Am I a trophy of her progressiveness? Am I a really bad person for not wanting to be her political crutch in this phase of her life before she finds her ‘woke’ feet?
Sometimes I think maybe she does not like me at all. Only the experience of me. Virtue signalling.
Is this the price all people of colour must pay in interracial relationships?
Age 32
Thank god I am back in Cape Town. Nothing cleanses me more than this city. My new medication is helping as well. After four years of not treating my illness, I finally went to a really great doctor at the Donald Gordon clinic in Joburg. I also found an awesome therapist. Both of them met me at another deeply suicidal time in my life.
A couple of days after returning from a holiday, the partner who seemed to be having an identity crisis broke up with me. At the same time, I was heading down depression lane. I had been on that road for a long time already, and I wondered how much longer I would remain there because of the break-up.
Nothing is scarier than standing on a balcony and feeling the most pathetic you have ever felt because you cannot find the courage to throw yourself off it.
I got so desperate that night on the balcony that I even called the suicide hotline thinking, on some messed-up level, that talking to them would help convince me to just end it all. It didn’t. It had the opposite effect. And god bless the woman who answered the phone at the call centre that night.
I didn’t jump, but I started cutting. Deeply. I had never done this to myself before. The cuts were so bad at one stage that I probably needed a stitch or two, but I never saw a doctor about it. I was too embarrassed. The wounds festered a bit. I wrapped my arms in long sleeves for a very long time to hide the weakness that left scars on my deltoids.
I spent my days feeling like I wanted to jump out of my skin. Like I was an alien in a strange universe who no one understood. I felt like I personally didn’t understand anything or anyone either. I felt like I had no roots, and no place in this world. I wasn’t of it and I wasn’t for it.
That’s what drove me to my new psychiatrist and therapist.
My doctor told me I am most certainly not bipolar. I am a depressive who suffers from a lack of emotional resilience. He explained new studies in neuroscience – brain pathways, that sort of thing. He gave me a mood stabiliser, an antidepressant and a ‘for emergencies only’ anxiety pill. The medication is really working. He also introduced me to mindfulness. I like it. It helps me check out of a situation whenever I need to. It’s not something that would ever have appealed to me before, but now I find myself practising it all the time.
I am about to start my new job in Cape Town as a programme manager for impactAFRICA, a grant fund for data journalism.
Age 32
I met Rebecca Davis three weeks ago. I have never felt this way before. This feeling is so new. A whole lot of new. And so lovely. We’ve only known each other for twenty-one days, but we really want to get married and spend forever together. The wedding is in December.
My parents are coming. They have accepted our union and given us their blessing. This makes me so happy. My dad is even giving a speech. That makes me even happier.
Age 33
Rebecca is on the couch. I am on the bed. My meds are in my belly. Charlie, our cat, is running laps between us. And when the depression comes again, and it will, at least I will feel I have roots and I can plant my feet firmly on the ground. I am home. We are home.
Why I’m down with Downton Abbey
I am afraid of white people. It doesn’t matter what class they are, it doesn’t matter what job they do, it doesn’t matter if I am paying to stay at a hotel in Europe and they are cleaning the floor in the foyer to lay a shiny path before me, I still recoil in fear at their very presence. And so I take pleasure in watching Downton Abbey. Fearlessly.
When Downton Abbey premiered, the website Gawker released a list of reasons why the show is so good.
Reasons like this:
• It’s highbrow. It deals with issues like the women’s movement in the twentieth century, and the sinking of the Titanic.
• It’s lowbrow. It has all the right ingredients for a Bollywood soapie but with better-timed close-ups. It has secrets, gossip, rumours, affairs, engagements, disengagements, etc.
• It has good heroes and better villains. (I won’t get into this. The Gawker explanation was a bit of a stretch.)
• It has insults. Now this I can fully agree with. The scriptwriting is exquisitely decorated with some of the best slights and slurs I have ever come across. They mostly fall from the mouth of the countess, played by Maggie Smith.
The Gawker piece must have been written by a white person, given that the list failed to include the obvious: Downton Abbey completely lacks diversity. It forgot to mention that it portrays white privilege in all its morning glory. It’s a show that asks the viewer to get lost in the luxury of a white twentieth-century England and forget that, during the same time, black people, Asian people, all kinds of people who weren’t white, were busy being displaced – or worse.
I have a lot of friends who refuse to watch it for these very reasons. It is a white show for white people.
Months after the Gawker article was posted, the critical analyses started pitching up on Google searches. The representation question was raised and answered. The show’s producers argued that the depiction of a more diverse society would be historically incorrect. And you know what, I agree. There is nothing worse to me than having a token black person – in any situation. And you just know that that’s how they’re going to ‘diversify’. Instead of fighting stereotypes, they end up perpetuating them. The token black person is always the assistant or the singer or the athlete or the adopted sibling from an underprivileged background. In fact, they eventually introduced a black singer in season four, but we’ll chat about that another day.
In the case of another hit show I adore – Friends – the eventual emergence of the show’s black character comes in the form of Charlie, a professor of palaeontology who dates Ross. Charlie is the whitest black woman I have ever seen. And no, it’s not because she is an academic or educated or a professional or any of those things. She is whiter than Rachel because there is nothing culturally black about her. This, to me, is the worst kind of inclusion. And these things happen because the people who are striving for diverse casts so that they can garner diverse audiences are white.
Good on the producers of Downton, I say. There would be nothing worse than pretending like the folks at the abbey were left-wing revolutionaries who welcomed one and all into their shire of equality – if not economically then at least racially. Good on the producers for not making it so. Tokenism is more offensive than exclusion.
Downton Abbey is a show I love to watch, and here’s why:
• I love the golden retriever whose yellow coat is as manicured as the lawns. He is cute, shame.
• I love Maggie Smith’s dowager countess. She is a legend and one day entire books will be written about her wisecracks.
• I love the milky-white minions who scurry about and make tea and bake bread and polish shoes and saddle horses.
In conclusion, I love watching Downton Abbey because it is a series about white aristocrats with their white slaves and it makes for pretty cathartic viewing. Plain and simple.
But, despite all my Schadenfreude-fuelled feistiness when I have the protection of a screen, put me in front of a white person in real life and I cower. This isn’t just my own insecurity, I’ve learnt. It’s an actual pathology.
Monnica Williams, a psychologist, professor and former director of the University of Louisville’s Center for Mental Health Disparities, conducted a study on race-based trauma. It’s a field begging for more exploration, but research is short on academic papers purely because it needs to be conducted by people of colour in order to have true meaning and effect, and there is still a lack of opportunity for this demographic in academic circles. Williams found that rac
e-based trauma is
a natural byproduct of the types of experiences that minorities have to deal with on a regular basis. I would argue that it is pathological, which means it is a disorder that we can assess and treat. To me, that means these are symptoms that are a diagnosable disorder that require a clinical intervention.
We fail to recognise these symptoms as part of a disorder because the post-traumatic stress of racism and the effects of what I call ‘white-perfection propaganda’ are so intrinsic. It has become so normalised and natural in the cellular memory of people of colour. We often don’t see it as a problem at all. We just accept the world we live in.
Being a person of colour scares me. I make myself small. I move through the world making exhaustive efforts to be invisible. In the face of white strangers, I lower my gaze. I speak when I am spoken to. I make cowardly eye contact only to greet politely, smile, nod and show respect. I do this with more effort than necessary and then lower my gaze again. This anxiety is my status quo and the status quo for many people of colour. Please can we just take a second to realise how fucked up that is? Really. How fucked up is it that this politeness is not the offspring of pure courtesy – as it should be – but rather the spawn of fear. Fear of degradation, criticism and conflict. If we aren’t polite, we cannot prove our humanity. We are undeserving of being treated with dignity and respect in the face of adversity unless we bow our heads and kneel.
How fucked up is it that history taught us to despise ourselves? That from the moment we open our eyes, we see a white world. A world in which we have no real place. A world where we are displaced because the media and actual events have drilled into us that we have no real power. We have been punctured by this idea that we are undeserving. We are even undeserving of the privilege of protection from the police. This may seem like an American problem, but it isn’t.
The police have never bullied me and I live in an environment where their forces are black and I should feel some kind of kinship with them, yet I still fear them. When covering the State of the Nation Address in 2017, things turned sour. Stampedes, angry crowds and trigger-happy police officers were rife. The enforcers were happy to launch smoke bombs. The air was filled with chasing and cries and banging and bright sparks of fire. Rebecca and I ran too. And after detaching ourselves from a wall while covering each other’s eyes because we thought the smoke might be teargas, my (white) partner sought a sense of safety by standing with the riot police.
At the sight of this, I went into fight-or-flight mode. Her decision was threatening to me. My evolutionary response was to grab her and run away from them. As journalists, we often find ourselves in situations that call for barbed-wire barricades and armed police patrols. She often tells me about her sense of comfort and safety at their presence. I always disagree and voice my fear.
In his 1962 essay ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’, writer and social critic James Baldwin wrote: ‘White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared.’ No truer words have been spoken or written.
I don’t encounter the same fear when in the company of black people, South American people, Asians, Arabs, etc. When travelling to their countries, there is a degree of affinity and sincere respect, which is unspoken but understood regardless of class or education. This was not my experience in Germany, for instance, where the reality of an age-old lesson hit me in the face. White people are considered better at everything just because they are white, and so the world teaches us to worship them. A hard thing to admit. But the seed of this sermon has been planted in all of us.
When a white person marries a person of colour, they are looked down upon. It is assumed that they settled for less. When a person of colour has a white partner, however, even their own people revere them. ‘They married up’ is a popular slogan.
A lack of historical racial education abandons us to sickening insecurity. The ‘woke’ renaissance eradicates or tries to escape the reality of this inferiority complex. It is weak to talk about this inheritance now. And even though I have started paying attention to this, and I’m constantly aware of it anxiously flowing through my veins as I move through the world, I still subconsciously accept what the world has taught me even though I do not believe it: whites are exemplary. This ideology still dictates my behaviour in many ways. But when I am home, watching Downton Abbey, I have free reign over my reaction. I can put my true beliefs into action. Instead of bowing, kneeling and begging, I can safely stand, point, laugh and even judge if I want to. And seeing white underlings scamper about sets my subconscious free. Watching Downton Abbey is a form of free therapy. Cowardly. But free.
Trendy hashtags of empowerment like #SelfLove and #BlackGirlMagic make us feel momentarily stronger, but in reality they have become one of the many offerings to calm the waters of our minds. They are a mechanism to arm our psychologies so we can fear less physically.
And then, of course, there are ‘woke’ white people who seek to convince us that we have less to fear from them. They do us favours, but then have the audacity to preach about equality and rainbow-nationness. Their freedoms and entitlement are so vast that they share with pride their fragility and struggles of being white.
Someone I once thought of as a friend had the cheek to shed white tears in the presence of myself and another friend of colour because she felt discriminated against on account of her race. Her inability to recognise that even that performance came with a healthy degree of privilege and power enraged me so much that I went home and cried for hours. It was insensitive and hateful. It sickened me, and I sickened myself some more, because in the face of all that whiteness I was still afraid. I was aware of her fragility and did not want to hurt her feelings. This is insane. It is insane that I carry the truth in the back of my throat and lug it home to be expressed in isolation. It infuriates me. She infuriated me. And even though I have become better at telling people like that that they are ridiculous, I have not mastered the courage or the language.
Pseudo-Bikos, I see you. I see you with your militancy. I see you ready yourselves. You’ve removed your rings and placed your berets of millennial wokeness neatly on the hat stand. Beat me with your words of righteousness if you must. Often I am in need of that fire. I wish constantly that only a part of me were like you, even though I do not believe in shouting at the world all the time. But I also no longer believe in suffering in silence to protect white emotions any more.
I will say one thing loud and proud when it comes to Downton Abbey: wokeness schmokeness and diversity schmiversity. You won’t watch a show without any black people in it? It’s for white people? I get it. But Downton Abbey doesn’t need racial representation in order for me to like it. Instead of boycotting a show without black people in it, I choose to watch a show where, for a change, the people doing the menial work aren’t black and I can be filled with glee and giggles as the whites do blue-collar work. I can openly and with confidence feel superior for a change. I do not have to wade through centuries of embedded racial insecurity that began long before my ‘transformed’ world and exists within me still.
My Islamic state of mind
The University of Pretoria is a segregated black hole waiting to swallow lost souls and outcasts. And I don’t just mean in the obvious black-and-white racial sense. I mean when it comes to intra-racial and intra-cultural discrimination. It is the actual worst. The only thing I give it credit for? It’s where I met my best friend.
If I hated school – and I did – I hated varsity even more. I did not enjoy the masses of people walking from point A to point B to settle in hall A or hall B where someone could talk at them instead of with them. I did not enjoy that it had structure but also no structure. I definitely did not enjoy being told what to learn, or what made some work good and some work bad and why the hell other people got to decide that. I was also academically paralysed by what I am
convinced is ADHD and a life-threatening allergy to formal education. I made use of the library; abused it. I read all kinds of books on all kinds of things. I wrote all the exams because I had to, and when things required critical thinking, discussion or debate, I went to class. When I wasn’t doing any of these things, I was pissing off the Muslim students’ association by just being me, and smoking cheap dope. Kassam, hell hath no fury like a rich Indian Muslim from Laudium at the University of Pretoria.
The Indian Muslims at UP were all from Laudium, but we attended different schools and so we hadn’t grown up together. You know? Not in the way that comes from living in a close-knit community. There were rich kids who lived on the avenues up on the hill. They were constantly surrounded by other students who were also Muslim and wealthy. They got what they wanted when they wanted it. The only thing we got in my family, whether we wanted it or not, was more education.
In my heavenly little portion of Laudium, I was surrounded by Hindu, Tamil, Christian and Muslim kids of a lower economic demographic. We played on the street and used all the neighbours’ houses for hide-and-seek. A cooldrink was a weekend delicacy because our parents were strict, but those rich Indian Muslim students got Coke in their baby bottles. Lush. Everything in their lives was lush, except their minds. Like their view of the world, which included only cookie-cutter versions of themselves with the same beliefs and thoughts, their minds were small.
We didn’t even grow up with the same religious teachings. Where they attended conventional madrassas, my siblings and I received most of our religious education at home. Every Sunday night, my dad read and explained the Quran to us verse by verse (in English), and we were made to engage in analytical discourse so as to understand the philosophical meaning of spirituality. We also explored interpretations of the text and studied it in a historical and factual manner.
Sorry, Not Sorry Page 9
