Wednesday 12 August 2015

Curro School and it's racism

This a originally by Khaya S Sithole. Taken from his Facebook wall.



"In 2002, Bridget Majola delivered a speech titled 'The condition of native is a nervous condition'. Since then, my interpretation of racial discourse has been influenced by the appreciation that removing the physical & structural manifestations of racism is nothing more than a tentative step towards fixing the problem. What remains an enduring challenge is to enable the mind of one race to acknowledge its scope of privileges & inherent advantages that exist within a broken society. Until there is transformation of the mind itself - the concept of discrimination persists. Curro School recently found itself at the epicentre of racial tension due to its policy of splitting students on the basis of 'language' (the linguistic defence to racism). So naturally - Curro decided to fix its racist image by creating a 'Zulu Day' at their Hillcrest campus. Then it went wrong. Curro decided to tell its white students that on this Zulu day, they needed to collect all their gardeners & domestic workers & bring them to the school. (The ability to avoid vomiting as I write this is a testimony to my elevated capacity for tolerating nonsense).
5 weeks ago, I stormed out of an AGM when 1 eminent member decided to express that white people couldn't give a damn about transformation. Days later, one of my brighter students highlighted that the problem was not primarily the man himself but the fact that he & I were part of a forum that had made him believe that such statements were acceptable to begin with.
How Curro has managed to exist within such an utopia of manufactured ignorance is a problem with Curro itself - & an even bigger problem with a society that has allowed Curro to believe that racial reconciliation simply requires them to teach children that a grand parade of black workers onto a campus they could never afford is the 'racism fix'.
That's the easy part. The challenging part of this is that if I had started off this diatribe by saying '100 gardeners & domestic workers were in my office this morning...' - every honest black person reading that statement would expect the 100 to be black. So who is more damaged in this society?"

Now this me of the blog I did not so long ago "Racism is a White Problem"