Black Lives Matter
I could cry at the sadness of it all, but maybe I don’t have the right to; so I look for another way to own that feeling and that effort transports me to the most revelatory book I ever read about racism and forgiveness titled; ‘A Human Being Died That Night, Forgiving Apartheid’s Chief Killer’1. The author a psychologist at the University of Cape Town, @Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela delves deep into the psychology of the true understanding of forgiveness.
A book for this time, an uncomfortable but beautiful read that explains how to change my mind, how to stay open to having my mind changed and to acknowledge that ‘open dialogue’ has not always been an automatic process for me. (See Fallacy Cards at the end. I have exercised all of them albeit different examples when someone has disagreed or strongly disagreed with my point of view.)
With the polarisation of thoughts being underpinned by the use of social media and even academically researched marketing techniques used by our political systems applied with a teenager’s outlook, we singularly build our echo-chambers; us teens are reward driven in the most self-absorbed way with a mis-understanding of the consequences, and when it goes wrong we wait for the boring ‘olds’ to bail us out and explain to us what our lack of experience and education means. It’s time to wake up, but instead our only focus is that we really hope the grownups won’t take our mobile phones off us for messing up. Do I just reject the fact that I am part of the #BLM problem because I treat the subject with white emotion (so wrote this) but without action, how am I not helping? I need to read more around this; suggestions have been ‘How To Be An Anti-Racist’ by Ibram X. Kendi and ‘White Fragility Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism’ by Robin Diangelo.
I know that if I am not open to having my mind changed, willing to feel uncomfortable at the price of that new knowledge and understand that with the privilege of white skin, I must actively change and tackle the status quo or I’ll simply continue to be part of the problem as “prejudice is the emotional commitment to ignorance”2.
So, I am reminded of the brilliant Jane Elliott who ran an experiment after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Witnessing the local bias in defence of this killing creeping into her town and her classroom she decided to do something about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTVw9d3SIzA3 You can see how some of her own neighbourhood reacted with the ad hominem and red herring fallacies.
Back to the book. Whilst working with Archbishop Tutu on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission4 [TRC], Gobodo-Madikizela became aware of victims’ stories and when the imprisoned De Kock asked to see a group of widows who had testified, piqued her interest.
The forgiveness shown to Eugene De Kock, the commanding officer of the South African police by the widows of missing men who had no knowledge of what happened to their husbands years after their disappearances; got the answers they were looking for during their visit with De Kock in prison.
Gobodo-Madikizela followed the women to the prison. When they came out, they gave the psychologist a response she was not expecting. She had been ready to hear about their justified anger, but when the response was that he had singularly answered all their questions, remembered their husbands, told them how they had died and where the bodies might be; they were so grateful to De Kock for his honesty they were freed from the ‘forever of unknowing’ that they forgave and blessed De Kock.
Puzzled, Pumla then went and interviewed him asking how he felt about the forgiveness from those wives? De Kock took off his glass’s tears ran from his eyes, with his head bowed down and tried to talk in a high pitch, cracked voice. It was in this moment that Pumla’s black hand reached for his trembling white hand, “a reflex which troubled her”5. A moment of humanity, sameness.
This changed the focus of Pumla’s clinical research, because as a black woman she did not set out to empathise with De Kock. She wanted to document his atrocities, ambushes and executions as apartheids chief murderer known as ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men. Her book is based on the 40+ hours of interviews with him.
Gobodo-Madikizela lays out in her book so well, as she traipses through the many different genocides, how they were organised, actioned and categorised shows that in order for racism and fascism to exist there has to be a support system of some type. For Hitler’s regime she documents how this was carried out overtly, there were systematic dehumanisation processes by which they justified and got buy-in from the masses. For De Kock all his work was carried out covertly through phone calls with his next job from officials. The same high-ranking officials distanced themselves from him once the African National Congress took power in 1995 and arrested him. It was the TRC who encouraged country-wide amnesty for some of those crimes, as they went around the country to give victims a chance to tell their stories and come forward. 15,000 statements were taken over three years4.
For me when I listed to the Podcast that led me to reading her book, there is a live recording of a priest crying in courtroom as he acknowledged that during one of the De Kock’s border raids, he barricaded his church door as men begged to be let in, because he was a coward and he didn’t want to die. Archbishop Tutu quietly says in the foreground as you hear the priest sob, “take your shoes off, we are standing on holy ground”5. Where people were brave enough to stand up and admit their inaction and others their crimes in court-like rooms set-up across the country to allow scenes like this to happen, we see acknowledgement of crimes and forgiveness from survivors:
“Let us look at some instances. In Bisho, some former Ciskei Defense Force officers testified about the Bisho massacre. One of them alienated the people with his insensitive tirade. Then another confessed his part and asked for forgiveness. In the audience were people who had been wounded in that incident, people who had lost loved ones; but when that white army officer asked for forgiveness, they did not rush to strangle or assault him. Unbelievably, they applauded.”6
No one wants to live in fear, in difference, without inclusion, or outside of equality and if Jane Elliott’s experiment shows that picking on an eye colour or a skin colour is a reason for any of this, I’m ashamed of this simplistic reasoning for racism. I need to think, see, feel, describe, hear and communicate way more clearly around racism with others. I watched Panorama’s “George Floyd: A Killing That Shook the World7”. There’s a system in place that I want gone in less than 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
I want to be able to trust my ability to listen and confront every time any of my senses are bombarded or lightly stroked with racism I want to be brave enough to say in my ignorance I haven’t helped or changed the status quo but – I’d really like to be part of a wider dialogue as I now start to understand my white experience is not a universal human experience. Who’s in?
Fallacy Cards
Sources
1. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela ‘A Human Being Died That Night, Forgiving Apartheid’s Chief Killer.’
2. Nathan Rutstein, quote.
3. Jane Elliott: Brown Eyes, Blue Eye Experiment
4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission website: https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/
5. ABC Radio National, Australia Feb 2019: Does forgiveness work? https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/8.45/10810720
6. “Forgiveness Is Liberating”: Desmond Tutu On Healing A Nation’s Racist Past
7. George Floyd: A Killing That Shook the World. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kbjm