RACISM

We have repeatedly stated that systemic and institutionalized racism pervades every aspect of the South African experience. Because racism mutates to accommodate changes in the prevailing scheme of things, simply removing offensive laws from the statute will not alter conduct. Ingenious marketing schemes camouflage racism and create a comforting perception of change that is simply not supported by fact. The public space that is controlled by mainstream media, works to ensure that the paradigm of racism is contained within a simplistic interpretation. Dispossession, the ultimate objective of racism, is overlooked. This may account for the reason why any effort to foster a cognitive understanding of racism is without editorial support in mainstream South African media. In similar vein, institutions of State, ironically borne out of the struggles of a racially oppressed people, seem to exist in a state of cultural amnesia, themselves marketing nothing more than a superficial notion of reconciliation.

Toward a Cognitive Understanding of Racism is part of continuing activism and advocacy, the core business of The Apartheid Museum®. Below is a definition of racism developed by the Saugeen Ojibway and others (Canada 1993). While we find this definition succinct and persuasive we believe that apartheid, as a legally enforced White Supremacist ideology, makes unique, our effort to bring South Africans to a cognitive understanding of racism. Even as we hope that an extended reading of this website will inspire new ways of understanding racism, we would like to receive input that is informed by personal experience.

Typically, our personal experience has been shaped by the view that Gold Reef City Casino, and its financiers and founding fathers, Abraham and Solomon Krok represent the sickening edge of racism. After making an extraordinary fortune manufacturing and selling poisonous skin whitening creams under the pretext of skincare, they fraudulently sold themselves as the intellectual visionaries of The Apartheid Museum. South African media readily aided both frauds. And so it is that the money that built Gold Reef City Casino and the intellectually dishonest structure they claim to have conceived has its origins in the misery of Black people who were struggling to overcome the hardship of apartheid’s race based laws. Emotional trauma aside, many of these victims have been left physically scarred for life. But Gold Reef City Casino, the Krok brothers and a company they initiated, The South African Apartheid Museum at Freedom Park, went beyond the depravity and racism in that conduct. In The Apartheid Museum fraud, they integrated into their elaborate fabrication, the tragic deaths of millions of Jews who perished in the holocaust under Nazi dictatorship. Our contribution to the development of a uniquely South African definition of racism will draw from that historical experience. We go further though and interrogate the pathology of the oppressed. We also question why South African media, judiciary and institutions of State, with personal knowledge and/or access to all these facts, would choose to conceal rather than highlight and condemn a clear violation of our constitutional imperatives.

We invite all to participate freely in the development of a succinct, all embracing, and yet uniquely South African definition of racism. We provide the definition below as a guide. Work within it if you like. Rewrite you own definition or craft a single aspect, you will want to see included in The South African Definition of Racism.