In 2011, the Pretoria-based Institute of Security Studies reported that seven women a day were murdered in South Africa. A 2009 survey by the Medical Research Council found that 46 percent of men in three major districts of the country admitted to having raped a woman or a girl. Despite formal gender equality in the South African Constitution, as Tanya Charles of the Johannesburg-based Sonke Gender Justice Project put it, This is not an unusual story; this is how men are behaving [in our country]. On the other hand, accepting Pistorius version of events speaks to another aspect of South African violence: coded race- and class-based behavior. If Pistorius was responding to an intruder, racial logic powered his trigger finger. The unstated code in Pistorius account is what Michelle Alexander refers to as colorblindness in the United States - racialized behavior described in race-neutral tones. Thus, a black intruder was the so-far-unstated specter in Pistorius story, legitimizing his hail-of-bullets response. The fear that pervaded apartheid society is now expressed in class terms: visions of poor people scaling those massive walls that surround nearly every suburban home in South Africa. These poor people are almost all black: the disenfranchised folks whom democracy was supposed to benefit, the same folks whose daily protests about lack of water, housing and electricity have called led researcher Peter Alexander to label unrest a ticking time bomb in South Africa. Pistoriuss defense plays into the fears this inequality stokes. His legal strategy parallels what US analysts call the racial hoax, where white defendants try to conceal their guilt by blaming a fictitious black suspect whose race makes the act of criminality more believable. --By James Kilgore
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 15:40:14 +0000
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