Interesting discussion I had with a (white) collegue of mine today. I am tasked with conducting a survey for some reasearch that our company is doing and at the top of the questionnaire, it states that a participant must fill in all demographic details including race. This collegue of mine pointed out something which I also had a problem with when the questionnaire was drafted. In the boxes where one is suppopsed to state what race they belong to, the options are: African, White, Indian, coloured and other. This colleague of mine being white, ticked the next to African and the lady next to him looked puzzled and asked him why he ticked the African box and he replied and said that he is African. He was born in Africa, and so were his parents and his grandparents and for that reason he identifies himslef as an African. He also says that his children also call themselves Africans and he encorages them to do that all the time. The discussion then got more interesting because we ended up asking ourselves a question which in my view, is quite necessary in our culturally diverse country. What is an African or how can you identify an African? Is being African limited to a persons skin colour and or cultural practices or is there another criterion which makes one an African?
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 11:03:05 +0000