A time for collective grief: Reflections on the Phoenix Massacre - The Mail & Guardian

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OPINION: Protecting our loved ones from harm and destruction is brave and noble but the insistence on framing the brutality in Phoenix in terms of the protection narrative is disingenuous

My two sons, aged 23 and 17, were with their dad in Durban in the week of the insurgence. Living in the relative safety of a moderately untouched Cape Town suburb, my heart sank when I received a message from my older son asking if he could join the “men of the neighbourhood” to protect the middle-class suburb of Westville.

The horrifying images of shooting people in the back and literally kicking people while they were down summoned my childhood memories of these deadly masculinities spurred on by a pernicious mixture of socioeconomic depravity, fear and drugs. It wasn’t just gendered insecurity at play, this time; at the heart of this matter was racist anxiety.

Furthermore, the defensiveness behind the “but” that inevitably follow explanations of the media coverage of the killings, without due acknowledgment of the pain and suffering of black families who lost loved ones is both cold and callous. We are all too familiar with the wounded racial anxieties that surface during social gatherings regarding affirmative action, or how conversations go down the slippery slope of claims that things might have been better during apartheid.

Is it possible to acknowledge the truth of the racism alongside commemorating the courage of those who protected their neighbourhoods through nonracist means? Those bodies that lie unclaimed in the Phoenix mortuary bear witness to the horrific, logical end of racial profiling in neighbourhoods where certain people still “don’t belong”.

 

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So why do the events in Phoenix qualify to be called a “massacre” what about similar events in Gauteng & Limpopo had as many people killed. Is it because it was black on black. Very distorted narrative you are driving.

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