White South Africans critiqued far-off slums while oblivious to local ones

Evidence

White men and women could declare solutions to insoluble political situations half a world away while oblivious to conditions in black townships barely a stone’s throw from home. They could drive by endless miles of shantytown shacks invisible to their gaze while bemoaning how terrible the favelas in São Paulo or the bustees of Bombay. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1556

Categorization

• SEED: An essay on ‘distance as moral alibi’ — how proximate misery becomes invisible while geographically distant suffering becomes a ready target of compassion — a structure that survives apartheid in gentler forms across liberal societies.
• XREF: Echoes the moral-perception literature (e.g., the identifiable-victim effect) and the ‘moral circle’ expansion debates; also inverts the usual direction by showing proximity ignored while distance is moralized.