Victory for SA war on racism

Racism suffered a blow yesterday when a court sentenced a woman who had hurled racial insults against a police officer to jail.

Vicki Momberg has become the first person in post-apartheid South Africa to go to jail for using a racial slur. The sentence should be welcomed by all who believe in equality and want to see all South Africans treated with dignity.

Despite the country having been free for over 23 years now, racism – especially anti-black racism – remains prevalent.

The causes of this are many and include the structural socioeconomic issues we have not been able to tackle as a country since the dawn of democracy.

But one factor that has made racists in recent years so emboldened that they no longer feared to use the “k-word” or call black people “monkeys” in public is because they believed they would suffer no consequences.

Well, not anymore. The message sent by the Momberg prison sentence is that racial slurs can no longer be tolerated and that racists will be punished. It is a victory for rule of law as well as the struggle to restore the dignity of South Africans, especially the millions of black people who suffered centuries of racial insults, oppression and being told that they were inferior to other people.

To truly put an end to racial discrimination and abuse, we need to destroy the socio-economic and political conditions that make such mentality to thrive.

The racial inequality results from decades of colonialism and apartheid has kept the majority of black people at the bottom of the social ladder.

This reinforces in some the idea that black people are somehow “inferior” to the rest of humanity and, therefore, deserve to be treated with disdain.

Unless we use the political power we have as a democracy to change the black condition in South Africa; the southern African region and Africa as a whole, we are bound to be victims of anti-black racism for decades to come – here at home and abroad.

So yes, let us celebrate the fact that Momberg is going to jail and that her fellow travellers have been shaken. But most of all, let us strike a death blow against racism by building the kind of society where race is not a key determining factor of whether you will succeed in life or not.