Posted on April 16, 2018

The Racial Hypocrisy of Charlize Theron

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, April 16, 2018

Charlize Theron thinks America may be too dangerous for her adopted black children. In a widely discussed interview with Elle magazine, Miss Theron claims America is so racist she may have to leave.

“There are places in this country where, if I got a job, I wouldn’t take it,” she said. “I wouldn’t travel with my kids to some parts of America and that’s really problematic. There are a lot of times when I look at my kids and I’m like, if this continues I might have to [leave America]. Because the last thing I want is for my children to feel unsafe.”

Her use of the term “problematic,” a word normally used to describe petty slights like “microaggressions” and “cultural appropriation,” raises the question of whether Miss Theron is genuine or simply virtue signaling. Needless to say, the most likely threat to her children’s safety comes from other blacks.

Miss Theron cites her South African background as a reason why she is so concerned about racism. “Being raised during the apartheid era in South Africa made me so hyperaware of equality and human rights,” she claims in the interview.” She denounces what she believes is the rampant racism under the Trump Administration. “We can’t deny it anymore,” she said. “We have to be vocal.” She argues her adopted children will face a harder time in America because of their race, saying, “[T]hey’re going to have to know that it’s a different climate for them than it is for me, and how unfair that is.”

This is not the first time Miss Theron has reflected on how race can affect one’s career prospects. Indeed, by her own account, Miss Theron has a career only because she emigrated from a country she thought would discriminate against her as a white person.

In a People magazine article by Dan Jewel published on October 14, 1996, Miss Theron specifically said she fled South Africa because “there was no future for a white South African.” The author links Miss Theron’s realization with “the dismantling of apartheid and new affirmative action laws.” Whatever her current declarations, when it came to her own life and future, Miss Theron clearly recognized there would be no white privilege in the new Rainbow Nation. “I just ran,” she is quoted as saying.

Miss Theron has a talent for reinterpreting her past to boost her social status in the present. In the 1996 article, she spoke fondly of growing up on a farm in South Africa, but said “everything just went wrong” when her father died. However, her father didn’t just “die.” Instead, as she revealed later in her career, her alcoholic father had come home drunk, threatening to kill both her and her mother with a shotgun. Her mother shot him in self-defense.

Miss Theron is now a vocal campaigner against gun rights. Obviously, the traumatic impact of a drunken father making death threats had a major influence on her views. Yet it could also be argued that firearms saved both her life and that of her mother, as without her mother’s handgun, her father could have simply overpowered and beaten them both. Miss Theron certainly has no problem with her mother’s actions, as she stated in a 2004 interview with ABC that if she were in her mother’s situation, “I would do the same thing.” She continues to have a strong relationship with her mother, who “co-parents” her adopted children. (It should be noted that the lurid tale surrounding the death of Miss Theron’s father is disputed by her aunt, Elsa Malan.)

In her 2004 interview with ABC, Miss Theron states “the terrible thing is that everybody in South Africa has a gun.” While this may have been true when Miss Theron was a child, it no longer is. The current South African government now has strict gun control measures which require a written test, a background check, a shooting test, adequate safekeeping measures, and re-registration in order to own firearms.

As this author wrote in 2012:

Not surprisingly, the South African government cannot keep up with its own administrative requirements. Applicants have been waiting for as long as five years to own firearms legally. The system is a model of what Sam Francis called “anarcho-tyranny,” as the government mysteriously loses tens of thousands of its own firearms even as it denies permits to law abiding citizens. If a white citizen does use a firearm to defend his life against a black, he is often punished.

These kinds of regulations, combined with the African National Congress (ANC) government’s forced disbandment of the self-defense “commando” security system, have arguably allowed the current wave of violence against South African farmers. Chitja Twala and Marietjie Oelofse of the University of the Free State argue in a 2013 paper: “With the disbandment of the commando units, rural safety was compromised. Although the ANC’s government launched two initiatives in respect [sic] rural safety, namely, Area Crime Combating Units and Sector Policing, the successes were limited.”

One would think the current plight of white South African farmers would be important to Miss Theron. She has spoken of being “50 percent farm girl” who can “milk cows and get dirty.” She still refers to South Africa as “my country” and professes to love it.

Miss Theron does do charitable work in South Africa, attempting to combat the country’s high HIV rates, though this cause seems oddly disconnected from her own life and background.

“That’s my home and I feel like I’ve been so incredibly blessed in my life,” Miss Theron said of South Africa in a 2008 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. “My life could have turned out very different and I could have been there living the struggle, physically living the struggle. Those kids have a 50 percent chance of contracting HIV and AIDS and dying from it, and that could have been my life.”

The facts suggest otherwise. According to a study published in 2004, HIV rates in South Africa vary widely by race. “In 2004, the prevalence of HIV was 0.5%, 1%, 3.2%, and 19.9% in 15–49 year old whites, Indians, coloureds and blacks respectively,” notes the abstract. Unless she was a rape victim, it’s highly unlikely Miss Theron would have contracted HIV.

Charlize Theron speaks at a press conference at the World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa. (Credit Image: © Jϋrgen Bätz/DPA via ZUMA Press)

The real reason Miss Theron doesn’t live the “struggle” of contemporary South Africa is because she left, not because of chance. Had she made the choice to stay, the “struggle” she would face is the one white South Africans are going through right now. Indeed, in the very house she grew up in, one Barry Newland was murdered in 2012. According to police, Mr. Newland was tortured before he was killed by suffocation. Alleged details about the crime are hard to verify, as every mainstream story about the incident glosses over the murder in favor of recounting Miss Theron’s life and career. Incredibly, PRI even features a picture of a smiling Miss Theron with the late Nelson Mandela to accompany the story instead of a picture of the victim. Today the house, once again owned by South African whites, is being used to boost tourism because it has Miss Theron’s autograph.

If Miss Theron was looking for a cause to champion in South Africa, the desperate situation of her own people would be a good place to start. Indeed, as a child of white farmers, she is precisely the type of person who could credibly speak out in defense of white farmers who are being targeted, tortured, and murdered at staggering rates, and who are now being threatened by the government with the theft of their land.

The plight of white South Africans is now in the mainstream. A call by Miss Theron for these people to be given refugee status would have a major impact. Yet this author can find no evidence of Miss Theron speaking out in defense of white South Africans, nor even acknowledging the problems they face.

Miss Theron has pointed out the importance of valuing one’s ethnic roots. In her interview with Elle, Miss Theron said of her adopted black children: “I want them to know who they are, and I want them to be so f***ing proud of who they are. Building confidence for them right now is an oath I made to myself when I brought them home. They need to know where they come from and be proud of that.”

Evidently, Miss Theron does not feel that way about herself or about other white South Africans, unless she’s just keeping it quiet. Either way, her current silence is remarkably cynical for someone who explicitly acknowledged in 1996 how race informed her decision to flee her homeland.