2 December 2022
RACISM IS A CRIME AGAINST BLACK PEOPLE
Through our Deputy President Kekeletso Khena, last Friday AZAPO opened a case of crimen injuria at the Boksburg North Police Station against a white granny called Belinda Magor (60). The case was transferred to the Putfontein Police Station for investigation. As a result of AZAPO’s antiracist intervention, Magor was arrested on Saturday and given police bail.
AZAPO followed up with an anti-racist picket on Monday at the white woman’s residence in Benoni. As expected, some brain-damaged black liberals and their organisations were quick to jump and claim that Magor’s racist “outburst” was unfortunate and isolated as it was not a reflection of the white community. But what did this racist say, which caused AZAPO to swing into action? This is what she said in part in a voice note:
“I’m very passionate about this. Ban them, kill them, shoot them, and get rid of them because they are the problem – not pit bull, not animals. Animals are beautiful, and they deserve a warm bed, food, love, attention, and everything else. God created those animals. Who created the black man? Do you think God? I don’t think so…
What I say is: ban the black man. They rape, they steal, they kill, worse than any pit bull could, and they get away with it… Get all black women and cut out their uteruses and their ovaries [so] that they can’t procreate, because they will all turn out the same because they are the same.”
The white supremacist was saying all this in defence of a call from the black community for the banning of pit bulls after the serial killing of children and adults by these wild dogs. Of all the reported mauling and deaths, I have not heard even of one white victim because the location of the killings is the black community. The ingrained hatred of black people by racist Magor saw her lifting “animal rights” higher than the human rights of black people. Strangely, the racist has now blamed her diabetes for her racism.
White society cannot escape collective guilt because it is the one that socialised and poisoned the mind of this old granny. At the age of 60, she honestly believes that it is not black people but animals that deserve “warm bed, food, love, attention, and everything else”. She strongly believes black people were not created by God, whereas animals were. While she appears to direct her racist diatribe against black men, she returns to command white society to abduct all black women and “cut out their uteruses and their ovaries so that they can’t procreate”.
She is not taking the option that her command could be executed in a surgical operation. No. Just abduct these “slaves”, cut them alive so they could bleed to death! One could have thought that, once all black men have been executed, there would be no need to cut the uteruses and ovaries of black women because there would be no one to render them pregnant. Perhaps this racist fears that white men in her community might pounce on black women and rape them. This exposes the fakeness and futility of white and black sisterhood through which the liberatory solidarity between black women and black men continues to be eroded.
Racist Magor is not calling for something new. She was raised in a society that constantly orchestrated genocide against black people. That genocide was somewhat subtle and systematic. It involved denying blacks the right to work and condemning them to starvation and malnutrition generation after generation. The condemnation for blacks to live in shacks and townships is part of the picture. For those who don’t know, living in shacks, RDP houses and townships amount to being homeless. By design, that is the destruction of the humanity and dignity of black people. At one stage in history, black people were shipped to a European war that had nothing to do with them. They sank with Mendi and died in distant and foreign waters as nobodies who were buried in unmarked graves.
There is a sense in which the fight against racism benefits from “honest” and reckless racists like Magor. The dangerous lot are the dishonest and smart ones. Those are the ones who think having a black friend or black lover cures them of their racism. Worse still, some think philanthropism towards black people is how they settle their racism guilt. While there are “conscious” racists, there are also unconscious racists. This lot honestly do not know that they are racists. As a matter of fact, racism has very little to do with whether a member of a group is aware of their racism and their benefitting therefrom. It has everything to do with the victims of racism and their experiences.
However, the curious reaction by the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) to racist Magor’s “outburst” is indicative of how defeated South Africa is against white racism and coloniality. SAHRC’s counsel, Advocate Andre Gaum, revealed that his organisation is not investigating or spending any energy on the matter. All they did was to write from their airconditioned offices a letter requesting that racist Magor publicly apologise. This matter is so negligible to the SAHRC so much that the written apology would be the end of the story. There is an empty threat that, if the racist woman did not oblige, she would be taken to the so-called Equality Court.
The Equality Court has been limp-wristed and ineffective in the fight against racism and its institutionalised roots. This court was set to prosecute “unfair discrimination, hate speech and harassment”. The problem with this democratic dispensation, which AZAPO characterises as a neocolonial setup, is that it views racism as some “hate speech” or outburst. That means racist Magor is never a racist until she makes some hate speech or outburst. This reduces racism to some verbalised racialism or racial prejudice. In that sense, a muted racist is protected by the laws and the Constitution in South Africa. This loose and careless understanding of racism tends to incriminate black people in the crimes to which they are perpetual victims.
According to AZAPO, racism requires power by a group to be able to subjugate another human group for economic gains and perpetuation of that oppression. White people and their whiteness continue to be backed by their fundamental economic power, which subtly rules over political power, to sustain their overt and covert racism of centuries against black people. Racism and colonialism results in the dehumanisation of their victims. However, Paulo Freire (1970: 26) cautions the white dehumanisers that they also get dehumanised in the process of dehumanising black people:
“dehumanisation, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human (Pedagogy of the Oppressed).
Black Consciousness (BC) remains the thoroughgoing antidote against white racism. That is because BC does not beat about the bush. It is not non-racial or non-racist. It is aggressively and radically anti-racist. Black people can never be fully liberated where racism, structural racism and coloniality are the order of the day. Courts are not the best places to fight racism. In the final analysis, it will take the repossession of the land and the redistribution of wealth to bring about an egalitarian society where racism will be expelled from the brains and veins of humanity.
