I was asked to speak about racism again, this time for an audience of South African Christian teenagers. I decided to base it on some excellent resources that I came across recently on the subject of covert prejudices. The following is the text of my speech, plus some of the key slides. I think it is a particularly important topic, given South Africa’s growing racial tensions, white supremacists in the USA, anti-immigration movements, the All Lives Matter movement, and Donald Trump in his totality. Most of us agree that racism is wrong, but most of us are also unaware of the degree to which small, seemingly-benign biases colour our vision.
(Note that for ease of reference, I refer only to black and white race groups. It is admittedly clumsy, and I mean no offence either by those terms or by the exclusion of any groups that don’t identify as either.)
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There are any number of illustrations that I could give from the last 400 years of our nation’s history that would illustrate how heavy a role racism plays in our pasts. I was going to choose the example of a British guidebook that described the inhabitants of this country as:
Unwilling to work and unable to think, stupid, with no mental resources whatsoever. They were cowardly, devious and cruel to animals. They are active only in mischief; and crimes against morality meet with applause if in the end they are successful. (Barrow’s travels, Paraphrase)
Because in this case their racism was directed against the Afrikaner, which goes to show that hatred moves around in circles, looking for a new target, and that our problems as a country in this regard are likely to be far from over.
But I returned to a more recent example, the famous case of Matthew Theunissen who was very upset about the sports’ minister’s ban on international sporting events in 2016 and he said this:
(For non-South-African readers, the ‘K’ word is the most violently racist word we have.) I’m sorry if this is a bit shocking, but this is a good example, because Matt T is a born-free—he was born after the end of Apartheid—he lived in wealthy Noordhoek, and he has a Master’s degree. He was not alive in the Apartheid system, he’s not disadvantaged under the new system, and he is not stupid. How can he still have this much of the Old South Africa in him?
LongWind 