In the past week, social media had been in a frenzy over an advert by Clicks, depicting and labelling black women’s hair as “dry and damaged” while white women’s hair was termed “normal” and “fine”.
Just days after the offensive advert was published on the Clicks website, the company’s group chief executive officer, Vikesh Ramsunder, released an apology and announced that “negligent employees” who had allowed the advert to be published were suspended.
This did not stop the EFF from staging nationwide protests and a shutdown of Clicks stores. By Monday morning, police had confirmed reports of an attempted petrol bombing of a Clicks store in Emalahleni, Mpumalanga.
Across the country, there are talks of a consumer boycott of Clicks, with scores of black customers indicating that they would no longer shop at the store. While I find this a powerful stance, the truth is that this incident has demonstrated, once again, how petty acts of racism by white people in our country keep lack people distracted.
White people in SA have mastered the art of distracting us. We spend a lot of time reacting to their petty racism and as a result, hardly get to do any meaningful work in empowering ourselves and developing our own communities.
We are constantly working to disprove the bigoted ideas that they hold about us and are perpetually responding to their deliberate acts of provocation. They do racist and offensive things deliberately and then feign ignorance.
There is no way that in 2020, barely a few years after teenagers shut down high schools across the country, in protest against the discrimination of black hair at former model C schools, that a company can claim it does not understand why it is racist to refer to our hair as “damaged” or unkept.
There is no way that a company doesn’t know that blackface is racist and insulting (earlier this year, a Dischem store in Killarney did blackface on a white mannequin to celebrate “African beauty”). They know what they are doing, and they are doing it deliberately.
I am not saying that racist adverts are not serious racism – on the contrary. I don’t believe that there is such thing as racism that is not serious, because the structural and institutionalised racism that continues to disenfranchise and devastate black people is facilitated by these acts of petty racism.
When a black person is called by the k-word or a “monkey”, it is done with the intention of dehumanising them. This dehumanisation justifies the animalisation that follows, because if someone is a “monkey”, they are unworthy of humanisation.
The petty racism we endure is part of a chromatin network of the structural racism that is tearing our country asunder and rendering black lives insignificant.
And yet, there is a pattern in both our response to racism and acts of racism. We respond to the provocation with uproar and threats of a consumer boycott that rarely ever lasts.
The reason for this is that we have not, as black people, built alternative institutions to compete with those of white people who continue to disregard us and treat us with contempt.
Where is the black-owned alternative for Clicks or Dischem? It is not there, not only because black people have been hurled at the margins of economic activity, but because even those with the resources are not investing adequately in the empowerment and development of black communities.
Until this happens, we are going to continuously find ourselves responding to deliberate racist provocations by a racist white minority that knows that even with our numbers, our bargaining power, it is holding us by the balls.
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