Backlash wasn’t about you, Rebecca

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” may sound like a typical comment on any news site that allows white people to complain about how they “just can’t win” in South Africa. That basically sums up Rebecca Davis’s dangerous opinion piece of the same title in the Mail & Guardian (July 1).

Davis explains her pain at being white and how that replicated itself after a “backlash” from “the Twitterati” — referring to three people (including me) who tweeted after the Daily Vox wrote a story about her visit to a mosque to talk about homophobia.

I retweeted the article, titled “Journalist and writer Rebecca Davis is helping this CT mosque to address homophobia” with the comment: “There are no Muslim feminists doing this or …? I don’t … OK.”

That was not about Davis. It was about the “progressive” Claremont Main Road Mosque, which made headlines in 2014 when it was said it would be an open mosque, allowing women and non-Muslims in.

If it was that progressive, why was a white person asked to do the talk? That was the conversation I sought to open, and that was the only question I asked Davis.

The rest is on Twitter and free to read. But what’s scary about Davis’s piece is how a comment that was not about her suddenly became the topic of the top piece in the M&G newsletter mailer on its publication day.

Davis dredged up all her self-pity and put it into a few hundred words, pretending that it was unique to her as a white person.

Yet the doubt and criticism she speaks of is what so many middleclass people go through, not whites (or Davis) alone.

The constant aching anxiety of “am I doing the right thing?” is normal life to most of us who think we understand our sociopolitical status.

And we don’t get to write about how someone hurt our feelings on Twitter after we thought we did such a good job conversing with other people.

When black people talk to white people (and sometimes to each other) about controversial topics, it’s usually violent and painful.

How is it that Davis can self-deprecate and humanise her privilege with cute anecdotes of a stolen bar stool, drunkenly throwing R10 to a man on the street and how she hates her liberal self, only to concede at the end of the piece that the points raised about the very serious privilege of being white and an out-and-proud atheist lesbian in a mosque probably had validity?

More i mportantly, why else would we have brought it up?

(read her full response on the Daily Vox: