FULL CIRCLE

FULL CIRCLE
The issues of race and racism are said to be worn out topics and need not be mentioned anymore, but with the recent occurrences of racist behaviour around the country and on face book it’s clear that the issue is still very real and needs to be paid attention to. After all the bloodshed that stains our constitution, or rather our democracy people still continue to be oblivious of South Africa’s tragic past of apartheid (http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html). It seems our forefathers suffered in vane in that it seems racism continues to imprison the minds of South Africans, especially the South African youth particularly in universities. It has manifested into a legacy that will not go away and we choose to ignore it and follow illusions that race is not an issue any more.
Take the incident at the Free State University for example; to go against the idea of residence integration white students resorted to racism to show their protest. Would it have not been enough to voice their antagonism to the idea instead of feeding elders food with urine? And to top it off made a video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SNhpY6gjLw) of this catastrophe. These people fall within the demographics of their care takers, people who raised them while their parents were too busy in meetings or being socialites.
The greatest injustice is that people still find ways to justify this horrible behaviour through ideologies and misleading perceptions taking the blame away from the perpetrators. They were looking to blame the FF for the appalling behaviour of the students. Cummins (2003) claims that, “individuals who feel invalidated and-or wilfully abandoned will experience anxiety, anger, hostility and violence. We add another consequence: racism”. Are we then saying by virtue of having uncomfortable circumstances we then have the right to vent our frustrations on other people’s dignity, could they have not done this to their people of their own race? Or found any other way of displaying their feelings of being abandoned? By so doing we are disregarding the fact that as humans unlike animals we are bestowed the ability to think rationally and make rational decisions. Where then do we place the responsibility if we are going to give excuses for the people who made the conscious decisions to infringe on another person’s rights?
One thing I believe should be made clear is that colour is something that exists and will never go away no matter how much we wish it away. But does our biological attributes then dictate how one should be treated or how they should behave? South Africa is already ailing due to the political instability she cannot handle another racist period. Do we really want to go back to a time place where one was thrown in to little boxes labelled black and white and discriminated against due to these differences?
And no racism is not only propelled by white people, it is a phenomenon that also occurs through other races. I will speak with specific reference to the black population I associate with. As a black man who dated a white woman in Rhodes I would have expected the resistance to a mixed relationship from the white population because that is that is what happened during apartheid, but it was more often than not from the black students. Apart from that we continue to judge black people who associate with white people calling them “coconuts”. Who are we to judge or dictate who one befriends or what culture they choose to follow? Are we not by so doing recreating the state of discrimination and racism ourselves?
Does the difference in our skin colour really matter in determining who we are and how we should relate to one another, are we really that ignorant? Our differences will always exist the solution is to acknowledge them not try and look away and disregard them but rather find a way of uniting in our diversity and apportioning blame where it should be.