A Touching Letter From a White South African to White America

Very Emotional

Dear friend,

It has been an eerie thing for me these past few years: sort of a déjà vu experience to watch the news and read about Ferguson, Eric Garner, Baltimore riots, McKinney and, most recently, the horrific shooting in Charleston. I've been watching #blacklivesmatter trend on Twitter: grief and outrage and opinions from every corner. And, as someone who grew up in Apartheid South Africa, this all feels eerily familiar. I listen to people talk and think I remember, and I recognize that.

America did away with legislated racism a few decades before South Africa did (I remember reading many of the early U.S. cases in my constitutional law classes in SA), but institutional racism is still alive and well, and people are hurting.

I recognize the fear, the blaming, the use of "they" and "them" in people's language. I remember hearing the voices of brave voices in the black community appealing to people to listen, to learn, to please, please acknowledge that there are hurts I don't see or understand. I remember the talk of white privilege, and feeling unjustly accused by the term. I remember grappling with what it meant to be regarded as an oppressor, even though I was too young to have done any wrong myself.

I know there are many differences between America and South Africa's histories: they are complex narratives, woven in blood and ink. I do not write this as an expert analyst, or as a political pundit -- but as one confessing there is so much I don't know and understand. But, I offer the little I've learned living in a country which shed tears and blood over race, and now living in another doing the same:

That, even though I was raised as a "liberal" white person, I was still a beneficiary of privilege. I still had more opportunities than people with more melanin in their skin, just because of being born white. I had not yet learned that we are all blind to our own privileges until we hear the stories of those who have lived without. Just as we don't know what a privilege it is to be able-bodied until we, or someone close to us, loses significant body function, we don't know what white privilege is until we, or someone close to us, experiences significant discrimination on the basis of their skin color.

For example, I didn't know until recently that even the color of band aids reflected privilege: the "norm" is a skin-tone suited for caucasians, not people of color.
That, just because I wasn't a hate-mongering "racist" and even though I had friends of other races (I was one of the few who went to a private, multiracial school in the 80s), didn't mean I knew what it was like to be black. I had not yet learned to listen to people's stories.