Race hurdle is one that isn’t easy to jump

LAST week I came upon a brittle pile of editorial submissions to the Rand Daily Mail in the days when you loaded your typewriter with five carbon copies.

They would be the labour correspondent’s, which would be me, and was I a great little teller off!

One item telling off the whites for failing to recognise that anti-apartheid meant one man one vote, next item telling off the blacks for failing to recognise the fears of the whites.

The whole damn nation’s ears would’ve rung, if only it had been noticing.

After a few pages I push it away, blurgh, in relief that whatever my other wrongs and errors, I’ve basically passed the hurdle of race.

That is, while it’s long since I stopped writing about the blacks and the whites, nowadays I believe I’ve stopped thinking that way, too.

That’s not something righteous. You can call it eccentric if you want. In fact you probably do, given how many South Africans are up to the nostrils in blackness/whiteness as the main game.

It works for me though, seeing a young South African as a compatriot and that’s that. I might or might not know his/her language, I might share much or little or none of his/her world view – that’s all secondary.

What’s basic is that I want the same for any one as any other – that they receive and give proper respect, they have justice, they live fulfilling lives, they find good careers, meaning they do work they’re good at, work they grow in, that puts meaning in their life.

I suppose that’s partly “altruistic”; if contentment is right for you or me, it’s right for the next guy, too, and partly “selfish”; if he’s contented, our lives work better. What I know is that if you tell me, “this person belongs to this race or this gender so different rules apply,” I stop listening.

I won’t argue with you, I just won’t listen. That’s rude, I know. You’re entitled to your point of view, but listening to you on this subject makes me feel pulled backward into a backwardness I only just escaped, and I’m entitled to block my ears.

Which is fine until come the hue and cries too loud to block that shove us into our binary racial envelope, forcing souls to sink, graphs to plummet, and innocent columnists to engage bloody race, again.

Let’s accept Rule A, no one can tell anyone how to respond to hurts that are theirs and not yours, and ask two questions:

Mandela’s memoirs, Tutu’s, Sol Plaatje’s, Selope Thema’s and many more mention respect for the learning that the invaders brought as counterpoint to abhorrence of the oppression that they also brought.

My ears over decades have heard that subject routinely treated as weights on each side of a scale, however uneven, by indigenous African mouths, journalistic and other. How did it last week become a blasphemy?

Over the era that different mouths complacently declared “we brought them schools, hospitals, etc, they should be grateful”, was it reasonable to reply that “unless you admit another side of the scale, with subjugation, belittlement, injury and insult, your position is absurd”, and if so, is that sauce the goose’s alone?

This affair is reversion. Depressing to receive furtive white-to-white e-mail circulars, “Here’s why Helen was right but don’t tell the blacks, they’ll think I’m racist.” Depressing to remove topics from the agenda of honest openness that we profess to applaud. Depressing to think with genes more than heads.

And spurring: toward people being people, building shared tomorrows, respecting past pains, rejoicing in the privilege of our era.