Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, tribalism and ableism are different forms of discrimination and prejudice that have one thing in common: they are practised by the lowest form of human beings. All these phenomena are grounded on the idea that someone is beneath you – that they are the inferior “other” that should not be accorded human dignity.
For the racist, people of colour are sub-humans whose place in the world is on the cotton plantations and in the homes of Caucasians cleaning faeces in toilets. The homophone thinks queer people should not exist – they are unworthy of a place in the human race.
The ableist looks at people with disabilities and thinks of them as a blight on the human species – a factory fault that is nothing more than an inconvenience. It is in this latter category of the lowest form of human beings that actress and television presenter Ntando Duma falls.
A few days ago, a video of Duma insulting an elderly white woman who had called her out for parking in a space reserved for drivers with disabilities went viral on social media. In the video, which the actress filmed live to her legion of Instagram followers, an elderly white woman can be heard politely asking Duma to move her car from the spot so that wheelchair-bound people who need it can access it. In response, Duma hurls profanities at the woman.
Duma then goes on to make the exchange about race, stating that white people are an annoyance. This she does because, like the black leaders I often write about who use blackness as a card to escape accountability, she believes that merely being the black person in a confrontation with white people makes you a victim and that the rest of us owe you solidarity. She wanted to mobilise black empathy to hide not just her complete lack of decency, but also her deeply problematic ableist politics.
Anyone who has been to a mall or shopping complex will know just how limited parking space is for disabled people. Parking spaces for disabled people make up less than 10% of parking spots in malls, university campuses and even office precincts.
This is not an accident of history – it is a symbol of the lack of investment that society makes for disabled people. Disabled people are disenfranchised in every facet of life – from the economy to representation in the media. They are intentionally hurled at the margins of existence precisely because they are deemed as lesser humans whose existence is an inconvenience to a world that is designed for able-bodied persons.
People who defended Duma were making a clear statement that they have no respect or regard for disabled people. They were stating that disabled people who live in a world where all the odds are stacked against them do not deserve even the simple convenience of an accessible parking space – that a Duma whose positionality already places her among the most privileged people in society, has the right to take away this one thing from disabled people, and that this is okay.
But it is not okay. It is not okay that disabled people must constantly fight not only for the right to exist, but to also just get out of their cars with dignity. It is not okay that in her senseless apology, she states that she did not refuse anyone access to the parking spot when simply by parking there, she did exactly that.
Was she going to allow this access when a disabled person performed their disability for her? This is violent beyond measure, and it is not okay. Our blackness must never be mobilised to support perpetrators of abuse against other human beings, no matter who they are.
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