RACISM AND ILLTREATMENT OF CASTER MOKGADI SEMENYA
The infamy of the 1936 Berlin Olympics has been recreated when African American athletes like Jesse Owens debunked the myth of racial superiority by winning four gold medals beating Europeans fair and square. It is like history is repeating itself.
The treatment of Caster Semenya at the World Athletics Championship in Berlin invokes sad memories that shouldn’t be repeated seventy-three years later when Adolf Hitler avoided to meet gold medalist Jesse Owens and also appeared to have spurned the event’s closing ceremony apparently because African Americans had disproved the baseless Nazi doctrine of Aryan superiority. The Nazis wanted to use the Olympics to show off Aryan athletes, whom they believed were naturally superior because of their race.
The infamy of the 1936 Berlin Olympics has been recreated when African American athletes like Jesse Owens debunked the myth of racial superiority by winning four gold medals beating Europeans fair and square. It is like history is repeating itself.
The treatment of Caster Semenya at the World Athletics Championship in Berlin invokes sad memories that shouldn’t be repeated seventy-three years later when Adolf Hitler avoided to meet gold medalist Jesse Owens and also appeared to have spurned the event’s closing ceremony apparently because African Americans had disproved the baseless Nazi doctrine of Aryan superiority. The Nazis wanted to use the Olympics to show off Aryan athletes, whom they believed were naturally superior because of their race.
The treatment of Caster Semenya at the World Athletics Championship in Berlin violated the code of equality and fair play. If it has the same intentions as the Olympics which are to be an exercise in goodwill among all nations and emphasizing racial equality in the area of sports competition, then they failed dismally. They have turned these nice sounding phrases into hypocritical crap.
When Europeans win they are not subjected to demeaning, degrading and dehumanizing gender tests like Caster Semenya had been. The way she was treated was gut-wrenching. It really turns one’s stomach. It is dehumanizing to the young lady. It has racist undertones. It would be interesting to hear the views of those in this country who want to gloss over racism and pretend it doesn’t exist.
An African American psychiatrist Dr Frances Cress Welsing who has grappled with analyzing white supremacy as far back as 1969 described white supremacy (racism) as a global power system by the global white minority, on both the conscious and unconscious levels.
This system, according to Dr Cress Welsing, attacks people of colour, particularly people of African descent, in the nine major areas of people’s activity: economics, education, entertainment, labour, law, politics, religion, sex and war. She believes that it is imperative that people of colour, especially people of African descent understood how the system of white supremacy works in order to dismantle it and bring true justice to Planet Earth. Dr Cress Welsing’s study into white supremacy culminated into a book published in 1991 titled “The Isis Papers: The Key to the Colours”.
By Sam Ditshego
