The protests in the USA about the killing of a member of the local community in Ferguson are not difficult to understand. Try and understand it in the following way: when blacks were freed from slavery, they were freed to become second-class citizens in an almost exclusively white world. These patterns hardened over time and inasmuch as they reveal a (disturbingly) racist side of the USA, it is the conflation of race and class that bothers me the most. If blacks were the economic equals of whites, this shit would not happen. So while we are all angry, I understand that the lack of economic ability continues to bite hard for blacks in the USA, as it does in the RSA (in spite of the brown and black diamonds who have made it). And like the USA, our economy needs to preserve an under-class in order for the horrible patterns of the past to be sustained. And the penalty for being poor: well, people take pot shots at you in the USA and in SA, those of us with cars, we habitually kill pedestrians! Tell me, how different is this UNDERLYING thinking from what the Germans did to Jews, gays and blacks?
Posted on: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 10:01:15 +0000
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