Reverse racism rears head

HOW TRUTHFUL, but seriously disappointing, I found the article by Lindiswa Jan, “Ability of black children to survive township life,” on Monday.

She gave such accurate detail about her childhood play times with her friends, creating dolls from wooden sticks, old clothes, wool and black pantyhose. Jan and friends could not afford the Barbie dolls available at Pep Stores, but with their own creations had a good and memorable childhood from the perspective of their play times.

The disappointing part of her writing was her superficial and forced argument that this was the experience of black children, and how systemic racism has successfully challenged black children through the destruction of the black family life and the potential for their futures. As if places like District Six and forced removal of coloured communities – even in my home town, Oudtshoorn – did not happen.

What Jan has described was the creativity of all children who were born in harsh conditions but never stopped imagining a happy and constructive life. This is not just a black child in a deprived environment, but all victims of apartheid can relate to this story – as children in our poor, coloured neighbourhood, we built immobile wooden motorcycles and in our imagination joyfully travelled everywhere, disregarding apartheid restrictions.

In fact, the coloured community in the rural area where I reside today is still in that situation that Jan so strongly tries to portray as unique to black children – for the coloured child born into harsh conditions might be even worse today because of a new form of systemic racism, which deprives them from using their full potential: the skewed policies of affirmative action and black economic empowerment.

Let us thus analyse this story correctly and not racially based, as being that of all children and their ability to survive despite poverty and being born into harsh conditions. By superficially focusing on race/the black child, especially since Jan is a researcher at the department of social anthropology, are we not repeating the same mistake as during apartheid? DR CLIFFORD VAN WYK Oudtshoorn