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.
Think of that entity “the family,” an impacted social space in which all of the following are meant to line up perfectly with each other: a surname, a sexual dyad, a legal unit based on state-regulated marriage, a circuit of blood relationships, a system of companionship and succor, a building, a proscenium between “private” and “public”, an economic unit of earning and taxation, the prime site of economic consumption, the prime site of cultural consumption, a mechanism to produce, care for, and acculturate children, a mechanism for accumulating material goods over several generations, a daily routine, a unit in a community of worship, a site of patriotic formation, and of course the list could go on.
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