The Magors of this world are an indicator of barely suppressed rage at black people

I have tried as far as possible not to enter the messy, racially abhorrent arena that has been created by one Belinda Magor. However, a point contained in her rant sticks with me – her call for black women’s uteruses to be cut out so that they can stop giving birth to black men, who, she says, are rapists and murderers.

It is not lost on me where this sort of thinking stems from – the eugenics movement, which expounds the illegitimate theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding”.

Eugenics was particularly popularised in the US, with a policy passed in 1907 that would allow Indiana the right to sterilise ethnic minorities regarded as inferior, such as black, Latino and Native American people.

Then, of course, there is Adolf Hitler, who infamously declared that anyone not of the Aryan race, such as Jews and Gypsies, was inferior and that Germans had to do everything in their power to keep their gene pool clean, including the genocide of such people.  

Magor’s anger and violence turn to the black man. She calls black people subhuman, labelling them rapists, thieves and murderers in comparison to animals, which she says are beautiful and deserve love.

The question is why is her reaction targeted at black people and when did we sanction comparing humans to animals?

Magor’s rant came as I was covering a work event at the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre, which is a place of memory and education that shows the depths to which our humanity can sink when people no longer see one another as people and as a result feel justified in pursuing the literal extermination of others.

In Germany, the Nazis dehumanised Jewish people by representing them as rats; in Rwanda the Hutus referred to the Tutsis as cockroaches; and in America proponents of slavery referred to black people as apes – all to justify violence against people perceived as less than human.