Ongoing racism not a ‘pigment’ of the imagination

IT seems implausible that the ill-advised social media rantings of only three hotheads can suddenly plunge a whole country into a melting pot of inter-racial tension.

First to hit the headlines was Democratic Alliance (DA) MP Dianne Kohler Barnard, who shared a Facebook posting praising apartheid president PW Botha in October.

As a politician she, more than anybody else, should have foreseen the repercussions.

Then earlier this month KZN estate agent Penny Sparrow displayed a classic moment of twittering madness, referring to blacks on the beaches as monkeys.

Gauteng government official Velaphi Khumalo then joined the fray, hinting that white people should be exterminated ‘as Hitler did to the Jews’.

This set in motion an abundance of other racist worms now crawling out of the social media woodwork (or should that be network?), so much so that some commentators are suggesting the country is sitting on a ticking time bomb in terms of race relations.

Certainly all the hype seems to suggest that. Everybody is in on the act, allowing emotional tit-for-tat hysteria to cloud rational thinking.

And rest assured, irresponsible politicians and other agents of opportunity will no doubt ensure the embers of discontent will be fanned into flames to suit their personal agendas in the months ahead. It is, after all, local government election year.

But in the interest of nation building and reconciliation though, we all need to take a step back and try to keep matters in perspective.

Only the most naive will believe that after centuries of suppression, discrimination and deliberate segregation of races, 20 years of democracy is enough time to have eliminated deeply entrenched prejudices.

It will take far more than a generation for whites to fully shake off lingering condescending attitudes towards black people and their culture. It will take equally long for blacks as the new power brokers to dislodge themselves from their supercilious attitudes towards the rights and views of minorities.

We are now at a juncture where the euphoria of the rainbow nation concept has entered a more sobering period of reality, a realisation that deeply entrenched distrust and enmity towards each other brought on by history will inevitably remain simmering under the surface for decades to come.

Lingering prejudices

Let’s not beat about the bush – all of us still harbour private prejudices and the race issue will not go away anytime soon.

It is how we are going to manage the ongoing tensions and crank up the levels of mutual tolerance and compromise in the interim that will prove to be crucial in avoiding a ticking time bomb scenario.

We cannot allow ourselves to be dragged in by emotional social media hate speech rabble-rousers and political opportunists endowed with limited reasoning capabilities.

Freedom of speech does not extend to insulting other people or societies.

Post-1994 South Africans have done a good job of negotiating the minefield, and there’s certainly enough evidence on every factory floor, office space or recreational facility to suggest that the majority of citizens, while struggling hard to overcome their differences which no one can wish away, nevertheless show each other enough respect to work this thing through to an amenable conclusion in time to come.