03 Jun '08 10:22>
Originally posted by twhiteheadPresumably if we were all lobotomised bigotry would fall away.
Do you think that bigotry would be reduced if we were all 'race neutral' and had no religion?
The recent xenophobia in South Africa thrives on the fact that the foreigners where reasonably easily identifiable either by looks or by language. There are probably quite a lot of people who avoided being attacked because nobody knew they were foreign.
I am to ...[text shortened]... tly because they do not socialize much with their neighbors, and they look distinctly foreign.
A better idea might be to work on cultivating ethics among all communities.
Everybody hears a different story. I tend to agree that Somalians are targeted because they are better at business than local people who lack skills and have an attitude of entitlement: their success causes resentment, and they are attacked 'because they are stealing our jobs and benefiting unduly from our freedom'. In other words the same reason Jews were attacked in Europe. Although in this case religion has nothing whatsoever to do with the situation: the drivers appear to be institutional (apartheid legacy, failure of government post 1994) and economic.