Keyword: white privilege

Racist Bullies at Racially Integrated Schools

Picture: Pixabay Mandisi Majavu - With Youth Day upon us again this week commemorating the contribution made by the school-going children of Soweto during the apartheid struggle in 1976, it’s hard to gloss over the enormous sacrifices they made. How tragic it is then that 21 years into our democracy, their massive impact has merely led to a fragile pact between black and white South Africans, where blacks have yet to be unconditionally welcomed in historically white neighbourhoods and institutions, and where white...

Mimicry Is Not Solidarity: Rachel Dolezal and the Creation of Antiracist White Identity

Picture: Rachel Dolezal, the white American woman who changed her looks so she could pass for black, courtesy AlterNet. Tim Wise - In a country where being black increases your likelihood of being unemployed, poor, rejected for a bank loan, suspected of wrongdoing and profiled as a criminal, being arrested or even shot by police, the mind boggles at Rachel Dolezal's decision some years ago to begin posing as an African American. Yes perhaps blackness helps when you’re looking for a job in an Africana Studies department, selling your own African American portraiture art, or hoping to head up the local NAACP...

Confronting Colonial Discourse

Picture: Statue of Cecil John Rhodes at University of Cape Town courtesy Danie van der Merwe/flickr Mandisi Majavu - It has taken the University of Cape Town (UCT) 15 years to seriously consider the views of its black students concerning the statue of Cecil John Rhodes. Way back in 1999, Melissa Steyn and Mikki van Zyl researched students’ experiences of institutional culture at UCT. Their report concluded that participants “are sensitive to the meanings carried by the statues and names of buildings that reflect UCT’s history”, which respondents viewed as constant reminders of...

'They Don't Teach It In Law School': White Privilege and Oscar Pistorius

Picture: Oscar Pistorius at the 2012 London Olympic Games courtesy Jim Thurston/Wikimedia Commons Mandisi Majavu - Notwithstanding the violent and aggressive behaviour he exhibited in his personal life, the product of a historically heavily subsidised racial group in South Africa, Oscar Pistorius’ life demonstrates how white privilege protected his masculinity from being constructed as uncivil, criminal, threatening and dangerous. In a New York Times article, Michael Sokolove described Pistorius as a “great deal of fun”, but “more than a little crazy”. It is white...

The Mere Mention of the Words 'Affirmative Action'...

Picture: Affirmative action protest in the U.S. courtesy Americana: The Journal of American Pop Culture Mandisi Majavu - Last month the BBC published an article titled, “Do white people have a future in South Africa?” Western institutions like the BBC see no problem in commissioning articles like this due to mainstream whites’ misconception of racism as a zero-sum game. Research shows that mainstream whites associate a decrease in anti-black racism with an increase in anti-white racism. The notion of “reverse racism” is rooted in this misconception. Proponents of “reverse...

On Clowns and Covert Racism

Picture: Green Tea Designs Gillian Schutte - The furore over the cartoon depicting the ANC parliamentarians and their electorate as a bunch of inept clowns is indicative of how far we still have to go in terms of embedded and unconscious racism in South Africa. There is nothing wrong with critiquing government in satirical depictions, but there is something horribly wrong when those depictions verge on 19th century blackface stereotypes and entirely overlook the racial demographics of our land. In this offensive cartoon we see the...