The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
Fifty-three years ago, James A. White Sr. joined the U.S. Air Force. But as an African American man, he had to go to shocking lengths to find a place for his young family to live nearby. In this TED talk, He tells a powerful story about the lived experience of "everyday racism" — and how it echoes today in the way he's had to teach his grandchildren to interact with police. Against the backdrop of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson and that of Eric Garner, White asks, as a...
Arthur Chu -
There was a lot to criticize about the “Saturday Night Live” 40th anniversary celebration–Jerry Seinfeld’s #SorryNotSorry joshing around about “SNL’s” 40-year history of whiteness, cringeworthy reminders of the show’s tendency to run dubiously funny gags into the ground, and the mystifying continued relevance of Sarah Palin.
So it was strange–though not surprising, for Internet junkies–that Kanye West came in for an avalanche of...
Chauncey DeVega -
ISIS burned Muadh al Kasasbeh, a captured Jordian fighter pilot, to death. They doused him with an accelerant. His captors set him on fire. Muadh al Kasasbeh desperately tried to put out the flames. ISIS recorded Muadh al Kasasbeh's immolation, produced a video designed to intimidate their enemies, and then circulated it online.
ISIS's burning alive of Muadh al Kasasbeh has been denounced as an act of savagery, barbarism, and wanton cruelty--one from the "dark ages" and not of...
** We apologise for the variable sound quality of this video and podcast.
As South Africa enters its third decade as a democracy, the idea of a rainbow nation, so carefully nurtured over the past 20 years, is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain with the stark realisation that the country remains largely untransformed. The lack of economic progress and social mobility for the vast majority of black South Africans means that apartheid-era social divisions have proven difficult to...
Richard Pithouse -
We would be more effective at dealing with the endemic racism in our society if we didn’t relentlessly speak in a manner that reduces racism to apartheid and ‘apartheid tendencies’. The reason for this is not because historical trauma should be repressed and its consequences in the present naturalised. On the contrary it is because the development of an adequate understanding of how our society came to be as it is requires us to speak a lot more about both colonialism and...
Anna Majavu -
This year looks set to be another gloomy one for asylum seekers, as the ANC government makes a renewed attempt to deport and restrict the number of African migrants to South Africa.
Black Africans are not welcome anywhere, even as tourists, and must jump through dozens of hoops to apply for visas to enter almost every country in the world to prove their worthiness. Lately, the quest for tourist visas can even entail providing proof that they have paid their children’s South African...
