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.