There has been a robust discussion on the issue of white
privilege in the world and in South Africa in the last few days on FaceBook and
I am relieved to see that finally people can have these discussions and express
their views without the whole exercise degenerating into an e-blood bath.
Therefore it was no surprise to wake up on Wednesday morning and find that one
of my friends had tagged me to a response she had written to a blogger named
Brendon, who had written a “mea culpa”, confessing to his prejudices against
black people. You can read the blog here. My friend Gillian Schutte is a white
South African who has no problem discussing the devastating role that
colonialism and its hideous cousin apartheid wreaked on the continent of Africa
and she will never back down from challenging notions of white supremacy. Her rebuttal
to Brandon can be read here.
However, after reading both Brendon’s blog and Gillian’s
public response to it, where she basically tells Brendon that his views are not
the views of all white people and that his admittance of prejudice, with
absolutely no sign that he was in any way trying to overcome those prejudices
was in fact of no use to anyone but himself and others like him, I felt a
compulsion to defend myself. Defend myself you wonder? Yes defend myself, my
blackness, because this is what many black people will tell you: Whenever a
black person does something wrong, commits a crime, drops a piece of paper on
the street, rapes, or murders, all black people become those things. All black
people carry the burden of the guilt of one person or a small group, because of
blanket statements many of us have grown up hearing from the mouths of white
people in southern Africa. Many of these whites were raised with racism as the
very backdrop of their lives, in which they had a black nanny or “house girl”
and a black “gardenboy”. By the way these were usually grown men and women with
families of their own, but they were infantilized even by the white children,
who came of age totally believing that the purpose of black people was to be of
service to them and that is all blacks were created for. These children grew up
hearing their parents talk about the dangerous blacks who robbed murdered,
raped, littered, stank, were drunks and cared only about fucking, dancing and
drinking beer all the while beating their women and living in squalor. Brendon
represents the kind of adults those children became and many stayed that way
even as adults. Brendon basically believes that he can never be friends with
blacks because blacks are not worthy of his friendship by virtue of their
“nature”. Brendon, and many whites have concluded that blacks are harbingers of
all things evil and bad, and that blacks are substandard subspecies of lesser
human form and because of this we, blacks will never reach a standard of
intellectual or material accomplishment that would make us worthy of effort by
white people.
Just to make things clear to Brendon and his ilk: The
mimicry you see black people perform, the fawning the flattery and the
bootlicking which you so accept as due worship, happens because we are
survivors. Many blacks realized that it was a matter of survival to comply and
bend with the sick wind that your ancestors belched over us. That is why we
could be transported across seas and still thrive where we were enslaved, and
made to work like the beasts of burden white people saw us to be. Look around
the world Brendon and you will see that blacks survived where other indigenous
peoples died out in their millions. The USA and Native Americans is a great example,
as is Australia and the Aborigines. At our core we have unpacked and
deconstructed your bullshit and I am glad to say that my children will fare
better in the new world order than yours will. My children are being raised to see human
beings first not color. My children are being raised to be conscious that there
are other peoples on this globe and that a sense of entitlement is a dangerous
quality to harbor, one that results in stereotyping others and bigotry. There is
no room for the kind of prejudice you exhibit. Those days are gone and just
because you confess to prejudice does not make you a better human being. You
have shown the world your baseness, your arrogance and stupidity, quite
frankly.
I grew up in a country where white people lamented the
demise of minority white rule and they all predicted the fall of the great
Zimbabwe, bread basket of Southern Africa, all thanks to the white farmers of
course. Well, that Great Zimbabwe did fall, but rather than look at the reasons
why things went the way they did, and rather than blame an inept, corrupt and
brutal regime that has meted out all manner of injustices on all the citizens
of Zimbabwe, many white people say:”look what the blacks, ALL blacks have done
to this country”. I have not head any of them remark at the ingenuity of black zimbabweans at home and abroad, who sustained a dying nation through sheer guts and steely resolve to hunker down and SURVIVE!
In the introduction his personal history of Biafra,
Professor Chinua Achebe, great Nigerian writer and scholar writes: “Africa’s
post colonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of
ruling themselves. We have also had difficulty running the new systems foisted
upon us by ‘our colonial masters’. Because the west has had a long but uneven
engagement with the continent, it is imperative that it understand what
happened to Africa. It must also play a part in the solution. A meaningful
solution will require the goodwill and concerted efforts on the part of all
those who share the weight of Africa’s historical burden [There was a Country.
A Personal History of Biafra, 2012]’.
In essence what white people on the continent and in
southern Africa in particular do, is to absolutely refuse to look at what black
people have become, as a direct legacy of the work of their ancestors, who
dehumanized, robbed, raped, disenfranchised and fragmented millions of organized black communities in order to enrich
themselves. Therefore when people like Brendon throw out blanket statements
about their racist selves and how they have stopped trying to be friends with
blacks, it doesn’t occur to them that blacks have a deep seated distrust for
white people based on this ugly and relatively young history and that many
blacks don’t really care to make friends with them. They are so blinded by
their position of power in terms of wealth and influence they truly believe
that to befriend black people is to do them a huge honor or favor. It is this
mindset that needs to be deconstructed in the minds of young people if there is
ever any change to be made towards real and genuine respect for one another. When white children see black children as their peers then things will turn around. However in order to do this they need their parents to lead by example and stop calling blacks kaffirs and baboons at the dinner table.
I have lived in several all white communities since
leaving Africa and believe me, white people’s shit stinks just as much as black
people’s and at 19 years of age the scales fell off my eyes when I saw a German
man snort and spit out a bolus of green mucus onto the pavement. I had never thought
a white person capable of such a nasty act even in private and here I was the
only black person in middle Bavaria in a tiny village where people stared at me
out of windows as I walked down the village streets.
In 2010, after running the Chicago marathon, I decided to
stop and use one of the hotel restrooms in downtown Chicago and to my horror I
found overflowing toilets with ugly turds floating on mounds of toilet paper,
dubious looking liquids on the restroom floors and guess what, there were a handful
of blacks who ran that race which had over 35 thousand runners that year. This
was not black people’s mess!
I use these two
examples to illustrate how ignorant and backward it is to live an unreflected
life in this global day and age. I also write because while it is great that my
white friend Gillian spoke up, it is high time that black people speak out
about racism and how it rears its ugly head under the disguise they call "honesty". While
Brendon’s confession is hardly a sophisticated one that requires special genius
to unpack, there are other more subtle, more insidious ways in which white
people try to undermine black people and usurp any collective confidence we
might try to gather as we go about our lives. A typical example of this is
Donald Trump’s demand that democratically elected United States President Obama
produce his long form birth certificate, to prove he was an American citizen.
That act, performed publicly was supposed to have the effect of humiliating a
black man, in the highest office of this land because then surely that would
result in the rest of the blacks cowering in shame also. The white South
African comedians and commentators who mock blacks under the guise of humor, by
mimicking our accents when we speak English are not-so subtle but effective ways of “putting us and keeping
us in our place”, which is as the “house-girl”, the “garden-boy” and the cook.
It is an underhanded way of sending the message to even those who have done well:
you are still black and will always be black and all that this term connotes.
Black people have a lot of work to do on ourselves in
terms of throwing off the shackles of mental slavery that have us believing
that we are inferior to white people. People like Brendon count on us cowering
and living down to their low expectations of us. We are better than that and
when we know better and should teach our children the truth about who these
racists are and who we really are: The original Africans who existed and had
thriving civilizations before Brendon’s ancestors came a -creeping. That we are
poor is because they are rich and have access to everything of the highest
quality and standards. That is a fact and they sit in positions of privilege from
which they write their unintelligent bull crap and call it confession! They believe
they have superior knowledge through science and technology, all the while
failing to accept that the reason the present is the way it is, is because they kept
all other peoples in various states of arrested development. Shame!
There is no shame in blackness Brendon and no, you are in
no way superior because of your white skin. I would encourage you to go back to
Ireland and visit the ghettoes of Dublin and come and tell me that blacks are
inherently dirty, loud, lazy and inept. I hope you live to tell the tale upon
your return if they don’t cut your hand off at the wrist to get to your cheap
watch. However, there should be a sense of shame in prejudice as blatant and as
archaic as yours and there should be shame at the fact that black Africa is in
shambles because of the heinous acts of your ancestors. Other white people are
trying to create a different legacy for their children than the one that will
burden yours: a legacy of hate, oppression and imperial complex against a
people that your ancestors came and stole from. They declared they came in
friendship, your ancestors. Now we know different, and you want to believe that
blacks want your friendship?! Get real!
