A child in a poor community near Cape Town is hit on the hit with a hammer for taking a playmate's packet of chips. This attack caused reported gross damage and he is seriously ill in hospital. The alleged perpetrator is the playmate's father.
This type of incident is commonplace in South Africa, so common it's relegated to the inner pages of newspapers, or completely ignored. (I recently reported this incident in a letter to the Cape Argus. As far as I can tell they didn't report on it, and neither did they publish my letter.)
But racism and alleged racism are latched upon as the worse thing ever to have happened. The outrage, particularly on social media, is exaggerated and self-perpetuating - for example, recently where a (black) waiter identified patrons as "blacks" - and is often fanned on by the media's breathless, over-the-top coverage.
In a recent article former UOFS rector and now Stanford fellow Jonathan Jansen asked "why are we outraged by racism and not rape"?
"Why do some of South Africa‘s horrors receive less attention than others? Where is the social media outrage about this vicious gang-rape that has left a young girl scarred for the rest of her life? Is it because rape ranks lower than racism on the sensitivity barometer of South African society?"
The same applies to prevalent violence, abuse and cruelty tendentious media, analysts, Human Rights Commission, etc choose not to dwell on because, as I think, there's not much political capital to be made.
As Jansen says, "My sense is that we simply do not care as much about rape as we do about racism, or many other crimes, especially when it comes to ordinary people in impoverished communities."
This type of incident is commonplace in South Africa, so common it's relegated to the inner pages of newspapers, or completely ignored. (I recently reported this incident in a letter to the Cape Argus. As far as I can tell they didn't report on it, and neither did they publish my letter.)
But racism and alleged racism are latched upon as the worse thing ever to have happened. The outrage, particularly on social media, is exaggerated and self-perpetuating - for example, recently where a (black) waiter identified patrons as "blacks" - and is often fanned on by the media's breathless, over-the-top coverage.
In a recent article former UOFS rector and now Stanford fellow Jonathan Jansen asked "why are we outraged by racism and not rape"?
"Why do some of South Africa‘s horrors receive less attention than others? Where is the social media outrage about this vicious gang-rape that has left a young girl scarred for the rest of her life? Is it because rape ranks lower than racism on the sensitivity barometer of South African society?"
The same applies to prevalent violence, abuse and cruelty tendentious media, analysts, Human Rights Commission, etc choose not to dwell on because, as I think, there's not much political capital to be made.
As Jansen says, "My sense is that we simply do not care as much about rape as we do about racism, or many other crimes, especially when it comes to ordinary people in impoverished communities."
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