a racism by any other name…

two days ago my bossman Darin told me about this story where a dad had picked up his young kid in the laundromat and stuffed him in a washing machine and closed the door [presumably as a joke or to teach him a lesson] but once the door locked the washing machine jumped into life and they couldn’t stop it or get him out until someone who worked at the place ran up and unplugged it and eventually managed to save the child. The child was apparently mostly fine [except maybe for the trauma suffered by your dad almost killing you in a washing machine]…

then yesterday i was at the gym, running on the treadmill in front of a wall of tvs and the incident came on two different channels which were showing news. sure enough the dad stuffed the kid into the machine and it suddenly starts and both parents frenetically try to stop the machine and the guy comes and stops it. it happened just as i had been told, except one thing really took me by surprise.

i decided to test out my theory on two people as we walked to the office yesterday and so i mentioned that i had seen the story on the tv and asked what colour the parents were. without hesitation they both answered “white” which is exactly what i had imagined. only thing is i had been wrong. what surprised me about the video was that it looked like a so-called african-american family [athough definitely a family of colour] and what surprised me was that in my head only a white family would be stupid enough to do something like that.

does that make me racist? it definitely would if it had gone the other way… but that made me think along with a lot of this Brett Murray ‘The Spear’ painting stuff that has been going on in South Africa and this amazing article which called a lot of it for what it was.

Four lines from that article carry the heart of where this whole racism-calling thing has gotten a little bit out of control:

I’m not shouting at you because you’re black, I’m shouting because you’re a maniac on the roads who is a danger to society.

I’m not complaining to your manager because you’re black. I’m complaining because you’re an incompetent moron who is incapable of doing her job properly.

I’m not firing you because you’re black. I’m firing you because you’re a thief.

I’m not confronting you because your black, I’m shouting at you because you’re a messy pig who expects other people to clean up your mess.

Each of those incidents [maniac on road, incompetent at job, thief, litterer] if they had occurred with someone of the same race calling out someone of the same race it would have been an incident of whatever is in brackets [parenthesis to the americanese] but because it was a white person calling a black person that [and i’m guessing vice versa] it suddenly becomes a race thing.

there is a lot more to say on this issue but hopefully this incident has at least got people thinking about it. are stereotypes racism or do they exist, much like cliches, because they are true a lot of the time? and while it is unfair to generalise with a stereotype or cliche and judge everyone as that thing, it is maybe not necessarily racist to be aware of or mention them.

i don’t think it was a big deal that i assumed the washing machine dad was white. i think it just was what it was. we could progress a lot further in this world, life, country if we started looking a lot more at what is as opposed to what could be suggested/read into/taken as…

your thoughts?

[late add: found out today that it was a babysitter and her boyfriend and not the kids parents who put the baby into the machine – story is here]

oh shucks, you’re racist!

so my good friend megan – who i used to watch bad movies with (not bad as in naughty, but we used to on occasion find something that would more than likely be awful and watch it and usually have one or two classic lines that would be private joke humour and that i would occasionally sneak into a sermon in church so megan would just break into raucous laughter and everyone would think she was a crazy lady – ah good times) samessed me the other day to say let’s go watch the latest Leon Shuster movie ‘Shucks Shabalala’s Guide to um something something safety South Africa something’

now just to set the context i used to really love LS movies back in the day but ever since he started combining genuinely pranking people with a scripted movie it has never worked for me and movies like Mr Bones and so on have been incredibly painful (when he was just doing candid camera type movies they rocked but the combo always has you wondering how much is scripted) so i was not super amped but i hadn’t seen the trailer so i didn’t know quite how bad it should be expected to be being so i said yes (cos hanging with megs is always good for a laugh or laughs of the plural variety)

and so we saw it and the candid camera stuff was absolutely flippin brilliant and you should really go and see it. and the scripted stuff was absolutely painfully awfully bad and was like someone rubbing a cheese grater against a black board (if that is worse than just nails – it seems like it should be worse). It was just horrible… but fortunately the candid camera stuff (which included taking on Helen Zille, Alan Boesak and Rob van Vuuren) was top top class. getting people in to apply make-up to a dead person who turned out not to be quite so dead… just go see the movie and go pee during the two songs.

but the one part of the movie that was really horrible to watch was the intense racism. the candid camera stuff where people get scared (giant snakes, ‘dead’ bodies, out of control wheelchair-bikes, traffic cops) was fantastic. but then Shuster got dressed up in his trademark black or Indian person disguises and some of it brought out some intense racism in people. then at the end he reveals it’s him and the person laughs and they hug and it’s all good and fun and whatever… but i’m sitting there thinking ‘dood’ (in my best dj Fresh impression) – you just showed to the whole of south africa and maybe the world (cos somehow in SA this movie is going to do better than Avatar, Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes combined – ai!) what a complete and utter racist you are and a smile and hug at the end (with a guy who is not actually black) doesn’t change the fact of who you showed yourself to be

yeah it was really sad actually and i am embarrassed that people like that still exist in that way and wonder if someone could actually give them the opportunity to leave…

“it’s my way! there is no highway option” – Vin Diesl in The Pacifier

pome: raiSIN, the dead!

cold, haunting wind blows effortlessly

against the backdrop of the eerie silence

composing illusions of an ominous chill

creeping ever closer

corrupting everything in its path

silhouetted shadows cast their gaze

upon the still, small body

that lies unmoving on the table edge

cold and lifeless, you lie there

tiny shrivelled body

unwanted, unclaimed

just a pathetic testimony

to your own immense waste of an existence

of space.

black and squishy

mercilessly discarded

stepped on

expiring without so much as a whimper

although possibly expressing the subtle hint of a whine