This is a partial response to a recent post in which the #IAmStellenbosch movement is evaluated quite negatively. Scope doesn’t permit me to deal with the issue exhaustively. I will be content to raise a few sceptical remarks about Michelle Avenant’s evaluation and, more generally, about social discourse. I don’t think our social discourse is […]
Open Stellenbosch
Posted inEquality, News/Politics
#IAmStellenbosch and the quiet violence of the ‘colour blind’
Hanging in an office at my old school is a yellowed newspaper article titled “School for the colour blind!” featuring photographs of children of different races laughing and playing cricket together. It was 1981 — three years after the small, independent school started admitting learners of all races despite apartheid norms — and to the […]
Posted inEquality, Gender violence
Transforming higher education: UCT students’ visions for the future
By Josie Cornell Vicky* had not thought much about her blackness, or what it meant. This changed rapidly upon her arrival at the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a first-year student where, for the first time, Vicky felt black. This “feeling of blackness” for Vicky and for other black students like her, particularly those […]