Who, among us, does not know racism is bad for democracy, for our country, for victims and perpetrators, be they individuals or corporate entities? Unless someone has been under a rock, there’ll be very few. Yet racist incidents flow like a steady, unyielding current.
In the latest example, a teacher screams: “I will never wake up liking coloureds like you because you guys are rude; you guys don’t have manners. You will come and teach that trashy child of yours.” The response from another parent was equally mind-boggling: “You racist pig!”
First things first: on what basis would a teacher exclude a coloured child from history classes? And why is the child a piece of “trash?” Since when do all coloured people behave the same to warrant “you guys are rude, you guys don’t have manners”?
Even if the teacher will “never wake up liking coloured people”, which is shameful, the teacher is still expected to act professionally. There is no room for bigoted individuals in our classrooms. The toxic racism they feed our innocent children — the future of our country — should not be allowed space in our education system. The fact that the teacher and the granny became embroiled in a shouting match in front of schoolchildren is uneducational, to say the least.
You’d say we would, 28 years after the fall of our racist past, be on the same page. The wars about languages in our schools have been bruising.
As an elder, we also expect the granny to know better, even when she’s wronged. She could have escalated her complaint to the school principal or even to Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi, who has proactively dealt with similar complaints in the past. Similarly, the teacher ought to have known better than to lock the child out of her class. Assuming she believed in the correctness of her actions, she could have asked the principal to address the angry parent.
Recently, Natalie Donaldson, head of teaching and learning at SA College of Applied Psychology (Sacap), said SA teachers were never prepared to manage diversity after the dawn of democracy. There were no programmes to help teachers manage changing classrooms. Managing diversity in the SA school context, Donaldson noted, meant more than just paying attention to race, religion, language, gender, culture to more nuanced factors such as beliefs, interests, personalities, thoughts and actions.
Yet, we still fail to attend to the most basic of these: race relations. You’d say we would, 28 years after the fall of our racist past, be on the same page. The wars about languages in our schools have been bruising. The politics of black hair in schools has led to protests. Admissions to schools remains a major struggle, made worse by covert race considerations for many parents. Can you imagine a teacher who believes “you guys are rude ... have no manners” being responsible for admissions at a school?
Racism has, in our country, been dealt with publicly, there have been many incidents, many investigations and admonitions meted out publicly, but why do we slack in rooting out this demon of racism? Are the punishments perhaps too lenient? Or do we just need healing from our very dark past? As we wrestle with change and diversity , it is important, particularly in school environments, to ensure we encourage integration while dealing very harshly with bigots.
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