QUOTABLE QUOTES – RACE AND RACISM
One can have a debate about whether or not you agree with racial quotas, which is one element of the ANC’s political drive to ‘transform’ South Africa (and almost every facet of South African society), but apart from the warped principle – that race should trump ability or talent – the crude side effect is that one often finds oneself having a debate about which race is which.
Take sport for example.
Is Herschelle Gibbs black? Is Luke Watson white? Cricket South Africa CEO Gerald Majola talks about “generic black” and sports portfolio committee chair Butana Komphela talks about “aboriginal black”. What does it all mean?
Not that things are any different outside of the sporting sphere. The choices for three top medical posts at two Western Cape Hospitals were recently rejected by the provincial health department because the hospitals’ choices were white. After the three posts - two for anaesthetists at Tygerberg and one for a specialist at Valkenberg - were advertised, the two institutions made their choices and submitted their decisions to the Department. But the department refused to accept the decisions and ordered that the posts be re-advertised until an 'acceptable' (i.e. black) candidate was found.
(If patients die as a result of the decision, the department may well find itself at the losing end of an expensive legal battle, because there is no law which requires the state to keep critical posts vacant for months on end while a candidate of a suitable colour is found.)
This is the bizarre world that the ANC occupies.
Racial profiling is one of the ‘odd’ side effects, but there is another side to the problem – a darker side: out-and-out racism.
In this day and age, when the ANC labels every second critical utterance racist, it’s hard to tell the wood from the trees. But, believe it or not, the ANC is perfectly capable of being completely racist; not just in terms of assigning stereotypical characteristics to generic race groups (its nine-to-five job) but in terms of cold, hard, malicious insults.
And this forms the theme of this week’s edition of Quotable Quotes: race and racism – how the ANC uses and abuses race in its day-to-day political rhetoric.
The usual rules apply: one point for guessing who said it, another for identifying the context in which it was said.
WHAT THEY SAID
1. “The coconuts are the coloured DA members who still jump to the DP master’s voice! WHEN TONY LEON SPEAKS: The coconuts support the evictions of the coloured people from their homes and cutting off their water and electricity. The coconuts say nothing about the evictions of farmworkers. WHEN BELINDA WALKER COMMANDS: The coconuts appoint whites as Unicity managers. The coconuts make coloured people pay higher rates which benefit white areas only THE COCONUTS: Support conservatives in sport who do not want Breyton, Quinton, Makhaya, Herschelle, Deon and others in our international sports teams. Stay silent when the DP says no to soccer at Newlands. The coconuts are the coloured people in the DA who are selling out to the DP. Don’t be a DP coconut!”.
2. “I have a feeling that Mr Tony Leon’s wife was found for him by the secret service of Israel. I think that was a match made by the Secret Service of Israel.”
3. “I do not go to Newlands to watch Jacques Kallis or Mark Boucher, I go to watch Paul Adams and Makhaye Ntini. Who is Jacques Kallis? Jacques Kallis means nothing to me. You say black players don’t want to feel like quota players. Tough shit. It is the media that calls them that. It is for more players than them. If they can’t stand it they must get out. I don’t care a shit about that. They must take the pressure like we had to in the struggle”.
4. “To all Afric
| Posted on 29/5/2007
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