Courts cannot erase escalating racial tensions – expert

The Constitutional Court cannot be used to erase the escalating ethnic and racial tensions in the country, an expert says, after the court’s ruling last week against a company which fired nine employees in 2013 for singing a struggle song it deemed racist during a protest. According to a report in The Citizen, sociologist Lucienne van der Walt said the debate on whether certain struggle songs can be ruled as racist was often conducted outside of the socio-economic inequities in the country, meaning bodies such as the courts were not well-placed to address the reasons behind the songs being sung in the first place. ‘Speech codes are not the answer here. Bad behaviour needs to be limited, but those limits need to be very, very limited. We need to be able to understand these things in context. Speech codes are not going to solve the problem. What we need are major reforms and reconstruction of how our society works,’ Van der Walt is quoted in the report as saying.