lodged an objection with the HRC over the FBJ incident and a public hearing resulted showed this, he said.

Mngxitama, a student at the University of the Witwatersrand, based his argument on his definition of "racism" as "whites oppressing blacks".

"It is important to maintain conceptual fidelity if we hope to sustain a meaningful engagement based on shared conceptual apparatuses.... We don't call sexism xenophobia. We equally wouldn't say that misogyny is antisemitism. Racism is not an abstract term.... It relates to the practice of black oppression over the last 700 years," he said.

"That's a very narrow interpretation of racism," Charles Villa Vicencio, former executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, said.

In the 1990s, Villa Vicencio was director of research for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His former boss, Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, agreed.

"If racism is exhausted as the oppressive treatment of blacks by whites, then what would we say the Holocaust represented, where people suffered simply and solely because they were Jews?

"Racism is not a phenomenon that happens only between black and white," Tutu said.

"As a concept it refers to the situation where one ethnic group regards itself as automatically superior to a different ethnic group on the basis of biological attributes -- nothing to do with the inherent characteristics of individuals.

"One automatically and always is superior, and the despised group is always and automatically inferior and denigrated. One has automatic access to privileges and the other is subjected to automatic disadvantages and vilification," the archbishop said.

"Blacks are human beings, and racism happens in every human society, and if we are human then we are as capable as the next to be racist," Tutu said. "We have been shown as capable of a near kin to racism -- we can and have been xenophobic."

Mngxitama is not alone in his beliefs.

Melissa Steyn, associate professor of sociology at the University of Cape Town, said: "I think that, fundamentally, he is correct.

"It has to do with a whole history and ideology of superiority in whiteness. We should recognise that any attempt to take away that meaning (of racism as white oppression of blacks) is a strategic move, and it's not giving full recognition to that history."

Blacks can be prejudiced, but the big question is whether we allow the term racism to be used in a way that takes away its power, Steyn said.

"There is a strong argument that we shouldn't.... Racism has its history in all that stuff about measuring skulls, but it is important to take fully on board the ideology of (white) superiority."

Not everyone agreed, though.

Ryland Fisher, author of a book on racism in SA, said: "I believe black people can be racist. All of us have elements of racism in us, and we have to admit to this before we can deal with it.

"It is very difficult to undo the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. By admitting to it, you show you are prepared to do something about it."