In celebration of the fact that it is Friday night and I don't feel horrible about the state of the world, I'm writing on my blog instead of going out. This may sound contradictory and somewhat odd, but I have a very heavy class on Fridays from 4:30-7:30, so it usually takes me a day or two to fully process.
Tonight though, Nora just told me she was glad I was in the class because I think about things completely and totally different than she does. And then that made me feel like I was crazy and am going to end up like my Papa Ed or something. Nothing against Papa Ed, but I dunno... or Aunt Lucille. All this crazy hippie blood in me or something. I can't seem to help it that I'm so structural and so anti-Western, anti-neo-liberalism anti-white-privilege. I just don't know what I'm for I guess.
In talking to my dad a few nights ago, I said that this class makes me feel more distanced from everyone else. It makes me think, it makes me process, and critically analyze the world. Heidi calls it "giving things space" and "Living in the contradictions". I feel like it is a process of humanizing. My dad reminded me that that's why I came... to grow as a human. even if it does distance me more from other people who aren't quite as haunted as I seem to be by the bigger questions of the world. And even having the leisure to contemplate Questions that aren't directly related to food, shelter, safety comes from having a place of privilege in society.
Everything about the world that I occupy is almost entirely dictated by Western thought, Western tradition, Western history, colonialism, capitalism, white-over-color ascendency (yay CRT). There is so much more in the world. But if I am the champion of the Other, that is a product of Western thinking as well. I cannot be another white savior. But how do I exist as who I was born as in the context of the questions...
The kids in my class in Kayamandi. They know the following three things about apartheid which ended just before they were born. 1. They weren't allowed to live with their fathers. Families had to live in Eastern Cape. 2. They weren't allowed to go placed without a pass. They couldn't go into King Pie in town to buy fast food. 3. White police shot black people. (and after apartheid)In 1994 we could vote and Nelson Mandela was our president.
There is such a rich history of protest. The ANC despite its corruption and governmental failings has sUUUch a rich history beginning in 1914, I think. What do the kids know about ANC? they know who is for them. They know whether or not their families support them. Maybe I'm romanticizing a brutal history that should not be even partially redeemed. But shouldn't lessons be learned? shouldn't the people of this country be proud of ridding themselves of apartheid? in class today we talked about how TRC basically established that apartheid was wrong, violence was wrong, and that public confessions were cheaper than trials. It did not really address the premise of apartheid. It didn't really ever say, racism is wrong. And structurally in South Africa, not much has changed. There's not space for relationship between races because townships are still townships. The roads still say "NY ###" which stands for Native Yard.
Even in the rememberences of people who died in the struggle, the white martyrs have names, the black ones have locations and numbers. The Gugulethu 7. The Cradock 4.
Amy Biehl an American Fulbright Scholar, who dove, swam, did gymnastics and went to Stanford, was murdered by a mob when she was somewhere she probably shouldn't have been. She was in Gugulethu. She stood for all the right things, but theres a white arrogance in thinking that will save you. Under apartheid, there was no discriminating between a good black person and a bad black person. Both could get shot just as easily for just as irrelevant reasons.
And now history just isn't taught? The schools don't want another angry generation? I don't know.
Yes this has implications for me. and for Fresno. and for the States. I'm not done thinking them through yet though.