Schools are a mirror of society.
And Children learn the prejudices of their parents.

If society is sick, racist, corrupt, self-serving & full of hate then schools will teach & multiply that cancer.

#Brackenfell

We shouldn’t be surprised South Africa is now locked into a race-row at a school.

Our society is locked into race issues everywhere else.

Churches, sports clubs, night clubs, suburban house clubs ... & even news are often demographically distributed on race.

There is also this naive belief that “our children don’t see colour”.

That’s nonsense.
No person born or raised in a society so obsessed with either protecting its racial privilege or upending it can be colour blind.

So parents, you are ones teaching your children to be racist.

How do you talk about other races at the braais, the taxis, sports field or choir hall?

What are you saying?
How are you depicting the humanity of others?

While the jury is out on whether or not human beings can ever exist without hating “otherness”, what we know for sure is that human beings will always find a way to teach discrimination & hatred.

Point: why have we not focused our attention on the parents of the learners?

Not to attack or victimize them, but to understand how they see the world.

Whether you believe the incident was racist or not, you must ask how a group of learners could have been so numb to the inclusion sensitivities of our country that they either willfully or not didn’t see this coming.

And if they are that numb to those sensitivities over a matric dance, what about sports, access to facilities, an inclusive economy, transformation?

I would venture to say that most of the learners haven’t meaningfully reached out the to the other side.

And this is the biggest problem:

Our society is made up of those that simply want to enjoy their position in society without recognizing the suffering or depravity of those across the railway line.

A suffering for which they did not volunteer.

A society without empathy can never address inherent structural injustices.

Never.

We can’t make the issue about a single school.

It’s about all of society.

VT

And perhaps the missed opportunity is the opportunity to listen to others.

Just listen. Listen to their account of the truth, listen to their hurt & (even if you don’t agree) listen to understand.

Police enforce the law. They don’t facilitate nation building.

So, the deployment of the police with escalate this issue.

Where is the principal & why has he/she not taken the centre stage. Prof Jansen did this. Yes he was criticized.

But the tensions were managed.

This is not going to end well.

If there is a single lesson from the collapse of apartheid it is this, the numbers of the masses & their emotional relent will always trump the might of the state.

Always.