So I was bored, flipping between channels on TV waiting for a friend to come over. I was with 2 boys both in their early teens at a close friend’s home. One of the boys asked if I was watching because they wanted to play games. Since my relationship with the television is one of mistrust, distrust and love/hate but a lot more hate than love, I told the boys it’s alright they can play their games.
So they connected their console, went through their exhaustive list of options and finally selected a game and started playing. Meanwhile my good friend arrived and we set on the couch chatting while the boys were playing their game. At some point we both realised that there’s a lot of gun shots in this game and a lot of violent talk and swearing. Interestingly, the accent was clearly that of Black people (i.e. Americans of African descent).
We became curious as it were and started watching this game. It quickly turned into a shocking scene as we became more aware of the context within which the game took place. The kids are playing Black characters who are employed by this white guy as car thieves. They steal these cars and deliver them to their dealer who, it appears, rewards them with a commission. These cars are also sold on to unsuspecting victims at exorbitant interest rates and when these victims default on payments these characters are sent with weapons to go and collect money and take the cars back to the dealer, sometimes killing people in the process.
This arrangement is glorified and portrayed as decent work. At the so called office, there are rewards for such things as employee of the month. As if that is not shocking enough, there was a scene in which the characters were sent to do a housebreak in with the intention of murdering the house owner, as it appeared. When they broke into the house, there was a little girl crying. The character played by one of these boys said, “I don’t care if you are 12 years old, I’m still gonna rape you.”
I could not believe my ears. The boys sensing the discomfort emanating from our shock and exclamations, decided to change the game a little while thereafter. I later learned that the game is called Grand Theft Auto and that it also has extra functionality allowing the player to rape women, physically assault them and then they are encouraged to murder them in order to get money.
That got me thinking, and I realised more than ever that there is a deliberate effort to turn our children into criminal thugs, rapists, and sex obsessed. From pre-teens, the little boys are trained to sexually objectify women and the little girls are trained to behave as sex objects.
These projections of Black people in this way are in themselves systematic acts of creation; they create black thugs, thieves, rapists, sex objects, and the like. When one looks at the images being portrayed everywhere; TVs, games, magazines, and virtually every other platform, visual or otherwise, it’s hard to miss the design.
It reminded me of an equally disturbing incident which took place during November of 2013 in which Dramatic Arts pupils were asked in a compulsory matric exam question to best describe the rape of a 9 month old infant using a broom stick and a loaf of bread. When parents, teachers and even some pupils expressed anger and disgust at such a question, the department of education responded by saying:
“If there is evidence that candidates have been affected by this question, the question will be excluded from the question paper and the marking guidelines will be adjusted accordingly,"
That in itself an equally sickening response to say the least. This in fact was not just an incident but a manifestation of systematic criminalisation of our children; desensitizing them towards violence and in this case, sexual violence just as that game does; same purpose and same end in mind.
These images are everywhere if we care to acknowledge them for what we know they truly are. Music videos do an efficient job of turning women into sex objects. Not only that, they are also on a not-so-subtle offensive against women’s self esteem and self-worth; particularly the beautiful dark skinned African woman (but that however is a topic outside the scope of this piece).
One would think that there’d be some substance to the pretence that the images are targeted at adults but that’s not even the case. Consider for instance that early this year, SABC 2 cancelled a scheduled cartoon show (Naruto it was) to cover celebrity rumours, for kids by kids or that once I saw an early morning kids’ news show (Kids’ News I think it was called) were talking about Little Wayne or some other rapper being arrested. These are the images we throw at our children.
Take, for instance, one of the 20 years adverts from Vodacom for data; the one with the baby crying because of video streaming interruptions caused by slow data connections. In the first ad that appeared (which also happened to be the most liked South African ad in 2013 according to research by the Millward Brown research agency) the baby, appropriately, is watching content from a kid’s channel.
I was always disturbed by the change in the follow up ad. The second ad features the same baby, now instead of watching a kid’s channel, the baby is watching the single ladies video by Beyonce; who despite her vast singing talents, her dedication and hard work is still forced to project herself as a sex object to grab the attention of her audience. The ad’s concept seems to have been borrowed from a 2009 YouTube video; virtually a recreation of that video which itself is in bad taste. However, Vodacom could have easily changed the song to something appropriate for children instead of making it seem okay for parents to have their children watch these images.
This is how the conditioning goes; the normalisation of the abnormal were wrong is made to be acceptable and upright, despicable is made desirable and the distasteful is made cute. I saw a toy at a Game store in Tyger Valley, Cape Town a while back. It was a package containing one of those Rambo knives, and a heart organ drenched in blood. This was a toy package targeted at children; the worst and one of the most sickening things anyone can produce yet it was there.
With all these images we bombard our children with, we can’t be surprised, not in the very least, of the violence in our society, of the unbearable videos which pop up on social networks every so often, of little girls twerking, and little boys dancing with female adults in sexually suggestive ways while adult spectators look on, laughing and clapping. Then we pretend to wonder were teenage pregnancies come from, or why sexual violation of women is so common. We pretend to wonder where 14 year olds get the mind to stab their peer to death.
Worst still, we have the guts to blame the children.
******
This is the Journal of a Broken Spirit #JOABS, wake up!
