CHRIS ROPER: So the DA does see race, after all
For a party that has embraced nonracialism, the DA is now flirting with the trope of the white farmer as a particular type of victim of violence in SA
On May 1 2012, I was walking between 6th and 8th avenues in New York, on my way to a meeting at The New York Times. Some hard rain had left the humidity at 88%, and everything felt steamy and uncertain.Standing outside one of those typical neighbourhood greengrocers that dot the city, dressed in a frayed coat with the blackness bleached out of it, in scuffed high heels and layers of frothy skirts and carrying a handbag heavy with tired gold embroidery, was an old woman shouting imprecations at passersby.As I shuffled past, she said to me, angrily: "I’m not a Jewish woman! I’m a human being."For some reason, this encounter has haunted me. I’ve got no idea what trail of sadness and toil led her to this dirty sidewalk, or why she felt the need to deny one identity and assert another, but I thought of her again this week when I read about the DA’s new(ish) self-definition as "a liberal party committed to nonracialism, a market economy, and a capable state".I thought about her, not becau...
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