Helen Zille in conversation with Sunday Times. [Picture: TimesLIVE]
Helen Zille has weighed in on the latest racism row, saying people should not invent racism in instances where it did not exist. But, she said, real instances of racism needed to be dealt with.
Answering a question from Mike Siluma on Sunday Times’s Politics Weekly podcast, she said while there was “genuine racism” in the country, people should not resort to victimhood to find excuses for not taking charge of their own lives.
“There’s a comfort for many people in finding every situation as a situation in which they were the victim. In this whole philosophy [of critical race theory], victimhood is very prized. If you’re a victim, you’ve got virtue and you’re a good person; there’s an evil villain who’s put you in that place, that binary,” she said.
Zille’s comments came amidst at least two alleged instances of racial bias at schools. In one instance, learners at a school in Cape Town were recorded ‘selling’ their Black classmates in a mock auction. In another, an apparent Whites-only WhatsApp group caused a stir at a school in Pretoria.
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‘Whites targeted too’
The chairperson of the Democratic Alliance’s (DA) Federal Council suggested that if people wanted to talk about racism, they should also be willing to acknowledge racism targeted towards Whites, a minority in the country.
“There’s a huge amount of racism directed at white people in this country as well. It is not a one-way street. If you go on social media and see what Black people say to White people and about White people, if any White person dared to say that about a Black person, there would be an outcry for weeks – and rightly so.”
Asked whether she believed racism needed to be dealt with, even three decades after apartheid formally ended, she agreed. But she insisted that even while dealing with racism where it existed, “we shouldn’t be inventing it.”
“There is such a thing as a microaggression, but it’s not something to expel a student from school about. Deal with it. Talk it through. Don’t see racism where it doesn’t exist and invent it. Lots of things can be explained in totally different ways other than racism.”
She warned a culture of playing the race card would have a detrimental effect on the development of a cohesive, non-racial South Africa.
“This culture of being able to blame others, especially on a racial basis and especially because it’s got credence in history, is going to be a terrible break on our society,” she added.
