“As long as whiteness exists, white supremacy will stand as the greatest threat to human dignity, to peace, to the well-being of the earth.” — bell hooks

The hours after Charlie Kirk’s assassination were drenched in rage that exceeded grief. Blackness itself was dragged into the dock, as though it were a Black hand that had pulled the trigger. Social feeds convulsed with curses and damnations. Black South Africans were called demons, murderers, “sub-human filth,” while a white God was summoned to act as executioner. What I witnessed was not mourning but the release of a deeper pathology: the hatred of Blackness that sustains white supremacy, surfacing once again with manic intensity.

It was in this context that I came across an X post from Dr Benway. Beneath a video of Kirk’s little daughter running across a set to greet her father with joy, he wrote: “There’s a whole lot of black South Africans on X who are celebrating that this beautiful innocent girl will never hug her father again. There is no line that these sub-human pieces of filth will not cross. Damn them all.” The responses beneath his post spiralled into racist frenzy, summoning a white-supremacist God to annihilate Blackness.

Faced with this spectacle, I replied: “Maybe your God wanted her to grow up a decent human being, unscathed by her father’s bigotry.”

That single line redirected the rage. Almost immediately I was branded psychopathic, monstrous, deranged. Threats poured in. Campaigns were mounted to erase me from the platforms where I write. What drew no outrage was the original post itself: the casual reference to Black South Africans as “sub-human pieces of filth,” the readiness to imagine God as their executioner. That was treated as ordinary. The scandal, apparently, was that I refused to sanctify Kirk’s memory through the figure of his child.

Into this manufactured scandal stepped Renaldo Gouws. He declared on X that I had said it was “good” that a father was assassinated for disagreeing with me, and repeated the distortion on his podcast as proof of my alleged cruelty. This was not an error of interpretation but a calculated falsification. In his telling, the context — the racism of Benway’s post, the violent theology it summoned, the reason for my reply — disappeared entirely. What remained was a caricature designed for outrage.

This manoeuvre must be named for what it is: propaganda. By twisting my words into a grotesque parody, Gouws gave the mob a scapegoat on which to discharge its fury. The original violence against Black South Africans could fade into the background, while I was presented as the “true” villain. This inversion is the structure of fascist disavowal: critique is cast as cruelty, while cruelty disguises itself as virtue.

Psychoanalytically, such distortions reveal the logic of projection. Supremacy sustains itself by relocating its own aggression onto an external figure, then punishing that figure for the aggression it refuses to see in itself. My words became the screen on which a movement inscribed its own violence. In this sense, Gouws was not merely a commentator but an instrument of repetition — re-enacting the cycle of projection and inversion that structures racial domination. His voice exemplifies the desperation of supremacy in its late stage: clinging, distorting, frantic, yet still capable of inflicting harm on those who refuse its rituals.

The words hurled at me were vicious, and their normalisation is revealing. To call me all manner of gross insults, to reduce me to a monster, is to repeat the language long used against Blackness. It is the rhetoric of disqualification, a way of turning dissent into pathology. What was directed at me is of the same structure as what is routinely directed at the Black body: a demand for disappearance, a stripping of humanity. White supremacy appears sane only because its madness is collectively agreed upon.

We are investigating people in South Africa that are celebrating and inciting death and violence on social media. We will submit the relevant information to their employers. If you have information to share, write to us at veldtogte@lexlibertas.org.za. pic.twitter.com/6DUHGpIacQ

— Ernst Roets (@ErnstRoets) September 16, 2025

@GillianSchutte1 is a demon from hell.

— Renier van Loggerenberg (@reniermedia) September 16, 2025

There was another cruelty in the backlash. Six years ago, my son Kai took his life after a merciless campaign of cancellation. He was young, biracial, and vulnerable to the cruelty of privileged peers who suddenly targeted him until he broke. I know the intimate terrain of grief. Yet this grief was now turned against me. I was told that no mother who had buried her child could write what I had written. This is a perverse inversion: my private wound weaponised to police my speech. It was meant to strip me of legitimacy, to place my sorrow in service of their demand for silence.

What I see in this is the melancholia of whiteness — a mourning for supremacy that cannot be relinquished. It clings to the fantasy of innocence through the figure of the child, while displacing its aggression onto Blackness. Beneath this clinging lies a deeper terror: the knowledge that Blackness is origin, the source of humanity, the primal scene that must be denied. This is why the Black body is endlessly degraded — to stamp out the reminder that what is despised is also the beginning. My response exposed this terror, and the attack on me had to be merciless.

It is within this light that the backlash must be read. What unfolded was not simply the hostility of individuals but the expression of a collective disorder that feeds on denial. The rage hurled at me revealed the extent to which supremacy is sustained by repetition and ritual, unable to confront its own fragility. Perhaps it is more symptomatic than tragic. When a generation of whites refuses to read the writing on the wall, what we witness is ignorance, but also pathological clinging to supremacy that corrodes from within.

Like a virus, it mutates and adapts, but in the end, every virus carries within it the seeds of its own demise. Hatred this intense, this obsessive, inevitably burns itself out. It consumes its hosts, it isolates them from the human collective, and it ensures their irrelevance. History shows that systems of domination collapse not because they recognise their fault but because their destructive logic eats through their own foundations.

So yes, it is tragic. Yet, it is also a process of elimination. What we are living through is the slow implosion of a supremacist psyche that cannot survive its own hatred.

As for Kirk’s daughter, of course my mother-heart empathises with her loss of a father. Yet my hope is that she may one day discover a voice unbound by the inheritance of supremacy, a voice that resists absorption into the rituals of whiteness. She may become the break in repetition — the point where the cycle of hatred is interrupted rather than reproduced. In that refusal, she could embody the possibility that even within the lineage of domination, there can arise a gesture toward its undoing.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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