The trouble with Ms Sparrow's remarks...

Anybody who has met me can tell you that I don’t much give a damn about how I look.

So you can imagine my feelings on FW de Klerk’s idea that the trouble with Ms Sparrow’s remarks being that they make whites look like racists.

“The trouble with Ms Sparrow's remarks is that they reinforce black stereotypes of whites as insensitive and supercilious racists.”

I would say that is not the trouble with Ms Sparrow’s remarks, I would say that the trouble with them is that quite frankly too many whites are in fact “insensitive and supercilious racists.”

The fact is that it is not the appearance of a thing that is the problem, it is the thing itself – and so long as we are in denial about it there is no solving it.

This is similar to my problem with a lot of the ANC – we end up with situations where there is denial over our problems until they finally become crisis.

Eskom, health, education, science we all see the warning signs for years and nothing gets done and the problem only gets worse.

Well the same thing happens with racism.

I know far too many black people who have very good English and American accents because that way they can book for a table on the phone to say there isn’t a problem with racism in this country.

And saying that the problem is that it reinforces a stereotype? Sorry that doesn’t work for me.

We have around 25% unemployment in South Africa, we have empowerment going backwards in our top companies, we have a drought, we have service delivery problems, we have a healthcare crisis, our education system is weak, our president treats our country like a laughing stock.

And we still have this stuff going on where people think it is acceptable to call other people monkeys, to give other people worse service, to provide worse products because of skin tone.

Racism compounds every other problem we have,  because it prevents us dealing with every other problem we have. We spend our lives trying to build our country using our feet, because our hands are wrapped around each others' throats.

And I am sick of it.

It is not that these statements divide us that is the problem – these statements show that we’re already divided. It is the fact that instead of acting to solve the illness we bemoan the most obvious and blatant symptoms.