blackness and issues around blackness have always been tricky subject,espicially for me. Where it seems blackness is something that can be quantified and measured.Theres a barometer of blackness that one can fall into or out off. Blackness is seen to be poor, violent, negative, oppressed, different and so forth. Whilst white is ordinary and normal, look at the television ads or programmes for an example of this.
One can never just be as a person, you have to be a black person,not a person.You cant be a woman, but a black woman. If you are a character in a tyler perry film you are black character in a black film, not just a character.
Why is that? if we look at our history as South Africans. We were told because we are black we are therefore different and inferior. We were told what a black person does, act and lives. But with the dawn of the new mzansi it seems we still find ourselves in the same cages of apartheid.
case in point, how the tv channels are separated on language, with SABC 1 being more nguni based, 2 more sotho-tswana-afrikaans based and 3 more english base. But in actual fact these constructs dont really apply cause sabc 1 is more a young persons channel than 2 , and 2 is more family friendly than three. But those are not the core bases used to distinguish the channels but the old SABC channel differentiantions of tv1 and tv 3 which were used to cater based on language and race. Which later made SABC 3 into a high class channel that equated white for quite sometime. So back in the hey days when SABC 1 was not doing that well it was equated with blackness, that black people dont care about good production value, while 3 had good production value since it was the primiere white channel with zero to no so called "black programming". although alot has changed since then but how far have we truelly moved from being constructed as stereotype to just being
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