The Economics of Hate and Love in South Africa: Postcolonial Queer Perspectives on Hate Crime Legislations

Abstract

In early 2018 South Africa tabled the new The Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Bill before parliament. Less than a month later, the first White South African was sentenced to jail for racist slurs towards a Black policeman. One might interpret the coming into existence of this new bill as a result of the increased public awareness of racism as acted out by White people in today's post-apartheid South Africa every day in one form or another. An awareness that a younger generation of students in the context of the #FFM Fees Must Fall, #RMF Rhodes Must Fall, and other associated student protest movements, aiming since 2015 to decolonise the universities, generated and forced the public to take note of. A generation that pushed for the recognition of racialised differences and critiqued notions of colour-blind, non-racial rainbowism when arguing that racism and racist hate only become visible once the concepts underlying these practices of Othering are named: deeply ingrained notions of White superiority and Black inferiority on the side of the perpetrators. The new Hate Crimes Bill therefore does appear to be a direct result of these most recent developments; however it is more complex and the road map towards establishing such a bill, which next to race includes a whole set of other categories such as pregnancy, sexual orientation or albinism, started much earlier and was not really a straight one but actually received intense discussions within the LGTBI community about a decade ago.