Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/28/racist-rant-wins-south-african.html
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I wonder how many new accounts will be created to cry here about how badly her peach got frozen?
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JoBerg, hell’va place that JoBerg.
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Link to video?
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Yep, that train is never late.
Never mind the fact that it’s South Africa, and the First Amendment doesn’t apply there, or anywhere else outside the US and its territories.
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Thank Gawd we live a country where people like her can express their beliefs however they like!
That thing I find myself using more and more these days: /s
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Puts me in mind of the Spitting Image song. Makes it seem a lot less like satire.
I guess it’s positive racial abuse is being cracked down on.
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The episode highlighted how… the country is still struggling with race relations.
Understatement of the week.
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Woe betide any black cellmate she is paired with.
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South Africa is still struggling with race relations? 
Pot meet kettle
Although I don’t personally hold with using prison to stop objectionable speech I can see why this might be the case there, especially concerning racial hate speech.
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The justice minister, Michael Masutha, said the custodial sentence could serve as a deterrent to others. “It was a question of escalating and intensifying the fight against racism by finding even more sterner measures,” he told eNCA television.
The cynical part of me says this won’t help. Deterring people from saying racist shit won’t actually change how they think (and act when there’s nobody to report them). If anything, it’ll probably just make racist assholes more resentful.
The only way I imagine this possibly helping is exposing fewer third parties to racism, preventing them from getting those ideas in their heads, but that’s still a longshot. Not sure what would be more effective, other than somehow just trying to get people to personally know each other (see Daryl Davis: How One Man Convinced 200 Ku Klux Klan Members To Give Up Their Robes : NPR), and even that usually puts the onus on the victims of racism.
TL;DR: Fuck this stupid world.
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Remember that apartheid has only been gone since 1994.
I think they are just trying to make sure people don’t start murdering each other in the streets over racial issues still.
We’re 160 years into it and people of color continue facing unthinking hatred and institutional racism. Maybe we would have been better off with the same system for 100 years or so after reconstruction.
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Some background for those who’d like to know more. First, the books:
Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of 1996, Chapter 2, Section 16:
Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes
a. freedom of the press and other media;
b. freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
c. freedom of artistic creativity; and
d. academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.2. The right in subsection (1) does not extend to
a. propaganda for war;
b. incitement of imminent violence; or
c. advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.
This latter provision would be broadened with the passage of The Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill, drafted in 2016. The bill does much more than this however, as noted by Matthew Clayton, Research, Advocacy, and Policy Manager of Cape Town-based Triangle Project, an LGBTI rights organization:
The new Bill creates some much-needed protection for groups that are vulnerable to targeted crimes because of their race, sexual orientation or gender, national origin, occupation and disability. This should be welcomed widely by civil society as it fulfils three essential necessities in combating these types of crimes.
The first is the policing and prosecution of these crimes, where the Bill creates obligations for the police, National Prosecuting Authority and others to identity hateful motives in crimes and investigate and prosecute on this understanding. This is vital in a country where the police often fail to understand, recognise and thus investigate hateful motives in crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people and foreigners. This is partly to blame for the outrageously low rates of conviction, particularly relating to xenophobic crimes.
The second aspect relates to monitoring and reporting, where an unprecedented obligation has been created to report and monitor crimes with a hateful motive. These statistics will form part of the national crime statistics and help the state and civil society understand more fully the landscape of targeted violence, and thus be able to start tackling the prevention and combating of these crimes.
Third, the Bill’s focus on prevention should be welcomed because it creates cross-cutting mandates for various departments — health, labour, home affairs, higher and basic education and others — to create holistic programmes relating to the prevention of hate crimes. This includes internal programmes to train and sensitise public sector staff, and ensures that where departments interact with the public they are aware of their duty to prevent and combat these crimes. [emphasis added]
Clayton also expresses his criticisms of the bill, ultimately concluding with this:
Reconciliation is the subject of intense debate as a new generation of young, black South Africans feel they are failing to see the benefits promised by democracy and continue to live with the scars — old and more recent — of racism. With that in mind, it should be clear that we do not yet fully understand how to tackle racism, or homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and others. But it is doubtful that criminalising speech and jailing those who offend will have the desired effect.
[Edited for clarity]
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Well intentioned, but were the blacks in South Africa not really South Africans or not really nice?
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Yeah, well, the lyrics pretty strongly imply they’re only talking about white South Africans. And really it’s about white British people ragging on other white British people who colonized somewhere else.
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The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the standard that the West measures the world by and is similar to the US’s First Amendment, although not modeled after it.
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Has Die Antwoord done of cover of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Good Bye”?
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Though virtually every other Western country except for the US has some sort of criminal hate speech law.
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That doesn’t make free expression any less of a human right.
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Your rights end where my autonomy begins.
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