In the name of God I hate you!

This is what I imagine I would hear if I were to attend the Faithfulword Baptist Church service.  This church on the south-east corner of Southern Avenue and 48th Street, Tempe Arizona is led by one pastor Steven Anderson.  The church is described as old-fashioned and one is cautioned not to expect anything modern or liberal – should you consider visiting, I suppose.

Until the good pastor was refused entry into this here mzansi, I had not heard of him and in fairness, my life was the better in that ignorance.

The beef, I gather from Twitter and electronic version of some newspapers, is the pastors hatred for homosexuals or as he prefers to call them, sodomites.  He is known to have called them vile and worse.  He is unrepentantly steadfast in his view of the sodomites so-called as evil.  In his sermon (I only managed 2 minutes of a YouTube version) he makes no apology for offending the evil that is LGBT.  Pastor Anderson takes his cue from the good book and no one is going to stop him from winning souls.  His bigotry, hatred and othering is God sanctioned.  The bible is, according to the good pastor ,very clear on sodomy.  The man does know his King James Bible; it is the only version of the good book that the Faithful Word Baptist Church goes by.  Not the watered down versions of the good book – this church only goes by the real deal and the real deal good book is on some “woe unto you ye sodomites”;  and pastor and congregation say amen.

As we know, the good pastor was prevented from entering this here mzansi.  As much as this made me happy, it seems to have offended others.  Like one Mike Collins who made his views articulately known in the letters section of the Citizen.  Yes that newspaper whose dodgy history is eclipsed goes unmentioned lately, what with BBBEE and that other newspaper that is a cousin of that TV news channel.  Mr Collins laments the fact that our freedom of speech is poorer thanks to the department of home affairs refusing the good pastor entry into the country.  In his defense of the good pastor Mr Collins refers to good ol’ Voltaire and his “I don’t agree with you but will defend your right to say it to the death” or words to that meaning.  He, Mr Collins not Voltaire, would rather we let the good pastor into our sodom so that he can come win some souls.  Like Voltaire we should defend the good pastor’s right to spew his bigoted bile-like views to the death more so that we disagree with those views.  So far so reasonable, right?  Wrong.  Mr Collins also says that the sodomites would in any event not be attending the good pastor’s sermons, except to be confrontational.  So what’s the fuss, right?  Wrong.  Then Mr Collins craftily uses the Dalai Lama’s experience to underpin the thrust of his letter – that the whole pastor’s affair is another black-eye for freedom of expression.

Bigotry can sound so reasonable sometimes.  Like how kids are placed in classes according to their race – because kids prefer to be with their own or those that are culturally the same, right?  Wrong.  Women do not progress in the work place because just when they get ready for a senior position they decide to get married and raise children, right?  Wrong.  Mr Collins chooses not to deal with the other aspects of our constitutional democracy such as the laws that proscribe hate speech, period.  The proscription of hate speech is not premised on its tendency to incite violence against the other.  Inciting violence is a crime all on its own.  So, when the good pastor makes his intention clear and public that he is mzansi-bound with the intention to win souls and to castigate sodomites in all of their evilness and vile ways;  he foretells his intention to commit a crime.  A crime for which good pastor unrepentantly and unapologetically stands by – in the name of God and the guidance of the bible, of course.  

Our social compact as citizens is that we shall not commit crime and where we do, we may be deprived of some or all of our rights – like freedom of movement, freedom of expression, etc.  Of course this may be a thin edge of a repressive wedge (a point Mr Collins does not make).  Enough has been written and said on the application of our constitutional principles as a balancing act.  Without this balancing Mr Collins and the good pastor will wantonly incite and hate and other and generally bigot their merry way around mzansi.  Of course without the balancing on the other end dictators and fascist will deny all forms of expression.  A concern Mr Collins does not express because fundamentally, he does not think the good pastor a bigot and a fascist – he thinks the good pastor a Dalai Lama of sorts..

Both Mr Collins and the good pastor are entitled to their views just as the department of home affairs has a duty to honour and protect the constitution in its decisions and rulings.  In this particular instance I am with the honourable  minister bae.  Contrary to the assertion of Mr Collins that the decision amounts to an assault on the freedom of expression; the ruling refuses the use of the right to freedom of expression as cover for bigotry, hate speech and othering.  For that, this freedom is strengthened and protected – as it should be.  Especially from the good pastor and his flock.

This is Our Stuff

This is what I hear every time talk of change, transformation or even a mention of Black, comes up. Yes, I hear this from white people, I hear this from whiteness that invariable is also in and by itself, rightness.  Of course this statement comes in a variety of forms and guises. From the ostensibly innocent “nooo, you can’t be serious, that can't be true” to the toe-curlingly infuriating “not everything is about race”.  On occasion as I smile and battle to keep my cool while seething inside – “I’m not an idiot and I am not talking about everything! I am talking about this particular thing! As you correctly point out the painfully obvious – “some things are about race”; your own *expletive* words.

I can never quite get my head around a life where one never has to account for or explain anything. A life where anything one says or does is taken to be valid, right and for a good cause or some good reason. That refrain through Chris Rock’s stand-up show: “it’s all right because it’s all white” or words to that effect – is more profound than I initially appreciated in between fits of laughter.  What gets me even more, all of the *expletive* time is how whiteness never gets this, refuses to get it, not even engage it for just one *expletive* second.  Like a fool I try again: “Sam, just look at how your life is set up” he interrupts, “it’s no different to yours, we both work hard and want only the best for our families” my turn to interrupt “hear me out please, I am trying to make a point of how our lives are set up – how I went to nanogang primary and you to Rondebosch prep; how from our respective first days at school our lives would follow paths set by that first day of school.”

Yes, today was not born on the death of yesterday. To borrow from Alice Walker’s phrasing – Today is not a place Yesterday comes to die, it is the link in the continuum that is yesterday that will become tomorrow.

Some of the brightest people I know are white, only some. It is this lot that get me to lose my generally good sense completely.  How the *expletive* can they not get it? In between responding to some mommy group WhatsApp and sterilizing the baby bottles and stuff says “babe what makes you think they don’t get it, maybe they won’t just get it?” In fact, she continues, I don’t interrupt, “they refuse to get it”.  The horror that is whiteness is of such a scale not even white people want to look at it, let alone engage with it. They would rather take a logic defying position than just see and hear things for what they are, not what they would prefer them to be. Yes, the word is prefer – innocuous as it may seem, it is the basis on which society as we know it is constructed. Laws were passed and enforced precisely on white preferences.  Of course preference is called all manner of other things like “manners, process, requirements, law, order, fairness, what is right; the list is as endless as white preference knows boundaries, not.  “It is rude to speak a language other people in the room do not understand” – seemingly sensible and polite, right?

Real talk: the power of whiteness is largely enabled by the submission of blackness. This was made plain and simple by children who said – my hair, my language, my voice.  This during a week of chaos and turmoil wherever else one looked around the country.  While faction battles raged on; while those elected to serve our communities concerned themselves with dress codes and decorum in *expletive* council chambers – our children were saying “I come as I am in all my otherness, whether you like it, approve of it or not.”  These children’s tomorrow will be better than our yesterday;  only if our today as their parents do not betray it, by our obsessive investment in the very whiteness we claim to resent.

It is because whiteness believes (and lives that belief) that all that is good about everything, is white and right,  that we owe it gratitude for letting us into that splendour.  The splendour Of good schools and clean, leafy suburbs.  How dare we make any demands when such generosity is shown to us, to our children.  All we need do is be grateful and in that gratitude just fit the *expletive* in.  It’s all about decorum and deportment, it is not difficult, besides you can always be you again when you get home – come on, be a team player, be reasonable, these things take time and sacrifice.

Whiteness will continue on the path it knows, understands and love; a path that assures and secures it's place at the top largely because we believe this to be right.  It is only when we, each in our respective spaces politely and emphatically say “fuck you Sam, this is not your shit, it is our shit and you don’t get to keep it to yourself for another 400 fucking years – it ends here, today.”  This is not your stuff.