Johannesburg — WHITE people first sought salvation in the black middle class in the immediate aftermath of the 1976 Soweto uprisings. The Transvaal Chamber of Industries appealed to Prime Minister John Vorster to build a community of "respectable metropolitan blacks" interested in "pay packets rather than politics".

Business magnate Anton Rupert, meanwhile, set out his personal dream of "the transformation of SA's urban black communities into stable, essentially middle-class societies subscribing to the values of free enterprise".

Conservatives have placed a great burden of expectation upon the shoulders of "respectable" blacks ever since. Given that black poverty has remained widespread, even while whites have enjoyed a post-apartheid windfall, the new middle class has been charged with demonstrating that political change can bring real economic advance for black citizens.

Any small black step forwards, however, has been also greeted as a justification for continuing white privilege.

Since one in five children in elite suburban public schools is now black, white pupils' vast hidden subsidy is supposedly now legitimate. Black citizens' alleged consumerism is likewise used to cast many whites' obscene materialism in a more favourable light.

White intellectuals meanwhile reiterate their curiously convenient belief that it is growing inequality within the black community that poses the greatest threat to social stability.

The quiescent role whites allotted to the black middle class was never going to last, and signs of growing anger emerge every day. First, black citizens short-changed in public service provision are saying enough is enough. Policing, street cleaning, lighting, library services, parks and all the rest simply cannot remain dramatically worse in every primarily black suburb.

Second, blacks are protesting about the unabated transmission of inequality from one generation to the next. The public school system still channels six out of every 10 white youngsters into a state-funded higher education system that remains the gateway to well-paid employment. Some members of this pampered white elite recently showcased their deserving character at the Reitz residence of the University of the Free State.

Black citizens who remain in historically black suburbs simply cannot access high-quality public schooling and must therefore accept that their children's lives will be almost as circumscribed as their own.

Third, black public sector employees, middle managers and professionals sometimes enjoy incomes similar to their white peers, but complain they still suffer from a paucity of assets. They were able to inherit neither land nor housing from their systematically impoverished parents, and they have begun acquiring the accoutrements of middle class living only by accumulating debt.

Finally, members of the black middle class often work far harder than their white counterparts. Whites' success is bolstered by affluent friends and family, whereas middle class blacks are responsible for supporting extended networks of family and community dependents.

The problems of the black middle class have been partly hidden over the past decade. Black citizens have advanced rapidly in public sector employment and private sector professionals have enjoyed a modest share of the gains from the strongest emerging-market boom in a generation.

Now, however, the squeeze is on. As food and fuel prices continue to rise, interest rate increases are piling on the misery. Black unemployment is set to grow again. Meanwhile, the new middle class has become heavily indebted as it has tried to make up for its inherited asset shortfall. A great wave of housing bond defaults and vehicle repossessions now seems inevitable.

This turn for the worse in material conditions has unfortunately been accompanied by disheartening confirmation of the persistence and depth of white racism.

White Afrikaner leaders' qualified protestations of shock and horror in the immediate aftermath of the Reitz scandal have been predictably short-lived. Many ordinary white Afrikaners contributing to internet forums offer simply, like unguided moral infants, that the students "committed no crime".

English-speakers have done no better with their feeble protests against the "silencing" of beloved columnist David Bullard. The central problem was never Bullard himself but rather this very audience, which seemed to interpret the writer's colonial buffoonery as a penetrating critique of black authority and pretensions.

It is a decade since financial journalist Nigel Bruce observed that restaurant service from a white teenager was preferable to a "surly tribesman with his thumb in the soup and his eye on the clock". Compared to Bullard, Bruce was a satirical genius indeed, and for this reason he was able to rebut racism accusations with some success.

Then as now, however, a satirist who causes offence should be able to demonstrate some genuine payoff in social critique. His targets should be chosen not from among ordinary citizens struggling to get by, whether white or black, but rather from the arrogant wielders of economic and political power.

Butler teaches public policy at UCT.