In the back half of 2005 I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, taking classes, hiking a lot, and volunteering at an orphanage in an especially impoverished area of the city, which was a stupid, shitty, selfish thing to do.

There’s a point at USC film school (I was there on scholarship, so don’t go getting any funny ideas about my background) where the classes divide into 4 separate projects, with each crew position (camera, edit, sound, production design, etc) being populated by a different student in the class. The way it works is first 50 or so director hopefuls pitch projects to the faculty; they’re whittled down to 4, who pick their producers and then audition their crew members among the wider pool of candidates. It all gets pretty depraved, and I ended up massively screwing over a friend to get the sound gig on the premium project of the 4, but before that I had a pseudo-moralistic-escape-fantasy-freakout that led me to the study abroad office. The adviser put some different options in front of me: New Zealand if you’re into extreme sports, China if you’re interested in global development, France if you’re really boring. But the social justice aspect of South Africa jumped out at me — it spoke to who I thought I was, or at least who I thought I should be. It afforded me the opportunity to feel morally superior to my scrambling film school peers, all while I was engaging in the exact same behavior I judged them for and then some.

The volunteer program in Cape Town was all on rails; we were presented with a brief menu of options, we checked the box for the one that sounded appealing, we showed up at the shuttle pick-up point three times a week and were safely escorted to the orphanage, through a level and scale of poverty none of us had the capacity to understand. For a few years afterwards I would tell people that seeing Khayelitsha on those rides to and from the orphanage would activate my interest in leftism and economic justice, but the truth is that I was just a tourist, extracting a halo for deployment stateside. Even at the orphanage we frequently did more harm than good, hanging out and playing with toddlers who had lost everything. The folks running the orphanage frequently warned us against building attachments with the kids due to the developmental damage it could wreak once we inevitably left, but we all picked favorites and basked in their unearned affection, convincing ourselves we were as sad as they were when we bailed on them. It was all bullshit.

Following this Justine Sacco nonsense reminded me of an anecdote I heard three separate American volunteers tell during my time in South Africa. First a bit of background: a good number of the children we worked with were HIV-positive. Which kids were was meant to be confidential information, but the do-gooderiest of those among us had ways of finding out, if nothing else to inflate the stakes of the narratives they were telling themselves about what they were doing with their time there. And a small subset of those who made it their business to rifle through the medical records of a 3 year-old orphan would spin a dramatic tale, which varied only a little depending on the teller:

I was playing with [redacted], who was, of course, born HIV-positive, and he had cut his hand. I reached over to grab him a toy, pricking my finger on the razor wire. He reached out to my cut hand with his cut hand, and I realized….

You can see where this is going. While I was in Cape Town I heard some version of this made-up story from three separate American college student volunteers, out of a crop of I’d say 150 American college students hanging out in Cape Town orphanages until the next rotation came in a few months later. So, unless I just happened to meet the three worst Americans who have ever been to South Africa (certainly possible), I’d guess that this is an anecdote that has been shared in one form or another hundreds of times, always with the same wide-eyed expression, always with the same full chest and heavy heart.

People who say things as awful as what Justine Sacco said don’t deserve sympathy, and I’m not here to offer her any. I’m not writing this to lecture people who suffer under the oppression of white supremacy, and have every right to vent their rage upon this deeply stupid, shitty, selfish person. I’m writing this to myself, and to people like me who want to do good in the world, and feel like the path to doing so is paved with self-affirmation and noble motives. I’m writing this to confess that, in my misguided zeal to feel good about myself back in 2005, I (along with many well-intentioned peers) did more emotional and developmental harm to the most vulnerable of black South Africans, in real and measurable ways, than Sacco’s dumbass tweet ever will.

There are institutions, governments and corporations, deeply invested in the continued suffering of black South Africans. Apartheid was never the sum of a bunch of white people acting racist; the British crafted an economic system in South Africa of which black subjugation was (to their logic) an unfortunate by-product, and in 1948, realizing that the direct administration of such a system was untenable, turned the keys over to a bunch of violent nut jobs (the revenue streams to England thankfully remain uninterrupted to this day). The institutions responsible for all this will survive the casting out of Justine Sacco, just as they survived the administration of Nelson Mandela, and just as they’ve survived decades of hordes of pure-hearted, not-at-all-racist white Americans flooding impoverished areas to help fix everything.

Not everybody needs to reflect before they make up their mind about Justine Sacco. Maybe you don’t. But I do.