scholarly journals Miseducation in South African Public Schooling: the case of To Kill a Mockingbird

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindiwe Maqutu ◽  
Adrian Bellengere
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
Public Schooling ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
South African School ◽  
The Way

A racial incident revolving around the teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird in a South African school has prompted this examination of how set works are implicated in the dissemination race-related beliefs. The way the book is taught, it is argued, cements the continuation of the alienation of blackness by affirming ubiquitous white normativity. It perpetuates the notion that the fault lies in an ‘existential deviation’ that inheres in black people. This examination highlights how, through the purposive propagation of white normality, the book exhibits anti-black sentiments. The sympathetic white psyche that subsists simultaneously with the continuing enjoyment of racial favouritism, is appraised. The stance of the book is confronted by noting the contrived largely absent voices of black people in the narrative. This book positions the black characters as props, for the absolution of the white protagonists (and by proxy sympathetic white people) during circumstances of the unremitting and deadly racial oppression.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly M. Welch
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
South African ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
Trial Court ◽  
Court Records ◽  
Legal Proceedings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Debt Recovery ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Black plaintiffs in civil suits remain a little known aspect of the legal history of the slave South. African Americans were not only observers of trials, informal participants, defendants, or objects of regulation: trial court records reveal them to be prolific litigators as well. They were parties to civil suits in their own interests and directly active in legal proceedings. They sued other black people, certainly, but they also sued white people. What is more, they often won. This is a phenomenon that has largely been overlooked by historians. But it ought not to be, because it speaks to the heart of the ways we understand the operation of power, of law, and of racial hierarchies in the slave South. The black legal experience in America cannot be reduced to white regulation and black criminality. Examining African Americans’ involvement in private law reveals a different picture. Black people appealed to the courts to protect their interests. They exploited the language of rights and property, thus including themselves within an American narrative of citizenship and privilege in advance of formal emancipation. When black litigants made such claims at law, they expected the courts to validate and execute those claims. Indeed, they sought accountability. Thus, seemingly mundane civil actions like debt recovery suits complicate our notions about the sources of rights and their relationship to civic inclusion.

scholarly journals Mostly ‘black’ and ‘white’: ‘Race’, complicity and restitution in the non-fiction of Antjie Krog

Literator ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacomien Van Niekerk
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black People ◽  
Partial Answer ◽  
White People ◽  
White Race ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
The Way

This article analyses the role of ‘race’ in Antjie Krog’s non-fiction trilogy Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2003) and Begging to Be Black (2009). It explores her explicit use of terms such as ‘heart of whiteness’ and ‘heart of blackness’. Claims that Krog essentialises Africa and ‘black’ people are investigated. The article also addresses accusations of racism in Krog’s work. A partial answer to the persistent question of why Krog is so determinedly focused on ‘race’ is sought in the concept of complicity. There is definite specificity in the way Krog writes about ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’ victims in South Africa, but her trilogy should be read within the broader context of international restitution discourses, allowing for a somewhat different perspective on her contribution to the discussion of the issue of whether ‘white’ people belong in (South) Africa.

scholarly journals A Du Boisian Reading of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

2015 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 121-127
Author(s):  
Sediqeh Hosseiny ◽  
Ensieh Shabanirad
Keyword(s):  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Black People ◽  
The Other ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
White People ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Black Characters ◽  
Different Types

Due to the color of their skins, Blacks were always subject to different types of disrespect and insecurity in their society. Among different groups of people, writers and critics knew it as their responsibility to act as Black people’s voice and talk on behalf of them, as these people were labeled as ‘The Other’ by the Whites. Du Bios created a kind of new trend of dealing with African-American culture by innovating the concept known as “double consciousness”, and arguing that these black people were trapped between dual personalities. As an American writer, Toni Morrison carried this specific burden upon her shoulders to reveal all those oppressions Blacks had to bear in their life, like what she depicted in the novel The Bluest Eyewith portrayal of the main black character Pecolla who is being blamed for the color of her skin. This article intends to elaborate some inherent postcolonial traces in Toni Morrison’s outstanding novel The Bluest Eye and examine how European power and white people were dominating the whole system of the society and what kind of regretful complications Blacks had to endure, and at the same time working on how Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness can be analyzed in black characters.

REVISITING THE BIRTH OF A NATION AT 100 YEARS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 596-598
Author(s):  
Elaine Frantz Parsons
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Technical Innovation ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Complete Control ◽  
The Past ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The One

D. W. Griffith's seminal 1915 film The Birth of a Nation is often approached as a paradox in that it embodies both an extreme commitment to white supremacy, on the one hand, and technical innovation and artistic vision, on the other. While its technique and aesthetics reached to the modern, revealing the promise of the still-new media of film, its celebration of racial oppression reached to the past, justifying and expressing nostalgia for a world in which white people wielded complete control over black people through a tight combination of natural superiority and unapologetic violence. As the essays in this forum underline, the film's modernism and its celebration of white supremacy not only happily cohabited, but reinforced one another. The film revived elements of nineteenth-century racism, and dressed them in the clothes of the modern.

scholarly journals Construction of American Hunger in Richard Wright's Novel "Black Boy"

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Febrian Ramadhani Setiaji ◽  
Mohamad Ikhwan Rosyidi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Binary Operation ◽  
Black People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Black Boy

This study aims at explaining the construction of American hunger in Richard Wright’s novel Black Boy. This study is a qualitative analysis that relies on the power of word or explanatory reasoning. The data were collected by reading, identifying, classifying and analyzed using the structualism theories which used in this study by relating to binary operation to see the gap between black and white society. The results of this study were the segregation between black and white people in terms of the treatment, power, and superiority that in the end, it  resulted that the black people are being treated different and has no right for freedom. The American Hunger is described in the novel through some events that go in the opposite between black and white people. The tention between them revealed from the different treatment, oppression, discrimination, superiority, and hunger that the black and white people or society experienced. The dominance and the power of the white people had harm the black people in some aspects in their life. Second, American Hunger that was described in the novel was regarded as the desire of the black people when they were living side by side with the white people in America. When the discrimination, segregation, and oppression occurs toward the black people, they satisfied their American hunger by standing agaisnt racial oppression, strengthen the superiority, and against the hunger.   Keywords: American hunger; construction; discrimination; structuralism

What Did She Just Say?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damali Ayo
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Black People ◽  
White People ◽  
The Way

damali ayo turns on her recorder as she confronts her interlocutors with performance art. She asks paint store employees to match her brown flesh tone. She sits on the sidewalk and collects reparations for slavery, handing over any contributions from white people to equally surprised black people. As you might imagine, interesting things get said along the way. damali secretly records that dialogue. Producer Dmae Roberts turns those recordings, and damali’s reflections on them, into radio. It’s anything but conventional journalism, but damali firmly believes she’s delivering the news.

scholarly journals Racial Oppression, Black Consciousness and the Quest for Freedom in Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 1415-1420
Author(s):  
Babacar Diakhaté
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
Black Consciousness ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
White People ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
Liberation Struggle ◽  
The City

The white South African capitalist system deprived the rural population of their lands. This deprivation of their cultivating lands engendered the displacement of the proletariat class to the city to find a better life. In 1946, Peter Abrahams released Mine Boy to denounce the exploitation and oppression of the blacks by white people. This article aims at castigating the inhuman treatment reserved for Xuma, a village rural boy who goes to Johannesburg to improve his economic situation in the mine. Xuma’s predicaments and Johannes and Chris’ deaths in the mines illustrate the brutal attitudes of the white bosses towards their mineworkers. The rising consciousness of the mineworkers leads them to a perpetual liberation struggle that finally ends in their historical freedom.

Are courts going out of their way to accommodate RACISTS? A critique of South African Revenue Service v Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration and Others

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thulani Nkosi ◽  
Neo Mahlako
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
South African ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Black People ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Racial Oppression ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
The Law

ABSTRACT The article critically examines the way in which the Constitutional Court dealt with the issue of racism in South African Revenue Service v Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration and others 2017 (1) SA 549 (CC). Invoking general legal principles blended with critical race theory, we show that the apex court erred in finding that an employee who had racially abused his superior by referring to him as a kaffir needed to be compensated for a dismissal that arose from such racial abuse. We show that even with a finding that the dismissal was procedurally unfair, existing legal principles, racial justice and social transformation imperatives negated the court making a finding that compensation was due to the employee. The racism involved was so vile and brazen that a compensation award was not only inappropriate in the circumstances but had the consequence of sending a wrong message to the general public, black people in particular, that the law and the courts are still tolerant of racists and racism. Ordinary black people are likely to read the judgment as the law rewarding racists for being racist. The article calls upon the courts to take racism and the racial oppression of black people seriously by acting firmly against those found guilty of racial abuse. Keywords: Racism; colour-blindness; workplace racial oppression; racial justice; judicial choice; social transformation; exceptions to procedural fairness.

Free but fragile: Human relations amidst poverty and HIV in democratic South Africa

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-94
Author(s):  
Christina Landman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black People ◽  
Hiv Treatment ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
White People ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Black Township

Dullstroom-Emnotweni is the highest town in South Africa. Cold and misty, it is situated in the eastern Highveld, halfway between the capital Pretoria/Tswane and the Mozambique border. Alongside the main road of the white town, 27 restaurants provide entertainment to tourists on their way to Mozambique or the Kruger National Park. The inhabitants of the black township, Sakhelwe, are remnants of the Southern Ndebele who have lost their land a century ago in wars against the whites. They are mainly dependent on employment as cleaners and waitresses in the still predominantly white town. Three white people from the white town and three black people from the township have been interviewed on their views whether democracy has brought changes to this society during the past 20 years. Answers cover a wide range of views. Gratitude is expressed that women are now safer and HIV treatment available. However, unemployment and poverty persist in a community that nevertheless shows resilience and feeds on hope. While the first part of this article relates the interviews, the final part identifies from them the discourses that keep the black and white communities from forming a group identity that is based on equality and human dignity as the values of democracy.

The Reflection of Apartheidic Trauma / Traumatic Apartheid in None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 328
Author(s):  
Şahin KIZILTAŞ
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black People ◽  
Native People ◽  
Nadine Gordimer ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
White People ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Violence Victimization ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Almost All

The world has gone through a trauma for centuries. Almost all nations have experienced all sorts of traumatic events and feelings in this period. Among those nations, the black seem to be the most unlucky and ill-fated suffered from traumatic disasters. However, among those black nations, the natives of South Africa have been the most piteous and wretched ones. Their misfortune began in 1652 with the arrival of white colonists in the country. Since then, the oppression and persecution of white European colonists and settlers on natives increasingly continued. Those native people were displaced from the lands inherited from their ancestors a few centuries ago. They were not allowed to have equal rights with white people and to share same environment in public premises. The natives have put up resistance against the racial and colonial practices of white settlers which excluded them from all living spaces; yet, they could not manage, even they came into power in 1994. Today their exclusion and violence victimization still go on and they are still subjected to inferior treatment by (post)colonial dominant white powers. As a white intellectual and writer who had European origins, Nadine Gordimer witnessed the repression and torturing of European settlers on native people in South Africa. In her novels, she has reflected the racial discrimination practiced by white people who have considered of themselves in a superior position compared to the black. This study aims to focus on how Gordimer has reflected the trauma which the black people of South Africa have experienced as a consequence of racist practices. This will contribute to clarify and get across the real and true-life traumatic narratives of native people in the colonized countries.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document