Posted in Books, tagged academia, Books, cultural studies, The Nation, universities, Walter Benjamin on October 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
From a review by Noah Isenberg in The Nation of a three new books on Walter Benjamin:
Generally bored by academia, [Walter Benjamin] likened his experience with the professoriate to “a mooing cow to which students were compelled to listen”; in his later essay “The Life of Students,” he asserted, “scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it.” Benjamin would maintain a deep skepticism toward academia throughout his life.
Posted in Johannesburg, politics, South Africa, tagged apartheid, racism, racist incidents, South Africa, universities, white population on March 7, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Chris McGreal quoting a new South African on everyday racism in postapartheid South Africa:
“Racism isn’t necessarily bad. It’s about cultural differences. We should accept each other as we are,” he says. “They say apartheid was so bad but it created communications and infrastructure, railways, roads, the mines. It created jobs. I myself will never apologise for something that created the best opportunities in this country. People take apartheid out of context. It was different groups of people living in their culture, the way they like it.”
Full context here.
Posted in politics, South Africa, tagged Bloemfontein, mothers, parenting, racism, racist incidents, South Africa, universities, white population on March 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Most of the [white] boys at Reitz are from farm areas. They have grown up with a black woman in the kitchen who is like a second mum. These ladies sort of take over that role when the guys come to university.
– Christo Dippenaar, the 37-year old residence head of the mostly white student housing complex at Free State University in Bloemfontein, South Africa, defending the behavior of his fellow white students who had fed black workers urine-soaked food, (he was talking to a reporter of the UK Observer).
Full story here.
Posted in politics, Sean Jacobs, South Africa, tagged racism, racist incidents, South Africa, universities, white population on February 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The op-ed I wrote for the Guardian (UK) newspaper ‘s Comment is Free site on the wider context of the racist incident at the University of the Free State (captured on video), is now up at that paper’s website. To read the piece and the responses (including some off-color ones), go here. Blogger at Rootless Cosmopolitan reprinted it for more reactions on the piece. See also the responses there. [BTW, In the piece I mention accompanying my mother to rural farming district in the Small Karoo (in Afrikaans Klein Karoo) where she grew up. That's my mother in the image above in front of the house where she was born and spent her childhood; another family is renting it from the present landowner.]
