Yonela Diko
SEVEN days into the new year, I think we have reached our quarter of stupidity this year – no more applications. It’s as if we are in a stupidity contest and people have taken the term “how stupid can you get” as a challenge.
With each day this year another fool, who derives a certain vanity in being called a racist, opens their mouth and removes all doubt about their stupidity.
The question we have not asked, at least not enough in our country, is “where are we when it comes to race relations in South Africa”.
The comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the first few days of the year reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our reconciliation that we have not yet perfected.
When we wanted to deal with racism in the early 2000s, many would say any persistent discussion on racism does not lead to the national feel-good atmosphere we all experience whenever our national sports teams score a victory over a foreign competitor or when other benign events occur that help us to forget the persisting racial divisions in our society.
It would be said that those who propagate affirmative action are seeking to introduce reverse racism or, more directly, resort to anti-white racism.
The enduring stereotypes about Africans, evidently shared by many white people, have done great damage in the project of reconciliation. There is a propagated assault that Africans are inherently corrupt.
It has become easy to attribute the success of black people to corruption since the same frame of mind would also suggest that Africans are, in any case, not that competent to succeed as major business players in our economy.
It is black people who have been more tolerant, more welcoming of people who are different than them (since the Europeans landed on our shores), more sophisticated about different cultures, and here black people must be credited.
The views of “a respected academic” were published in Rapport on January 27, 2001. The academic wrote: “Because (Mbeki) refuses to confirm the white perception that blacks are promiscuous, he fails to give critically important leadership on the Aids epidemic.”
It is these stereotypes about Africans that have been rearing their ugly head in the first few days of 2016.
None of us expected a transformation in race relations overnight. Whatever solutions we were to find would be incomplete. But it has been a great betrayal that after we have travelled together for a few years, there remain such enduring and brutal stereotypes about Africans.
However, we have to be completely honest. It is incontrovertible that race relations have improved during the last 20 years.
It has taken us, particularly blacks, a great sense of humility, caring, compassion, support for others and integrity to give us the leap on race we have had.
Despite these improvements, the legacy of apartheid, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, still casts a long shadow over our landscape.
Yes, we need policy, we need specific and consequential laws, but above all we need to open our hearts.
Anti-racism is more than just being polite to others. It’s more than just overt discrimination. It’s the attitudes that ultimately affect who gets opportunities, who gets hired, who gets fired, who rises, who falls, and such attitudes have consequences on livelihoods.
Penny Sparrow, Chris Hart, Gareth Cliff and all these individuals who share these deplorable views express a profoundly distorted view of this country.
These white South Africans still don’t see anyone outside of themselves. They are pushing racism straight to the top of the country’s agenda.
Today there is a much greater sense that we have been lulled into a false sense that everything is okay in the country, at least until people erupt into underbelly, racist retorts.
In the end though, we have no other option but to stay together. We have come too far to retreat into our respective corners.
l Diko is ANC Western Cape Media Liaison Officer