Racism: unfinished business on both sides

IT’S been a depressing week for South Africans. Hardly done with licking our wounds over Helen Zille’s praise of colonialism (or certain aspects of it, whatever that means), the nation faced another divisive incident.

The now infamous video in which two parents had a meltdown with each other in a restaurant had people seeing red.

An aggressive white father confronted a black female diner, accusing her child of slapping his daughter in the play room. The man was branded a racist on social media and the woman captured the nation’s sympathy for her bravado.

The incident has left South Africans emotionally exhausted, outraged and racially divided. “Why must everything be about race” to “he would never react like that if she was a white woman” was the common outcry on both sides of the argument.

Call it covert racism if you will, but racial undertones played a provocative role in fanning the argument between them. For those who argue that neither the black female or white male attacked each other racially, here’s my response.

Black South Africans can easily sense racial intolerance or racist overtures, verbally, physically and emotionally. It doesn’t have to be explicit name calling. It’s in the interaction, the demeanour, the body language, facial expressions.

It’s inexplicably difficult to substantiate as it’s often cloaked in rational argument: the man was not racist, they were just defending their children and he went overboard.

But many people who viewed the footage felt the white man would not have been aggressive had the woman been white, which I agree with. Many white South Africans have dismissed that argument on social media. Instead, most interpreted the man’s behaviour as abusive, not racist.

My view is that their interpretation is based on their lack of exposure to racism as recipients and can never relate to it. They’ve never been victims of it.

Many white South Africans describe the current government as “racist” based purely on how they perceive racism. They cite things like lost economic opportunities (think BEE and radical economic transformation), struggle for university admission (think quota system) or singing anti-boer songs.

For many white South Africans, racism must be explicit for example: “What did he do or say that was racist?” And, as in the case of the Spur altercation, the answer is the white man did not say anything that was racist, but he was – but white South Africans don’t get it, and that’s the problem.

South Africa is on par with the rest of the world where we no longer have legislative laws condoning racial prejudice. But, despite this, we are still grappling with the effects of our deeply divided past.

Buzzwords like social cohesion are simply band aids. There is unfinished business on both sides, simmering volcanoes of emotion which erupt every now and then.

We need to make racism a crime, punishable with imprisonment, regardless of colour. What good is it to have hate crimes that are open to interpretation? We need racism to be criminalised and courts to act swiftly and decisively.

Racists who have been found guilty by the Equality Courts have escaped with impunity simply by pleading poverty. Think Penny Sparrow. I too, have been subjected to harassment and racial abuse from a white racist who threatened me through a series of anonymous calls.

After eventually tracking him down (yes, you can trace anonymous calls) and taking him to the Equality Court, he was found guilty and fined R10 000. Like Sparrow, he pleaded poverty. He continues to work and be free to practise his racial hatred.

But I will not allow him to distort my views of all white South Africans, however angry that experience made me. I’ve had white friends and black friends reach out to me and those are the experiences I choose to hold on to as a guide to restore my faith in humanity across the colour divide.

As a nation, we all need to actively work on our mental racial emancipation, whether we accept it or not.

But, we have to work on actively making an effort to understand how the past has shaped our perceptions today, if we are to reweave our social fabric. A white man shouting at a black woman conjures up painful memories of a brutal, apartheid past.

A black woman standing up against that aggression demonstrates her saying “I won’t accept you talking to me like that”.

Such an act would have landed her in jail 23 years ago.

And that’s why the video unleashed the racial storm it did. For the sake of our children and country, we must understand that dynamic if we are to heal our past wounds.

Only then can we move forward.