So we all read the judge, jury and executioner headlines trumpeting that Stanford had sent a RACIST e-mail; “DA racist e-mail fury” in Monday’s Herald.
I eventually got hold of the e-mail sent out by Slabbert and, surprise surprise it had the exact same wording as that on the blog I found on the News24 Site, titled The 2014 Elections, attributed to ‘Susie’ and published on 1 June 2013 at 08:36.
Now that word racist bothers me a bit so I exercised my maths brain on the e-mail forwarded by Stanford and counted the number of times the words black, coloured, indian and white were mentioned. Reasoning – if the e-mail was racist then it would contain many references to people of a colour different to Slabbert, who is white (and not African like me!).
The number of times the different race groups was mentioned appears below:
- Black – 0
- Coloured – 0
- Indian – 1
- White – 1
The number of times political parties were mentioned:
- ANC – 7
- DA – 0
Help me out here – nowhere do I see words that say that black, coloured or indian people are useless or whatever it is that racist people say about other races.
The only racist type comment I see is about whites being dumb.
I do see a comment about the Indian Mafia which could be construed as xenophobic.
Also there are less than palatable comments about Zimbabweans, Chinese and Nigerians – once again xenophobic.
And I wonder about the context when the writer says that the people who voted the ANC into power are dumb – that means that there are a whole lot of dumb South Africans running around.
The problem in the ANC is that they are struggling with a number of failed policies, their insistence on cadre deployment and their protection of corrupt elements within the party – another case of an extremely good on paper manifesto being ignored methinks. This leads them to falling back on the old tired racist diatribe in order to drum up votes.
At the end of the day big banner headlines judging someone as guilty of being racist sell more newspapers and garner more votes than the real nation building stuff that we all say we want to read but secretely don’t.
My real concern is that maybe Heather and Zandisile are the ones who are blinkered. Heaven forbid that they actually think that the ANC is the exclusive property of one race therefore any criticism of the ANC is racist.
Click here to see the original e-mail contents.
Alan Straton
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Stereotyping – If I vote for the ANC I must be black, If I vote for the DA I must be coloured, white or Indian – very dangerous in this day and age. We are thankfully a free country now, we have freedom of choice, freedom of speech and freedom of association ~ lets keep it that way and try to not get our feathers ruffled if someone points out the grave issues of our country. Lets keep an open mind and an attitude of “How, can I do better?”