The Huffington Post tracked down its contributor who had proposed denying the franchise to white men and interviewed him in an exchange that resulted in the contributor resigning from his job.
Marius Roodt worked as a researcher at the Centre for Development and Enterprise in South Africa until The Huffington Post found him and interviewed him at work. He had contributed “Could It Be Time to Deny White Men the Franchise?” to The Huffington Post, jokingly suggesting that white men should be denied the right to vote and citing numerous false statistics, according to the interview posted by the newspaper. The Huffington Post published the piece, but later retracted it.
“I think there is a lack of fact-checking in South African journalism,” said Roodt to The Huffington Post. “I thought, would it work? And it worked. In hindsight I wouldn’t have done it, I didn’t think it would get this big.”
Roodt submitted the article under the pseudonym Shelley Garland and submitted a picture of a costumed version of himself, complete with a female-appearing face, makeup, and a blouse to go along with “her” byline.
“I said in my piece that whites own 90% of land in South Africa. That isn’t true,” explained Roodt. “And 97% of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange isn’t owned by whites.”
Roodt’s racially charged article parodied some racial animosity he perceives towards whites.
“Comments like ‘whites take up too much space’ or at that lecture by that Kenyan guy, Ngũgĩ (wa Thiong’o) where whites were asked to leave . . . some people don’t want whites’ voices to be heard.
The former CDE researcher commented on social media’s ability to engender rage.
“Twitter mobs amplify anger to where it doesn’t need to be and I think that’s a problem,” stated Roodt. “Maybe I did raise some good points about journalism in South Africa. I’ve seen some journalists saying it should never have been published because it was a silly piece, and it was a silly piece.”
Roodt resigned from his job at CDE on Wednesday.
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