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
On International Law and Gaza
The powerful ideology that makes us talk about Israel’s right to defend itself, and not the Palestinians’ or the Lebanese, for that matter, is racism as the core element of the broader system of settler colonial racial capitalism that law has played a significant sole in creating and maintaining. If you condemn the killing of one kind of people but not another, what makes one grievable and not the other is centuries of coding done by the marker of race that serves settler colonial racial capitalism. What I am interested in is how such markers, ‘legal categorisations’ become ones that we identify ourselves with, and how those attachments solidify our attachment to law. They make it personal, as it were.
