The roots of racism run deep
PETER BRUCE: Another fight, in black and white ...
We need to crush our sense of achievement and success and see things for what they really are
It seems a column I wrote in Business Day the other day has produced another one of those remarkable coalitions of outrage that I suspect may only happen in SA — classic liberals and old Afrikaner Nats. My sin is basically “political correctness” in that I criticised Helen Zille’s tweet about some parts of colonialism being positive and went on to describe how people of her and my vintage, white South Africans of European descent, carry deep within our cultures the racism that made, for Europeans of the time, the transatlantic slave trade, the colonising of vast parts of the earth and, in SA, apartheid not seem quite so bad. Helpful even.I don’t think there is anything strange about this assertion. We all come from one or other culture and each culture has its idiosyncrasies. The culture of Western Europe, while in many ways admirable, also came to the conclusion that it was superior to black people. It probably had something to do with the rise of Christianity and the expulsion fro...
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