For many – but not all – some Christmas cheer on race
"Derogatory comments intended to denigrate the intelligence, humanity, appearance, and beliefs of black people are rife." "The use of the K-word is endemic." "For many poor black people, for example farm and domestic workers, this is a part of the daily fabric of their lives and they remain vulnerable to racist treatment".
So concludes the South African Human Rights Commission in its 2016/17 Trends Analysis Report, published earlier this month. The commission is one of the institutions established under the Constitution to strengthen democracy.
Its report says that social media are used to express racism. In addition, "incidents of racial discrimination take place at schools, universities, businesses, and in the workplace [and they are] not limited to verbal abuse but often also entail further violations including physical violence, intimidation, sexual harassment or assault, and being physically excluded or removed from establishments or businesses".
Does its report contain data that substantiates its conclusions? In the year in question, it received 486 "race-related" complaints. These accounted for almost 10% of complaints about rights violations. An annual figure of 486 works out at 1.33 complaints a day, hardly a sign of ubiquitous anti-black racism.
Perhaps targets of racism do not always report it to the commission. Let us therefore assume that only 10% of racist treatment is reported. That would push the daily number of incidents up to 13.3. Against this, 5 816 serious crimes are reported daily to the police. So even a tenfold inflated number of racist incidents pales into insignificance when measured against crime.