Rugby, race, and privilege

For the last few days I’ve been seeing a lot of comments about something that happened recently in the rugby world.

There have been posts on Facebook and tweets on Twitter and people are apparently taking sides and arguing about what happened and the rights and wrongs of the affair.

I haven’t had anything to say about it because I don’t know what happened, other than that someone walked out of a TV studio (“Don’t touch me on my studio!”), but from what I’ve seen everyone is expected to have an opinion about it, whether they know what happened or not.

Perhaps the people who think that everyone should have an opinion about it should reflect on the fact that they are the privileged few, and the debate is taking place among the privileged few.

Rugby is a sport that you can only watch on TV if you are rich enough to afford dsTV Premium, and most South Africans cant afford it, so rugby is likely remain in its privileged niche for the foreseeable future. The hoi polloi aren’t going to get a look in.

Some one once said that rugby is a ruffians’ game played by gentlemen, while soccer is a gentlemen’s game played by ruffians.

And if dsTV (or is it DStv?) have their way, it’s going to stay like that.

So this particular storm in a teacup is strictly a gentlemen’s affair — the privileged talking to the privileged.

Don’t expect the rest of us to have an opinion.

 

 

Fighting racism with racism

For as long as I can remember, when people said that someone is “holier than thou” they mean that that person has a bad attitude.

But in South Africa, we seem to think that “unholier than thou” is a good attitude, and people seem to be vying with each other to see who can be the most racist.

Racism been around for a long time, but it it is no longer enshrined in legislation. We are no longer obliged by law to be racist. There is no compulsion to be racist, yet people seem to be taking it upon themselves to promote racism, and even boast about it.

Last Saturday I saw a link to this article: Rhodes must fall leader refuses to tip waitress because of race. South Africa responds by collecting money to tip her! – Good Things Guy:

Ntokozo Qwabe bragged online that he and a friend made the woman cry ‘typical white tears’ after writing on the bill ‘we will give tip when you return the land’.

The incident, in a cafe in South Africa, provoked a fierce backlash from critics who branded him a ‘hypocrite’.

Ntokozo, 24, is one of the leaders of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which campaigned to remove a statue of the 19th Century imperialist from Oriel College.

When I saw it on Facebook I commented that the student seemed to be channelling Cecil Rhodes — it seemed like the kind of “town and gown” snobbery that I suspect was more common in British universities the imperialist era than it is now: the privileged student bullying the disprivileged waitress. Or perhaps he was channelling Flashman.

Notokozo Qwabe, student at Oxford University

But racist snobbery seems as common today as it was in the imperialist era, and that was not the end of it.

I saw an invitation to sign a petition on Avaaz to have Qwabe expelled from Oxford University, and “send him back to the kraal where he belongs”.

So here was someone trying to be more racist than thou.

It’s bad enough for Qwabe to boast about being a racist bully on social media, but here is a someone inviting others to join them in racist snobbery. I noticed that there was a place provided by Avaaz for people to report inapproprate petitions, and I reported that one for “inappropriate language”.

It’s hard to get rid of racism when people are bragging about it, and soliciting it in web petitions. You can’t fight racism by racism. You can’t fight evil with evil. If you try to fight fire by fire you end up with a holocaust.

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21).

 

Privilege and prejudice: the dangers of binary opposition

Someone posted this graphic on Facebook this morning, and like many such things it paints a simplistic picture of the world in terms of binary opposition. It portrays a binary opposition between privilege and oppression, and presents them as mutually exclusive.

It’s a lie, and a dangerous one.

Believing such a lie can lead to stereotyping, and stereotyping can lead to prejudice, and prejudice can lead to bigotry, and in some cases it can lead to genocide.

Consider, for example, a child born to rich parents.

Such a child is privileged in enjoying adequate food, housing and clothing, and probably gets a better education than most children.

I don’t think one could deny that the child is privileged.

But the child is living in Germany in 1938, and its parents are Jewish. As a result, the child is bullied at school. Can one say that bullying is not a form of oppression, because the child is privileged, and its problems therefore cannot arise from oppression? I find that a difficult concept, a very difficult concept.

Or look at an example closer to home, for South Africans anyway.

Consider Bram Fischer.

In South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s he was a white Afrikaner male, the most privileged class of all in  that period. He was the son of a judge and the grandson of a prime minister, and his wife was the niece of another prime minister. He was a lawyer, one of the most privileged occupations. So there can be no doubt that he was privileged.

He was also a communist, and after the passing of the Suppression of Communism Act in 1950 communists were oppressed in South Africa. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for promoting the aims of communism, and though he escaped he was recaptured and was only released a fortnight before his death, because he was dying.

Bram Fischer was both privileged and oppressed.

Perhaps one reason that such binary opposition concepts are not difficult is media spin. The media love to promote stereotypes, and to put metaphorical black hats and white hats on people.

Perhaps in my old age I’m getting a bee in my bonnet about media spin. Is it actually getting worse, or is it just that I am getting more and more aware of it, and more obsessed by it?

Another example, now that it is an election year in the US, is the stereotyping of “Evangelicals”. We are told that US Evangelicals are divided — they don’t know whether to vote for Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. It seems inconceivable, to the media at least, that US Evangelicals might just possibly vote for someone else. You’ve heard of Islamophobia, but now there seems to be a growing Evangelicalophobia.

If you’ve been conned into believing the media stereotype of Evangelicals, please read this: So What, Then, Is “American Evangelicalism?”

If the media spin has led you to become prejudiced, or even bigoted about Evangelicals, print it out and read it daily until you are cured.

Another example of the binary opposition mentality surfacing is the recent South African debate about racism. There is no doubt that there has been a lot of racism in South Africa — the system of apartheid could not have lasted as long as it did if there hadn’t been racism, at least among white voters.

But I also believe that there is less racism now than there was. I found this article quite interesting, as it seems to indicate that we are less racist than some of our neighbours, as shown in the accompanying map:

Racism, though diminishing, has been around since before the end of apartheid, and some of the racists are quite vociferous. The white ones have mainly surfaced in the comments sections of online newspapers, where you see them in all their ugliness. The black ones mainly seem to surface on radio talk shows. At least that is where I have mainly encountered them, though if you look and listen carefully you can see that is usually the same people phoning in to the radio station, and the same people commenting on the article today as were commenting last week. They also appear sometimes on social media like Twitter, where I generally become aware of them though the chorus of disapproval of something that one of them has said.

Sometimes reaction against racism tends to promote stereotyping of the “All Xs are racist” or “They’re playing the race card again” kind, and that can lead to more binary opposition thinking. But we don’t have to go down that road. You can find a simple test for your own level or racism here: How racist are you?

Boolean algebra and logic with their simple opposition of True and False can be useful in many fields, such as electronics and computing, but in the field of human behaviour and human characteristics and human relationships, they can lead to some very distorted thinking.