Activists march from the US Embassy in Pretoria towards the Union Buildings, the President's office, on June 06, 2020 during a protest against the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes during an arrest in Minneapolis, USA. (Photo by MARCO LONGARI / AFP)
In early May, Bianca Schoombee was being touted as the next Miss South Africa winner when entries for this year’s pageant opened. Both black and white social media users were united in praise of her beauty. And then the spectre of racism raised its ugly head.
Someone dug up her racist, sexist and body-shaming posts from when she was 14 years old. And just like that, the cookie crumbled. She was booted out of the pageant and her modelling agency dropped her. And then the storm died down.
That’s SA for you. Its political landscape is not normal without a racist incident every couple of months. The question is: do these incidents get handled in a way that ensures that SA never reaches boiling point, where the US is right now?
Some people will find the link between Schoombee being booted out of a beauty pageant in SA and the brutal video of the killing of George Floyd in the US as very tenuous. The tie that binds the two together is racism.
The US has gone through centuries in which black lives have been lost at the hands of institutionalised racism, with nothing done to correct the situation. Statistics show that since January 2015, more than 1,200 black people have been killed by police, one every two days. And they simply became talking points.
SA’s legalised racist rule ended in 1994. Yet incidents of institutional racism happen every day in the workplace, in the supermarket queue, in integrated schools, and even in homes when the helper or “garden boy” is addressed. Once in a while, these incidents make the newspapers and social media and become talking points.
The George Floyd-type of incidents in SA hardly raise an eyebrow these days because of their nature. To borrow a repugnant phrase used in the 1990s to sanitise state-sponsored violence, SA’s institutionalised racial killings of black people today is said to be “black-on-black”. The alleged killing of Collins Khosa by the SA army during the Covid-19 lockdown only made it to presidential level because the killing of Floyd in the US made international news.
SA’s institutionalised racism is just as bad as that in the US. A police officer in SA can kill a black person and be protected by the same kind of institutional network that Derek Chauvin was counting on to protect him when he brazenly kept his knee on Floyd’s neck, even after his victim had pleaded: “I can’t breathe.”
When the racist tweets of a 14-year-old beauty pageant entrant are dismissed and (in some cases) defended by sections of SA’s public as acceptable, it gets blacks thinking whites are defending one of their own, because to them racism is acceptable. That racism can always be forgiven.
Floyd’s death clearly shows racism is unforgivable and lethal. South Africans must take note that recruiting police officers and soldiers into structures with norms and standards developed during apartheid will one day blow up in the same way that America is blowing up now.
One day, defending the racist views of a 14-year-old will spark riots that will have the country regretting it never addressed its inequalities.
Racism is ugly and its victims have reached the point where they are telling the world: “This far and no further.”
Sydney Majoko.
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