LETTER: SA shows failures of racial redress

Further to Ruth Muller’s condemnation of my previous letter as “a sad display of ignorance”, without the benefit of any factual evidence, I note US President Joe Biden’s determination to appoint an African American woman to the US Supreme Court (“Sad display of ignorance”, January 25).

As a president whose inaugural address promised to unite the country, Biden is doing a pretty good job at achieving the opposite. Pace, Ms Muller, this display of presidential brilliance didn’t originate from Martin Luther King, who I seem to remember saying: “Judge a man not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character.”

Dr King understood that the racist scourge couldn’t be beaten with more racism, albeit with a different focus, and that “positive discrimination” could not exist.

Biden’s determination is therefore far more in line with the earlier verbalisations of Malcolm Little, Muller’s “fighter for racial justice and redress”. It’s the redress bit that especially worries me.

If Biden is still capable of joining the dots he only needs to see what racial “redress”, positive discrimination, BEE and cadre deployment have achieved in SA to see how the chips will fall in the good old USA.

James Cunningham
Camps Bay

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.​