i online-met Thandi via my friend Alexa and she agreed to share some words on the concept of ‘The Better Black’ which is a heart-breaking idea for me and i hope that by sharing it, we will all be able to take one step closer. i also hope it hits many of you hard in the face, because we need to really start ‘getting’ these stories more…
Thank you Thandi for sharing some of your pain with us…
YOU LUMPED US ALL INTO ONE GROUP
I lived my life in the township. I thought it was because we were too poor to live in the leafy suburb my school was in. It actually took me-and my school mates-a long time to realise that I was fundamentally different to them. Instead, my classmates would ask how I got my hair to be like soft cotton wool, would ask how I got such a lovely tan when they would go pale white after a while. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that when we go to the rural Transkei every December, we put Milk of Magnesia on to actually escape the darkening effects of the sun. Dark was NOT lovely in my world!
Then I realized I was in the township because I was black. It had nothing to do with individual choice but to do with my looking like others of this continent. I was part of the black mass, and I had to live where the white people said I should live. The only way I got to be in ‘your’ school was because it was private, it allowed me in, unlike the other private ones, and I managed to stay there because of a partial bursary.
My mom couldn’t take me to restaurants not because I was a naughty child, not because she’d pilfered a sachet of tomato sauce, but because we were part of that group-those scary, black people. I laughed at the irony of seeing photos of my children playing at Blouberg beach when because I was black, I was not allowed on it at their age.
I am part of the black nation. I am hated, mistrusted because I belong to that group. They have called my children, “blackies” because we are part of that one homogenous group. I was called the k-word, because I look like ‘my’ people. I was pushed down a flight of stairs because I am black. And so, I started identifying with ‘them.’ I became a black person. Not Thandi, not a Christian mom, not a homeschool teacher…I am black. That is the identity forced upon me, especially in the Afrikaans living spaces we are trying to carve a life in.
So, now that you’ve lumped us all into one group without getting to know us. Without ever asking us about our home life, our dreams, our aspirations, don’t try and take me out of that group. Don’t make me the token ‘good black person.’ Don’t make me the ‘better black.’
When you hear my accent and ask me, “You speak so well! How come the others don’t speak like you, are they lazy?” what you are doing is trying to take me out of your preconceived box and make me different, better. And I resist. It is YOUR fault the others don’t talk like you do, because you gave them no choice. (By the way, I don’t speak well, I speak like you. How boring life would be with only one accent.)
When you ask me if I’m foreign because I act more like you than like them, you’re reminding me that my people were educated (or rather, were un-educated) through Bantu Education, or currently by teachers who went through that un-education, and never got the chance to learn the social niceties you deem to be so important.
You view life through your lens, your values. And because I escaped into your world, you think I’m better. I’m not. You’re worse for not having given all of us the chance to be in your world. You never taught us how to bath indoors, when you forced us to have cold water baths outside while you had running hot water in your houses. You never taught us how to tip in restaurants because you never let us in.
I am not better. I hate you using me as the token “good” black. You are the one who is worse, worse for not getting to know and love my people who speak differently to you. For judging them according to your standards of acceptability.
I am black. I identify with black people. I am not a better black person. I am Thandi. Maybe if you removed the box you put us all into, you’d be friends with a Xoliswa, a Puleng, a Thabo. And you’d see that there is no box. There is no better. We are all the same. We love, fear, cry, hurt.. all the same.
Thandi’s family
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Like in Thandi’s world, black community’s hatred of whites is strong. It is not resentment or mere anger. It is hatred. Things are lousy, and it is whites who did it. Life is going nowhere; people live meaninglessly and don’t know what to do about it. There are no jobs. The economy doesn’t need them. They do not know why they are in the mess they are in, so, they blame whites.
Everything is always someone else’s fault. Whatever is wrong in their lives, whatever woes and miseries they bear these are the fault of whites. The impression is of an angry people who, in isolation from historical reality, weave a world that isn’t there and then live in it. The sense of grievance, of being owed, seems as central to their notion of the world as God was to Bernard of Clairvaux. It is not a condition but an identity. Without it they would be unsure who they were, and might have to look within for explanations of their problems. And so they protect the grievance, shield it from thought; cherish it as others cherish their children.
To suggest that blacks need to solve their own problems brings cries of racism. When blacks demand reparations, a white, acting in the European tradition of logic and analysis, is likely to point that he has never owned slaves, that blacks under 30 years of age have never known discrimination, that he never supported grand Apartheid, that his ancestors arrived in SA in 1923 from France/Poland /Wherever. None of this makes the slightest impression on blacks. They can’t look at their position rationally because it doesn’t hold together rationally, and would threaten the grievance.
On the other hand, whites are giving up on blacks. Ritualistic talk continues about poverty and ‘closing the gap’, and AA/BBB, etc. is accepted as entitlement, but no one does anything or knows what to do or has much interest. Many whites are quietly angry while others revel in flagellating themselves over White Privilege, but chiefly for the joy of narcissistic self-abasement. It has little to do with blacks. First-world countries are brain-intensive. Automation eats rapidly away at the low-end jobs for which blacks are usually qualified. In a technological society, people at the bottom at some point become economically unnecessary, unemployable for anything at any wage. This happens now to blacks, and soon will to unintelligent, dumbed-down whites. The unnecessary will need, do need, to be kept in custodial care, however disguised. The alternative is starvation.
But things are getting explosive. Black extremists have often called for it, thoughtful blacks have worried about it, and a lot of whites think “bring it on.” The media carefully will call it “civil unrest” when what is meant is “race war.” They don’t really grasp that the human animal is savage, cruel, vindictive, and murderous. This diagnosis may seem excessive if you are well-fed, content, and more or less in control of your life. It is not excessive. History, and especially present day Africa, are full of groups butchering each other for reasons of race, ethnicity, and nationality. The real danger in South Africa is that blacks, favoured by the media and liberals, accustomed to intimidating whites, may push too far and find that they have made a very serious mistake.
The notion of a “homogeneous black group” is a fallacy which can easily be de-constructed. If this were true, there would be no need for 11 kings and there would be no 11 official languages. There would be no black on black xenophobia and no tribal fighting. It really is a fairy-tale and if it makes you feel better then by all means live in that fantasy world. It is however dangerous to propagate the above as it is devoid of logic and incites civil war by gives it some imagined “justification”.
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