Johannesburg — I ASSUME that readers of this column would have the most to lose from a racial conflagration in this country. After all, this is a business publication read by the asset-owning classes.

And therein lies the short-sightedness of the defences against racism emanating from the white community in the wake of David Bullard's firing from the Sunday Times. My purpose here is indeed to sound the alarm bells about the rise of racial recidivism in the white community, and the response it is generating in the black community. By recidivism I mean the relapse into the mud of backward theories of racial superiority by the likes of Bullard.

The mistake we made was to equate our political transition with a transition in social attitudes in the white community. Yet many white people were indeed socialised in those backward, eugenicist social attitudes. Once we accept that social reality, Bullard stops being extraordinary. He has simply lanced the boil and released the underlying pus of racism into our social life.

Max du Preez responded to this social reality thus: "The Polokwane show and Zuma-mania didn't upset me, nor did the Selebi/Pikoli/Scorpions debacles. Not even Eskom's disastrous outages shook my faith in my nation's future. But the possibility that there is a large section of our nation still producing the likes of the Video of Shame Four, the Skielik killer, the Waterkloof Four, is the most depressing thought I've had in decades. Especially because that community is my own."

Du Preez has shown leadership. But how many will join him in pulling the white community back from the brink? I say this after a depressing conversation with some of my friends this past weekend. For the first time in a long time, I began to ask myself whether I had indeed become the coconut that some of my critics have called me. I was alone in holding to the argument that we need to do more to assure white people, and marginalise the likes of Bullard, in building a new nonracial moral majority.

UNDER attack that evening was nothing less than the model of racial reconciliation epitomised by Nelson Mandela. My friends insisted it was this model that emboldened the likes of Bullard. I felt guilty for having invited Bullard to be a panellist at the launch of my book earlier this year, and for having defended him against black people calling him a racist in a radio programme. Did I really have to wait for the blatant racism of Bullard's latest column to get out of my own comfort zone?

My friends' anger notwithstanding, I still have the hope that sanity will prevail in the white world. I still have the hope that the all-too-easy defensive reflexes of racism will give way to long-term thinking about the safety of all those defenceless children, who will be left to reap the whirlwind of hate.

But right now, racism is not a black people's problem, ridiculous charges of reverse racism notwithstanding. No white people are being sent to the guillotines in this country, which was routine practice throughout all those years they kept quiet as we survived the hellhole of the real racism of apartheid. We need visible action from the white community, perhaps a march against racism organised and led by white people.

Other actions could follow from that. A similar initiative, the Home to All Campaign, failed because there was no responsiveness among whites. But is it really possible that the events of the past week would not rouse white people into action? If so, then I'm afraid my friends will have been proved right. There will be no coconuts left to defend white folks from the flames of anger that could still come to engulf us all in "the fire next time".

n Patricia de Lille will give a public lecture on The Arms Deal and Its Implications for Democracy at the Wits Senate Room on Thursday April 24 at 6pm.

Mangcu is executive chairman of the Platform for Public Deliberation and the author of To the Brink: The State of Democracy in South Africa.