Rape and racism flourish

Allowed to flourish unchallenged, evasions and euphemisms will wreck us. One is that we play politics with race, pretending prejudice and racism run only one way. Another is that we call child rape “teen pregnancy”. In present-day South Africa, these combine disastrously.

- William Saunderson-Meyer

Racism hasn't vanished, but shifted shape. Where a minority once directed its racism at a majority, the switch has flipped. Public racial hostility, in its most aggressive manifestations online and from some politicians, now often runs from the African majority towards coloured, Indian and white minorities.

None of this denies history, inequality, or legitimate anger. It insists on a single standard. Racism is intolerable, whoever it targets.

At the softer end is race as a veto in politics. The reaction to Helen Zille's selection as the DA's 2026 Joburg mayoral candidate is illustrative. Many in the ANC, its union and communist allies, as well as the EFF and ActionSA, dismiss competence as irrelevant and say she should be rejected because she is white.

At the harder end are ostensibly race-free social issues that, because race permeates everything, turn explosive. Take child and teenage rape. The cold statistics are horrific: