The desegregation of self
Towards ending white silence
My grandfather never believed the holocaust happened. He believed it was “fake news,” a story the Allies constructed to increase anti-German sentiment. It’s not as though my grandfather was an unreasonable man, nor did he live in social isolation. One of his best friends, Mr. Levine, was a Jew. I presume Oupa and Mr. Levine did not talk about the holocaust. Or maybe they talked about it — once. I cannot imagine how it might have felt for Mr. Levine to share the experience of his peoples’ suffering with someone like my granddad, who not only represents the people who caused that suffering but also denies that it happened.
Maybe my grandfather’s belief that “German people were good humans” could not co-exist with images of Nazi soldiers marching Mr. Levine’s people into gas chambers. So he pushed the whole holocaust out of his consciousness. Believing a lie might be easier than facing unbearable darkness. Because how can your good people enact atrocities? How can you belong to a blood-stained history? How can you look into the eyes of your fellow humans, who bear scars carved by your people? How will your life change if you allow the truth to soak into your body?
In some ways I am no different than my grandfather. In 1993, just before apartheid fell, I made my first two black friends: Letlagle and Jerry. Our conversations did not traverse that dark chapter of our history. Instead we spoke about Shakespeare, soccer and Nelson Mandela. This pattern of avoidance became easier after apartheid ended because, like slavery in the US, we could shoo the topic away with a gesture of “it is over.”
The discomfort I was avoiding came from my inability to deal with the pain, rage or trauma that shaped our history. One survival mechanism of an oppressive system is that you need to segregate. You segregate yourself from the realities of others so you do not have to be confronted with the pain or rage they feel when they return, tired from a long commute, to a corrugated home too hot to sleep in. Or when one of their brothers is shot by police. Or when they are too afraid to visit the out-house at night as they have been raped there before.
Drive through any city in the United States or South Africa as a white person and you notice when you enter the “black” part of town. The part that has been separated from your experience by design.
The more difficult division to see, the one that perpetuates this structural violence, is the segregated landscape of self.
As a kid I saw adults slinging insults at a person of color. While the insults were not aimed at me, they would hit me, time and again, in the soft tissue of my belly. Pain, anxiety, anger would erupt inside me. Yet the fear of making myself vulnerable to more insults taught me to stay silent and relocate the discomfort of my experience to another neighborhood inside myself. Instead of allowing myself to feel and express this discomfort, I exiled it from my conscious mind. For more than three decades I lived a life where I banished disconfirming information or strong emotions. I erected higher and higher barricades between my thoughts and my exiled grief and rage.
That is until one windy fall day in Pittsburgh. There was a march downtown after a shooting. I would like to remember the name of the person who was shot, but it is blurry in my mind. I remember only the posters, the group of protestors gathered on the corner of Liberty and Penn, the dryness of my mouth.
People shared their grief and anger at the loss of yet another innocent black man to police shooting. I was listening. My heart was pounding. A friend of mine took the megaphone. We used to hang out at the dance studio and I really liked her. I felt close to her in some way, but the two of us did not speak about racism.
From deep inside her came a long wail of sorrow, mourning the loss of a brother, frothing with rage at white silence. White silence, like mine, that sees pain and injustice, says “I am sorry for your loss,” but stays unaffected, takes no action to shift an unjust system.
I couldn’t deny her pain. But I couldn’t quite hear it either. Because if I really listened to her pain, it would tear down my defenses and walk me straight into the forgotten neighborhood of my subconscious. I was afraid to go there, because how will I be able to face decades of un-mourned grief, muted rage, silenced shame and unacknowledged trauma? Will I even be able to know what I know and feel what I’ve been too afraid to feel?
I did not want to enter and at the same time I could no longer live in this segregated self that is never at home or at peace. After the march, I got onto my bicycle and peddled home with shaky legs. Once at home I closed the door to my apartment and inside this silence a wail dislodged itself from my body. Over time I allowed myself to feel the pain of so many interactions that broke something inside me or in someone else, but which I never acknowledged, expressed or genuinely experienced. I entered a season of grief, I started to desegregate myself and welcome what I’d abandoned into my conscious experience.
My granddad died before we could have sensible conversations. If he were still alive, I would pull two chairs into his back yard. We would face his vegetable garden with the upright beanstalks twirling from the dark grey soil and the softly lit mountains beyond.
“It’s not okay, Oupa,” I might say in an unsteady voice. “It is not okay for us to live as though things didn’t happen, as if things are all okay right now. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for me, it’s not good for the world.
“I don’t want to run from what is uncomfortable any more, yet I know how hard it is to face the facts of our world. It might feel like the end when you allow yourself to know what you know and feel what you feel. Well, it is an end. It is an end to silence and segregation. It is also a beginning. A beginning of reintegration and liberation of yourself, of your relationships and of your — I mean our — world.”
