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.
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.
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