i love how in the darkest and longest of rooms, the moment you light the smallest candle, it can be seen from anywhere else in the room. [Unless of course, you’re hiding in a cupboard, but then, Narnia!] Whereas in the lightest and brightest of rooms, you introduce a little bit of darkness and nothing much happens. […]
That is the refrain i hear quite a lot from many white people when it comes to issues of reconciliation and marches and freedom and South Africa: Can we just please stop saying it’s about race? So i thought let’s give that a try. And the way i want to do that is by telling a few stories. Now try and not get distracted by the kind of message you think i want to [...]
Yesterday at the Cape Town #ZumaMustFall march, my friend Craig Stewart, who helps lead the Warehouse in Wetton, gave an excellent speech and here, with his permission, is the transcript of what he said, along with the video link if you would like to see him saying it: This is the draft of a speech I gave at a Unite Against Corruption event in the Company Gardens on Dec 16 2015. The gathering was in [...]
This morning i posted this: Maybe Financeministergate was a sneaky ploy to unite the country cos I have not seen quite so much unity online for a long time… …after one of the funnest thirty minutes i have spent on Facebook and the Twitterer in living memory [Except perhaps on Wednesdays at 1pm when i’m hosting SA’s premier Hashtagging game @AFrikkinHashtag of course]. […]
A while back i shared a number of passages from the Steve Biko book: I Write What I Want. Which are all well worth checking out, as is the whole book if you get the chance. i found one more i would like to share with you which is an example of Steve’s conduct while under hostile examination as well as his ‘perceptive understanding of the difference of black and white uses of language’. This comes [...]
This week i was hanging out with my friend Susan and she told me a story that happened recently about standing up to racism. […]
LET'S LEARN FROM THIS GUY A couple of different people shared this story with me this last week and it was so powerful that i really wanted to try and capture the heart of it in a blog post so it would stick around for longer. You have likely seen this iconic Olympic photograph before and wondered, like myself and so many others, what is going through the white guy's mind and possibly questioned his [...]
Continuing the search on how to be a more effective ally when it comes to my black, coloured and indian friends in South Africa. While it was not specifically an Ally Series post, this piece i did yesterday titled, ‘Before I Comment’ is one we would all do well to pay attention to. Thinking before we rush in to an argument with an opinion or to try and take control is a definite way we [...]
Yesterday i wrote a post titled, 'Before you favourite, RT, forward...' which started with Back to the Future memes [not serious at all] and ended with alleged swimming lesson racism [very serious]. The focus being on people on various social media platforms sharing stories that arrive as 'Breaking News' or are sensational or emotionally-charged, before they have bothered to check whether they are authentic or not. i want to take it a little bit further today, [...]
Continuing with the conversation about ‘How to be an Ally’ with my friend Alexa Matthews who has a huge heart for this kind of thing and the humility to understand that we are trying to figure it out as we go along: I have sat with this for a little while – and was hoping to send it off before leaving South Africa for a holiday. I am still wrestling with whether I as a [...]