I have watched and read many discussions on the Woolworths issue over the past few days and I'd like to have a say.
I am directing this message at those who have supported the boycott and defaming of Woolworths. That's right boys, grab your pitchforks, you can vent you hatred on me for a little while. God knows you have plenty of it.
I want to start by asking a question, do you think that the CEO of woolworths called all the staff together in a big meeting and said "right, we don't want no more stinking whites in this place, turn them away at the door"? No? So what then? Where do you think this started and what do you suppose the intention was. Was it Hate? Predudice? Discrimination?
Or, was it possibly that some time in the past, the executive commitee of the company sat in meeting after meeting to plan the transformation of the company to be more representative of our demographic ratios? So how do you do this? Well, you could retrench the entire company and then re-hire all the staff in the correct ratios. Clearly not the solution, so let's say you have 10 people in your clerical dept and 8 of them are white, you desperately need to get more black people in there but you only need 10 people total, you can't go hire more people than you need and you certainly don't want to fire the loyal staff that are there, so what? WHAT?
What they could have done (and i bet they wished they had done this) would be to advertise the position to all people equally and then just hire the black person. But hang on, I have an issue with that, I am a white person applying for jobs, if i'm not going to get the job please don't waste my time. I'd rather only apply for jobs that have the available quota to employ a white person to that role.
As a side note, I think much of the anger circulating started with the SAA issue (they refused to accept applications for whites into their cadet program). Now this to me is a different issue. I believe that at a government level, all professions which bear the responsibility of human safety should be exempt from any equity targets. I want the pilot who achieved the best marks on his exams both theory and practical. I don't care if he is white, black, blue or from Mars.
Final thought to my white friends. I would guess that 90% of you have a maid or gardener, either full or just part-time. When you employed that person did you advertise the position in such a way that a white person could have applied for it? Oh but that's different isn't it? Look deep inside your heart and ask yourself why that's different, you may find more racism than you think.
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