South Africa seems at the moment to be a country lost at sea, and that is revealing itself in how it is turning on its young, stealing their innocence before they even have a proper grasp on life. This week isand ironically it started with a rather disturbing racial incident over the weekend between a white and a black pupil from Michaelhouse and St John’s College, which are among the most expensive private schools in our country.
Students protest outside the Admin B building at Stellenbosch University after a video of an alleged racist incident went viral on 16 May 2022. The video shows a white student urinating on a black student’s belongings. South Africans are very good at calling out obvious racists – the ones who call Black people names or abuse them. But the country is still very poor at naming and changing the core of racism. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that the way things were organised under white rule is so deeply embedded in everyone’s minds that the past three decades have been devoted largely to absorbing Black people into the system rather than changing it.
To understand the ways in which racism ‘operates in the routines of life’, we need to consider the ideologies, structures, systems, institutions, rules and attitudes that structure or guide those routines, and how these all operate in tandem to centre certain white ways of being in the world.
SA has become an extremely toxic place, with each group guilty or afflicted in its own way. As a black foreign professional who encounters the word 'kwerekwere' (the other k word) from black SAns regularly, it's hard for me to see any innocents in this tragedy.
It starts with you
The worst is yet to come, the African pot is boiling over, and its poisonous soup of blood, sweat, and tears, is flowing into every town, city, every field, and every valley throughout South Africa.
The problem is that the world is competing against itself. Future generations will wonder at such raw primitive behavior. Why were human beings of different races so blind to the fact that they had one earth, they would puzzle 🤔.