Quote of the week
Early in 2016, a racist outburst by a white woman in KwaZulu-Natal, Penny Sparrow, ridiculing Black beachgoers as ‘monkeys’, and announcing that thenceforth she would ‘address the [B]lacks of South Africa as monkeys’, published in her online profile, was quickly disseminated countrywide. It convulsed South Africa in shame and acrid anger. The [Constitutional] Court was not unaffected. Previous members of the Constitutional Court took comfort in reflecting, with evident satisfaction, on the absence of racially loaded and racially defined splits. Dramatically, these now fractured the Court.
"Rainbows and Realities: Justice Johan Froneman in the Explosive Terrain of Linguistic and Cultural Rights" - Constitutional Court Review
Because in these books [Rachel Cusk] is very specifically exploiting the public conversations of men, which they consider genial and beneficent, but which women very often consider a burden or an intrusion. It is an inversion of that public spectacle: a man bending a woman’s ear. She bends the ear now, on the page. In fact the talkingness of men is something I have always counted on; I love it as perhaps only someone raised Catholic can love it. Men are helpless in the face of female listening. If you sit for it, as for a portrait, they will tell you anything. There is a price for these encounters, though.
