Tag Archives: whiteness

Rescuing whiteness

Well before Gillian Schutte’s letter to white people calling on them to reflect on their whiteness, its invisibility and centrality in the reproduction and edification of white power, the very experience of blackness has been characterised by this same demand. Yet, as is wont to be the case, it would be Schutte’s, a white woman,…

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What are vile white practices? Really?

I was most perplexed to read fellow Thought Leader Sarah Britten’s “What are vile white practices?” written in response to Gillian Schutte’s “Dear White People”. Let me begin by pointing out that Britten was correct to say Schutte showed no sense of humour in the post. As a person who has actually experienced racism, there…

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Dear White People

I have decided to start the New Year with a letter to you all. It is a letter that implores you to wake up and smell Africa with a fresh white nose. Before you get angry and defensive, think of this letter as a crash course survival kit for navigating a new reality, and please…

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Unpacking the discourse of domination

Over this past year I have written a series of essays that attempt to deconstruct the “discourse of domination” and have provided the links to these articles in this piece. These essays were written in response to a series of racialised events that happened in South Africa in 2012 — occurrences, which I posit, are…

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Whiteness, shame and “this strange place”

“The liberals must realise that they themselves are oppressed if they are true liberals and therefore they must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous “they” with whom they can hardly claim identification.” – Steve Biko So much has been written on whiteness recently that it hardly seems worth adding to…

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The problem is not black and white

It was 1994 and a Canadian comic at a South African festival thought that given our apartheid history, he’d be edgy by poking fun at race. He got mere titters and derisory silences from the audience. He didn’t realise: we got race. We South Africans had been through race, come back and turned it inside…

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