OWN CORRESPONDENT, Pretoria | Tuesday
SOUTH Africans have become slightly more positive about race relations since last year, but more whites have reported discrimination, according to a survey released this week.
“An encouraging 44% of South Africans think that race relations have improved in the country since 1994,” the first year of black majority rule, Stephen Rule from the independent Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) said in a statement.
“One in three (30%) say that relations have remained the same and 16% that they have deteriorated.”
The findings emerge from the HSRC’s survey of public opinion among 2611 respondents in September.
“These statistics signify a positive trend since the HSRC’s March 1999 survey when 40% said that race relations had improved, 32% that they had remained the same and 24% that they had deteriorated,” Rule said.
He said South Africans of Indian descent seemed the most encouraged by the changes, with white respondents the most negative.
Approximately 29% of whites – roughly double the other population groups – believed race relations had deteriorated.
Some 27% of white respondents said they had experienced discrimination from March to September 2000.
Comparatively, 17% of black respondents, 12% of Indians and 11% of mixed-race South Africans said they had experienced discrimination.
But the majority, 82% of all respondents, reported no experience whatsoever of racial discrimination during the six months before the survey was conducted.
Of those within the white, Indian and coloured (mixed-race) groups, experiences of racial discrimination were evenly split between the genders, but nearly twice as many black men (22%) as black women (13%) said they had experienced discrimination.
Of those who had experienced discrimination, the highest proportion had most recently experienced this at work (44%), followed by shopping centres (20%), government departments (15%), educational institutions (seven percent), and elsewhere (14%). – AFP
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