Discrimination not a selective battle
I AM NOT a woman and I’m not gay, but this has never stopped me from campaigning for and promoting women’s and gay rights.
In fact, I believe it is more powerful if people who are not considered to be part of designated groups stand up for the rights of those groups. But I also believe you cannot choose which human rights you wish to support and which make you feel uncomfortable.
The people who think they can choose which human rights they want to support, as if they are taking it from a supermarket shelf, do not quite understand what it means to support human rights. You cannot claim to be non-sexist, and be racist at the same time. You cannot claim to non-xenophobic but be anti-gay. You cannot claim to be a humanist yet discriminate against certain people based on their religion, race, age, sexual preference or other identity markers.
Supporting human rights in its entirety has nothing to do with whether or not you support the constitution – which is expected of all South Africans – but about doing what is right. It should be, I believe, an international human principle.
Too often conservative people hide behind religion and tradition. But I have never believed one should blindly follow a religion, even if it makes you do things that go against your grain. So it is not enough for people to try to hide their conservatism within a religious framework. Even if they followed no religion at all, they would probably still hold those views.
The same goes for tradition. I have never believed in following tradition, culture or whatever, blindly. Too many bad things have been done in the name of tradition. Just ask anyone in the rural areas of South Africa.
The sad thing is that these issues are not discussed daily, but only surface when a celebrity is involved, like what happened last Sunday when television personality Somizi Mhlongo stormed out of the Grace Bible Church in Soweto after a visiting cleric, Bishop Dag HewardMills from Ghana, made remarks claiming it was “unnatural” to be homosexual.
While the pastor’s anti-gay remarks upset Somizi – and the church later half-apologised – the pastor also earlier made sexist remarks against women which appear not to have offended the television star, or not enough to make him want to walk out of the service. It appears that Somizi, who is gay, would be more upset by anti-gay remarks than by remarks against women.
This is the point I am trying to get across: You should not only get upset about anti-gay remarks and behaviour if you are gay, but also if you are straight. You should not only get upset about anti-women comments and behaviour if you are a woman. Men should also get upset and do something about it.
Unfair
Until we reach a situation where we realise that unfair discrimination is bad, irrespective of who is being discriminated against, we will continue to have discrimination. There is, of course, fair discrimination, which is meant to address imbalances and inequities of the past, but that’s another story.
I’m sure most of us have been in situations where everyone looked and sounded alike and the conversation quickly degenerated into comments about people who were “different”, whether these were women, gays, whites or blacks, etc. And I am sure most of us probably just tolerated these conversations for fear of upsetting the people who were part of the conversation.
I have been guilty of doing that. A few years ago, I was at a function attended by mainly white
people and someone started talking about how blacks could not and should not play rugby because “rugby belongs to us”. Instead of confronting the man, and possibly upsetting everyone at the function, I just walked away.
I have often thought about whether I had done the right thing and whether I had betrayed my non-racial principles by not standing up to a racist who was possibly in the company of many other racists. I would probably have been beaten up, but it might have been worth it if it meant I was defending my non-racial principles.
But most people do not walk away when conversations are about the “others”; most people probably also contribute to the conversation and laugh at so-called jokes which could only be made in the absence of those who are being joked about.
Before joining in conversations about people who are perceived to be different to you, or cheering those who make comments against others (like the people at Grace Bible Church last Sunday), please think about how you would feel if those comments were made about you or those you love.
The sad thing is that all of us probably interact at some point in our lives, some more than others, with people who are perceived to be different to us and, by all accounts, we survive those interactions. Yet we think nothing about acting against, or commenting negatively about, those people when they are not around, or when we are surrounded by seemingly like-minded people.
Unfair discrimination on any basis is wrong. If you oppose racism, you should oppose sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and whatever other -isms and phobias that have been manufactured to create divisions among people.
Fisher is an independent media professional.