Racism is bigger than its North American definition.

      In February comments about Coloured people by black socialite and column writer Kuli Roberts caused an uproar in South Africa and eventually led to her column being cancelled by her newspaper. Among her comments were the following:

 Coloured girls are the future for various reasons:
You will never run out of cigarettes.
You will always be assured of a large family as many of these girls breed as if Allan Boesak sent them on a mission to increase the coloured race.
They always know where to get hair curlers and wear them with pride, even in shopping malls.
You don’t have to listen to those clicks most African languages have. 

 Comments attributed to a friend:
They drink Black Label beer and smoke like chimneys.

They shout and throw plates.

They have no front teeth and eat fish like they are trying to deplete the ocean.

They love to fight in public and most are very violent.

They’re always referring to your mother’s this or your mother’s that.

They know exactly what tik is. (tik is a drug common in poor areas of Cape Town) 


You can read the full text on this website (the newspaper has retracted it):
http://www.wonted.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1334:tshiamo&catid=925:tune-news&Itemid=38

The following article discusses her column as well as other racist comments towards Coloured people.
http://mg.co.za/article/2011-02-28-weekly-kuli-roberts-column-to-be-discontinued
"In 2005 the spokesperson for City of Cape Town, the late Blackman Ngoro, was fired after referring to coloureds as 'beggars, homeless and drunk on cheap wine'."


"Roberts' column comes amidst a furore over remarks made about coloureds by government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi.
 Manyi, then the director-general of labour, said in a show broadcast on KykNet's Robinson Regstreeks in March 2010 that there was an "over supply" of coloureds in the Western Cape."



            Manyi's comments are viewed by some in the light of the ANC's inability to win elections in the Western Cape, which is partially the case because some coloured people (who predominantly live in the Western Cape) feel marginalized by the ANC. Trevor Manuel, a minister in government, responded with the following open letter:
http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/trevor-manuel-s-open-letter-to-jimmy-manyi-1.1034606
"I have never waged any battle from the premise of an epithet that apartheid sought to attach to me but I will do battle against the harm you seek to inflict. When I do so, it is not as a coloured but as a non-racist determined to ensure that our great movement and our constitution are not diluted through the actions of racists like you."
"  I now know who Nelson Mandela was talking about when he said from the dock that he had fought against white domination and that he had fought against black domination.

Jimmy, he was talking about fighting against people like you." 

                Now at this point, unless you are South African, you're probably confused with the usage of coloured and black, so  I've added a few links as background knowledge (Wikipedia will do for a basic introduction, but feel free to do your own research!). In post-apartheid South Africa,  black  is legally used to refer to communities disadvantaged during Apartheid and thus also includes Coloured and Indian people. (In 2008, Chinese South Africans  campaigned for and won legal black status in order to benefit from black empowerment policies, but that's really too much information for this post!) In the articles above, though, black refers specifically to people of Bantu origin. 


Quick definitions:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_peoples:
Bantu also is used as a general label for 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa of speakers of Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa.

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan :
Khoisan (also spelled Khoesaan, Khoesan or Khoe-San) is a unifying name for two ethnic groups of Southern Africa, who share physical and putative linguistic characteristics distinct from the Bantu majority of the region.
 The San include the original inhabitants of Southern Africa before the southward Bantu migrations from Central and East Africa reached their region, leading to Bantu farmers replacing the Khoi and San as the predominant population. 
 The Bantu people, with advanced agriculture and metalworking technology developed in West Africa from at least 2000 BC, outcompeted and intermarried with the Khoisan in the years after contact and became the dominant population of Southeastern Africa before the arrival of the Dutch in 1642.

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured
In the South African, Namibian, Zambian, Botswana and Zimbabwean context, the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense, Kleurlinge or Bruin Afrikaners in Afrikaans) refers or referred to an ethnic group of mixed-race people who possess some sub-Saharan African ancestry but not enough to be considered Black under the law of South Africa. Genetic studies suggest the group has the highest levels of mixed ancestry in the world. However, the maternal (female) contribution to the Coloured population, measured by mitochondrial DNA studies, was found to come mostly from the Khoisan population.

                                                  Distribution of Coloured People in South Africa



Genetic studies:
 1. Strong Maternal Khoisan Contribution to the South African Coloured   
                                 Population: A Case of  Gender Biased Admixture
       The overall picture of gender-biased admixture depicted in this study indicates that the modern South African Coloured population results mainly from the early encounter of European and African males with autochthonous Khoisan females of the Cape of Good Hope around 350 years ago.                        

 (The American Journal of Human Genetics,  Volume 86, Issue 4, 611-620, 25 March 2010)                        http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297%2810%2900096-0

2. Journey of Mankind: A great visualization of the spread of Homo sapiens over the planet based on mitochondrial  and Y-chromosome markers. It takes about 10 minutes if you read all the extra information.
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

             Important to this post is that proto-Khoisan people arrived in Southern Africa over a 100 000 years ago. The Bantu migration from Central Africa started approximately 1000 BC and reached Southern Africa around 300 AD, gradually displacing the Khoisan from the northern parts of South Africa with their more advanced agricultural production techniques and weapons made of iron as opposed to bone/stone. The significance of  the lack of paternal Khoisan-DNA in coloured people's genes in terms of their power relations with Europeans and the Bantu is fairly obvious. 

           So, what's the point? Surely this is ancient history and irrelevant today.
 But is it? Let's travel to Botswana...

"Jumanda Galekebone, of the advocacy group First People of the Kalahari, was raised traditionally - learning to hunt and live in symbiosis with nature on the world's second-largest reserve.
'I am very sad and desperate,' he said. 'The government is racist. To them, the Bushman is nothing."

"Galekebone's sentiments are fuelled by statements such as those of Botswana President Ian Khama, who said the Bushmen's hunting lifestyle was an 'archaic fantasy.'
Khama's predecessor Festus Mogae termed the people as 'Stone Age creatures who must change or otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish."
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/africa/features/article_1614852.php/Waiting-for-water-Bushmen-denied-wells-by-Botswana

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0416_030416_san2.html

http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen




        The question then is whether this is a case of Freire's oppressed turning into the oppressor,  a continuation of precolonial Khoisan displacement by the Bantu,  just another example of post-Neolithic/ post-industrial society grabbing land from hunter-gatherers (see the Survival International link above for more), or whether it's an example of the callousness of the diamond industry. Quite possibly it is all of the above. What no !Kung would  question though, is that it is an attempt to dehumanize them, and that was also the reaction of Coloured people to the statements by Roberts and Manyi.

         Racism is virtually always seen through a  North American prism, and Hollywood determines which discussions are relevant;  usually they focus on issues simple enough not to confuse the general population. Commendable as it is to try and penetrate one's own problems, generalizing the black/white dichotomy internationally provides a convenient cloak for non-white oppressors  to hide the nature of their actions. The real issue at hand is power and the abuse thereof, and when power is used to dehumanize and discriminate against a specific population, I consider it racism.