A picture showing Black and White kids sitting at separate tables at a South African elementary school has outraged parents and has spread online, according to the Daily Mail.
The photo, taken at a kindergarten class at Laerskool Schweizer-Reneke in South Africa and was shared by the class’s teacher on the school’s WhatsApp group, shows 18 White students sitting together, while the Black students sat at a separate table in the back of the classroom.
“This was meant to be an exciting day for me but it’s not. I am pissed off,” one of the Black students’ parents told TimesLIVE. “All I saw was messages from the White parents saying ‘dankie, dankie’ [thank you on WhatsApp] but no one was saying anything about the separation of the learners.”
Social media users shared that the image reminds them of apartheid , which was a system that promoted racial segregation and oppression, in South Africa. The practice, legalized in 1948, ended in 1994.
Another Twitter user had this to say, “My only hope for this is the children are at a different table because the 3 of them speak the same language and are taught together and the other kids speak English and they are grouped together. Otherwise this is just completely ignorant and unfair.” @GxldSociety
“What is most provoking about this image is not that Black kids are ostracized from White kids, that is common in our supposedly post-apartheid Africa,” activist and African National Congress campaign manager Mcebo Dlamini wrote on Facebook. “Rather what becomes painful is that there are black people who still insist that racism has ended and who think that blacks and white can have peaceful relations that do not have undertones of racism.”
