An encounter on a British bus

I wrote this piece a while ago as part of a project for a Reflective Practice course I was doing in the UK. Georgina was a classmate of mine, originally from Sierra Leone but who has lived in the UK for much of her life, who graciously told me her story and allowed me to put it into narrative. Hope you enjoy!

I twirl my new braids around my finger as I waited to climb aboard. I always feel good after getting my hair done, more human, more worthy, somehow. I remove my sunglasses and walk to the back of the bus, which is largely empty on a Saturday morning. Three older ladies sit in the second-to-last row, white hair neat and tidy, scarves around their shoulders and handbags on their laps, real prim and proper, chatting away, probably on their way to do their weekly shop.

They spot me as I walk towards them, and I can sense something change. Something intangible, like a breeze changing direction. I've always been overly sensitive to these things, these subtle changes in behaviour, and so I tell myself it's nothing, just shrug it off. I take a seat in the row behind them, and they continue chatting pleasantly about everything and nothing.

“...and so I told him that the irises needed splitting and that he needs to do it because I can't do it any more because of my back, you see,” says the one with the slightly purple hair and horn-rimmed glasses.

“I know what you mean. My garden's really suffering because my knees just can't take the bending any more,” says the one in the pink fluffy cardigan, and she surreptitiously glances my way.

“I feel so guilty when I think of my hydrangeas,” says the one wearing a pearl necklace over her peppermint blouse with the lace collar.

I play it cool, look out the window at the Lewes Road shops, while watching them out of the corner of my eye. I get the sense that they're very aware that a black woman has just sat behind them, not in a hold-onto-your-handbags kind of way, but more in an our-space-has-been-compromised kind of way. It's the subtle change in the air, you see. Something about how they hold themselves, how they become self-conscious and try not to look at you too obviously.

These kinds of situations amuse me, actually. I'm curious about these women. Having lived in Brighton for the last 20 years, I tend not to see colour anymore. I don't mean to sound pretentious or overly PC, but it just doesn't occur to me when I'm the only black person on the beach. I don't look for racial discrimination, and only really notice it when it's overt. I smile as I remember last week when a chavvy young man hurled a racist insult my way that I don't care to repeat. An old gentleman waiting at the bus stop whipped his head around, and suddenly started beating the boy with his umbrella for having such bad manners. I couldn't stop laughing! It's good to know the world is mostly made up of decent human beings.

The bus is on North Street now, and we're passing the Clocktower on our way to Churchill Square. It's been wrapped in layers of clothing, mostly shirts and tops, ranging from pastels to deep hues. It's magnificent, and reminds me of the lines upon lines of washed clothes drying in the wind back home in Sierra Leone. My heart pangs, a reflex reaction when I think of home.

“What on earth is that?!” exclaims Pink Fluffy Cardigan.

“I don't know,” replies Pearls. “It must be vandalism of somekind. You know these youngsters these days.”

“It can't all be some kind of prank? Who would go to such effort? And surely the City Council wouldn't allow it!” says Horn-rimmed Spectacles.

I hesitate for a second before I decide to explain. “Actually, it's an art installation.”

They slowly, self-conscious-casually turn their heads around.

“It's for the Brighton Festival. The City Council actually helped construct it. They had cranes and men in hardhats helping out last week.”

I could almost see the relief wash over their faces. They visibly relaxed almost as soon as I spoke and they heard my accent, which is clearly British. Their discomfort is like a heavy cloak they've shaken off. I could read their minds: It's ok. She's one of us. Nothing different or threatening or scary, it's just that her skin's a different colour, that's all.

“In my day, washing lines weren't mistaken for art!” ventures Pearls, and smiles at me tentatively.

“Speak for yourself! I was a regular Vincent van Gogh with the clothes pegs!” says Pink Cardigan, and the ladies and I break into laughter which shatters the last layers of ice.

We regale ourselves with various puns on the theme of clothes (“Bet the artist thinks she's tops!”, “Well no need to get shirty about it!, “Oh, button up!”) until we reach Palmeira Square which is my stop. I say goodbye to the ladies, and they seem almost sad to see me go. How strange, I think, to find acceptance in such an unlikely place. I wonder if I'll miss this marvellous city when I move back home to Freetown next year, and whether I'll belong there as I've come to belong here. A small part of me fears I have more in common with the octogenarian English ladies than Sierra Leonean women my age, and I sincerely hope that isn't true.

A letter to a friend in defense of "Assumptions, intentions, purple aliens and Michael Jackson"

Hi Koketso!

Trust me, I have defended my argument so often at this point against mindless accusations that your well-argued email was really pleasant to read. :)

You touch on a broad variety of topics in your email, and I'm going to speak about the ones I think bears directly to the piece I wrote.

Every person of colour has a story of injustice to tell. My grandfather was forcefully removed from a white area and made to live in the Cape Flats. That same grandfather's birth was the product of an arrogant government minister who thought it was ok to take advantage of a friend's servant (on a regular basis) and impregnated her, never recognising his son beyond occasional cheques towards maintenance. There is a mansion in Tamboerskloof that by today's rights should be ours, as said minister had no other kids. I could go on and on, about how my parents are teachers because in those days if you were coloured and wanted to be a professional you had to go into teaching or nursing, about the time my father spent in prison when I was a toddler for handing out pamphlets...yes, point made. Apartheid was unjust, and we are where we are today because of that inequality.

I understand perhaps more than most the inequalities inherent in land and capital possession in this country, and especially the injustice of our labour force. I am not ignorant, I am not a colourblind, "rainbow nation" junkie, as everyone seems to assume I am (and quite frankly I take offence that everyone automatically assumes that of me). However, I do contest the following statement you made very strongly:

"My most sincere concerns however, are that, ‘White South Africa’ will eventually learn to let go when ‘Black South Africa’ starts killing them, literally. White South Africa will consider leaving the country only when ‘Black South Africans’ start loving themselves. At the moment, the vision is far from transpiring."

I don't understand why black self-love equates to killing white people. The piece I wrote stemmed from a frustration with the current tendency of people of colour to somehow think that our pain is a license to say and do anything to others. I don't understand that reasoning of wanting to punish white people, to make them suffer the way we suffered. Not because I care especially much about white people, but because I care about what we say about ourselves as black people. Our black humanity is formed every day, and is our black humanity one that degrades us by treating others worse than we treat ourselves? Is that who we are as a people? The kind of people who would behave EXACTLY as our oppressors did, by judging people by the pigmentation of their skin and then KILLING them? I would like to think I am a better person than my oppressor.

I don't understand the end result of such an attitude, and perhaps you can explain this "vision" to me? Are we, ordinary people of colour to take up arms (provided by whom?) and storm the white suburbs, killing men, women and children as we take their houses, take their land, take their businesses by force? Is that the intention? Are we to call them "cockroaches", "devils", "foreigners", as we physically make them walk into the sea? How would we avoid a charge of crimes against humanity? How is that not genocide? How are we not as heartless ourselves as the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994? How is that not "ethnic cleansing"?

This is all not to say that I'm against justice. Justice must come. The land must be redistributed, capital must be redistributed. White people won't like it, of course, but equality hurts if you have been unfairly privileged for generations. That's ok. What is not ok is to lose our own dignity by treating white people abhorrently. Justice does not mean maliciousness. Justice does not mean revenge. And I mean that in order to protect the spirit, the soul, the wholeness of our being as people of colour. Because this is exactly how it starts - the way the oppressed become the oppressors throughout history, time and time again. If we go down that road, we become Animal Farm.

As I said at the end of the piece (which a lot of people seem not even to have reached) I am not for going easy on white people. White people have a crapload of work to do if they want to be a part of this new new South Africa we have created. And they need to come out of their self-imposed isolation and engage with the rest of South Africa and do a lot of introspection and yes, feel some pain. But it will not be because we as black people have been unnecessarily cruel to them. It will be because they will realise what white people and whiteness has done to this nation, and that they are actively complicit in that, and that they will have to materially lose in order for us to progress as a country.

So your implied assumption that I am protecting white privilege is incorrect. I am in fact protecting our black humanity from being fractured and broken even more that it already is, by our own words and actions. The very least we can do is to recognise our common humanity, and treat white people the same way we treat ourselves, with dignity. Maybe they don't deserve it, but we do.

I have seen this play out myself very recently, to the very same friend I wrote about. She was treated with extreme condescension and disrespect for merely asking a question in a forum, I believe, because she is a white person asking the question, and not on the basis of the question itself. The people who replied, both black and white, were abhorrently mean, cruel, in fact, and intentionally so, in a way that I would never treat another human being. Their intention was to hurt. But what kind of human being does that to another human being? I understand that you are angry, I understand that you carry hurt inside you, but the instinct to hurt others does not contribute to anything, it doesn't build anything, it does not bring justice. And it does not heal you. You lose some part of yourself in doing so. Yes, white people do such things all the time, but do we really want to be just like the backward, racist, closed-minded fossils of our past? This is what I am fearful of. This is why I call for treating others as you would like to be treated.

Anyway, I hope I have addressed some of the points you raised. Thanks for your thoughtful and considered email. I'm always happy to engage when I get well-written critique.

Keep well,

Mel.

Assumptions, intentions, purple aliens and Michael Jackson

Recently there has been a story in the news of what initially appeared to be yet another case of blackface at a traditionally white institution. “Blackface at Stellenbosch University”, headlines said, above a picture of two young women clearly sporting paint all over their faces, necks and arms, smiling broadly into the camera. “Disgusting!” roared some, and others started petitions to Stellenbosch University to get these girls excluded, all racists herded up and stoned, and other extraordinary measures of redress for the crime. I was one of them, insomuch as I took a screenshot of the headline and photo and forwarded it to a friend of mine with the caption, “Again!”

The thing is, if you clicked on the article and actually read it, it says somewhere near the bottom that the girls may have been at a res party where the theme was “Aliens”, and they may have in fact been painted purple to resemble the theme. I confessed this news to the friend I had sent the screenshot to, and upon further inspection of the photo, we found that the students were wearing strips of tinfoil in their hair, as one would do if you were trying to look like an alien. Whoops!

And yet the tar and feathering continued, by those who had clearly not read the article, and had assumed the worst. Even after another photo emerged of one of the girls, this time in better lighting, where one can clearly see that she is painted purple and not black or brown, and that she has tinfoil in her hair, and that her fellow students are similarly bizarrely painted, it continued. This was clearly not a case of blackface, yet people had already sprung onto the nearest high horse, latched it to the nearest bandwagon and rode it into the setting sun. The students were suspended pending further investigation.

My friend seemed concerned, yet cautious. As an Afrikaans woman with a liberated mind, she noted that it must be easier just to be racist. “I mean, as a racist, you can say what you want, without fear of offending anyone, because you are racist, and you don’t care if anyone is hurt by your words. Your intention is to hurt. But as a liberal, liberated white person, everything you say and do you have to be so cautious, examine your words, your actions and the context, to make sure it couldn’t possibly offend anyone.” I know this particular friend triple checks every Facebook status to make sure it wouldn’t unintentionally hurt her conservative white friends nor her radical black friends.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Oh shame! Poor white people! They have to think twice about everything they say! That more than makes up for the fact that they have historically oppressed people and have all the land!” Yes, it’s easy to be blasé and dismiss this minefield some people have to cross, especially if the colour of your skin is a clear indication of your intentions.

Wait, what does that mean? It means that if you, as a person of colour, make a joke, it is understood not to be hurtful to other people of colour. If you try to pantsula on the dancefloor, or even try to twerk, it is considered natural and not offensive. People might laugh at your efforts, but no one will criticise you, or whisper the words “cultural appropriation”. You can say words like “nigga” or “gam” or even make sweeping generalisations of white people, coloured people, Indians, whoever, and it won’t be assumed that you’re making a racist slur.

Obviously, this is because white people speak from a position of power. If a person with no power says a bad thing about a person with no power or even a person with power, what difference does it make? Conversely, if a person with power says a bad thing about a person with no power, that’s oppression. Intention doesn’t matter, all that matters is that someone is offended. Right?

In 1995, the New York Times reported that the song “They Don’t Really Care About Us” by Michael Jackson contained racist lyrics, just a day before the release of the album HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1. If you were a child of the 90s like I was, I’m sure you know the song, and probably can sing along to the album. The line in contention was “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don’t you black and white me.” “Kike” is a derogatory word for Jewish people, and the very use of the word is offensive, the New York Times argued.

Michael himself was horrified that anyone would think that his intention was to demean anyone. He responded in a statement saying, “The idea that these lyrics could be deemed objectionable is extremely hurtful to me. The song is in fact about the pain of prejudice and hate and is a way to draw attention to social and political problems. I am the voice of the accused and the attacked. I am the voice of everyone…I am not the one doing the attacking. It is about the injustices to young people and how the system can wrongfully accuse them. I am angry and outraged that I could be so misinterpreted.” So ironically, in a song about how marginalised groups are oppressed by those in power, he was accused of being racist. His outrage stems from the fact that that was not his intention, if seen in the context of his heart. Anyone who is a Michael Jackson fan would know that he was all about world peace, anti-discrimination, anti-global poverty and taking care of our planet. Yet his song critical of discrimination had backfired. After some consideration, Michael changed the words of the song.

My friend is often saddened by the fact that people can’t see into her heart. I have rarely met a person, particularly a white Afrikaans person, who is so totally committed to the project of reconciliation and justice in South Africa. She is passionate about trying to get white people to see their ingrained racism, the everyday ways in which they isolate themselves and oppress everyone else. She is fully aware of her privilege, completely understands both the white fear of loss and the black need for real, tangible, redistributive justice, and is actively thinking and working towards bringing understanding between the two poles of society. She marched with #FeesMustFall, she wants to know what she as a white person who owns no land can do to contribute towards socio-economic justice. She has dedicated her life towards empowering young people to change South Africa. And yet people can so quickly call her a racist, for the most innocuous deeds or words. It could easily have been her suspended from university for painting her skin an alien purple.

It is currently very unfashionable to be asking for consideration on behalf of white people, whether allies in the cause for justice or not. The current trend is to punish all white people. “Fuck white people,” as one Wits student recently wrote on his t-shirt, and not without good cause. This article is not about asking for leniency, it is not a call to go easy on white people. I am not stupid enough to say that liberal white pain is in any way equivalent to black pain, or even vaguely comparable. It is merely a plea to people of all races to observe the Golden Rule, the central tenet of most world religions, and a very good idea if you want to be a decent human being: Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. As much as we would each like to be seen as an individual with individual interests, beliefs and intentions, why are we so quick to make assumptions about others, based on a few visual markers of skin colour and body shape, or the sound of their name? Let’s pause a moment before flinging ourselves onto our high horses, to see if we cannot discover someone’s intentions behind the action, word, look, smile that has offended us. Context matters, after all. If we could ask Michael Jackson, he’d agree.

This blog was reposted in the Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader Reader blog under the title 'Blackface' but not really: http://thoughtleader.co.za/readerblog/2016/02/09/blackface-but-not-really/