THAT Racist Tweet
Written by Glass Pearl on May 6, 2012 – 12:18 pm -
Social media in South Africa have found a common cause and that cause is a against a racial slur made on her Twitter account by some FHM model of the year called Jessica Leandra.
Every where you look there is this righteous indignation – from both the mainstream and online media, especially Twitter.
To be honest, something about the whole affair leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Not just the fact that this woman felt free to write such blatantly racist remarks and post it to the world wide web. And not only the fact that people actually followed someone on Twitter who have nothing of real value to add to society.
What bothers me most is this mob mentality. Attacking this one woman as if she is the only one in the whole of South Africa who is racist or racially prejudiced.
For goodness sake! www.timeslive.co.za called her ” a truly ugly and repugnant individual”.
And the remarks on Twitter are not much better, some even worse.
Is this maybe a case of protesting too much? What is happening? Are we trying to cover our own inadequacies or does this make us feel better about ourselves because we are not the ones being called all sorts of names.
Are we now social media activists? And what does that even mean? Showing how liberal we are by picking on individuals?
Yes, racist behaviour must be condemned in whatever form it presents itself and at every turn. But to condemn and attack a person in the way that this woman has been attacked just makes me wonder what else is at play.
I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I no longer read comments on news or sports websites especially local South African ones – because they generally turn into ugly displays of hatred and racist bigotry.
Just in the last month I heard a woman use the “k” word to describe a taxi driver in the southern suburbs of Cape Town and earlier in the year at lunch someone referred to Xhosa speaking South Africans in a derogatory way. None of the perpetrators were white.
Where was this kind of moral outrage when Helen Zille referred to fellow South Africans from the Eastern Cape as refugees?
Where is the outrage when a black person enters a retail outlet and gets followed around like a criminal when a white person get’s free reign in that same store?
Do we speak up and strongly condemn this very common occurrences in our daily lives as we do on Twitter?
It’s easy to pick on and bully a silly model but the issue doesn’t start, nor does it end with her. It’s easy to sit behind a keyboard and type whatever we want. Very easy.
Look around you at your lunch table or down your street, because racists and the racially prejudiced are not only found on Twitter and Facebook and websites. And his/her face isn’t only that of a blonde model.
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