As the country just celebrated 18 years of democracy, racism still continues to loom large in our country and our body politic. AZAPO is not surprised at all as we have argued that never died in the first instance - instead it continues to change shape in order to be modern and appealing.
Whether we accept it or not, Black people are the ones confronted by racist attitude and actions. White farms, banks, insurance companies, media, etc all stand accused of racist practices in one form or another against Black people, and, somehow, as a nation we seem to have accepted this as the norm.
In the last few days there has been a lot of talk over a racist comments made on Twitter by SA model Jessica Leandra dos Santos, and Ken Sinclair who posted many more derogatory statements on Facebook about Black people, as expect, our media went crazy as if it was the only time Blacks suffered from racism, or as if these tweets were the worst form of racism, when actually Blacks live with racists insults in their RDP houses, in their schools under the tree, with their long queues on street intersections as they beg for jobs and food.
AZAPO believes that to date, most whites are still racists, and their racism is protected by the current ruling party as it needs their votes and their approval of government policies and programmes. Recently, ANC sent a high level delegation to meet with Afrikaans scholars in order to ascertain what the ANC should do in order to get the votes of Afrikaans speakers.
This happened as many Black communities have taken to the streets to demonstrate their displeasure on how services are rendered to Blacks as compared to whites. No high delegation has ever been sent to Black academics to ascertain what government should do in order to respond to needs by Blacks. This is largely because in the racist ANC's books, Blacks do not matter.
AZAPO believes in building an anti-racist society, ANTI being an operative word that denotes an active role in fighting racism, and that Black people must lead that fight in order to restore the dignity that they lost under apartheid and continued to lose even under the current ruling party. This fight must not only be about allowing Blacks to walk tall in the country of their birth economically, but culturally and social.
While the Human Rights Commission which is entrusted with the mandate of ensuring equality, continues to be irrelevant under the leadership of Lawrence Mushwana, AZAPO would like to make a call to remind all victims of racist practise that God is not in the habit of stepping down here to fight our battles for us against our equals - we should be on our own!
Statement issued by Thole Somdaka, Member of AZAPO Communication Desk, May 9 2012
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