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White folk, in South Africa, who have an interest in the well-being of this country need to start actively distancing themselves from the sentiment expressed by the Western Cape premier.
We need to actually stand up and be more vocal about it, otherwise we are silently supporting her. Unfortunately, comments such as hers are found slithering their way through office environments across South Africa, wary of being caught out, until at some point someone’s caution is vomited out in a moment of emotional honesty and stupidity to say the least. Being white myself, I have seen how the lingo of subdued racism comes out when there are no black folk around, it is human nature to hide your feelings until you feel the environment is safe enough for them to be expressed. That is the origin of those other moments when people become brave and blurt out their long fermented feelings in a slightly less secure environment, believing they have engineered it just right so as not to get themselves in trouble, but still make a stinging point for others to hear.
Most white people are not vehemently racist to the point that they want to bring harm to black folk, the same goes for all other homogenous groupings. However, there are degrees of racism, as there are degrees of hatred and bias. Degrees of bias exist in all humans and they are fed by emotional thinking. If they become strong enough they can shroud the course of logic and become a concrete perception. Once that happens a person will defend their stance come what may, and unfortunately, the process of critical, honest thinking is just not fun nor of any importance anymore. The result: Hypocrisy and insensitivity. In extreme cases: Holocausts and Apartheid.
What we think and how we think is very important, because even if we manage to hide our thoughts well, they will consume us and become our reality. Each day we need to challenge our thoughts, ask ourselves whether we are allowing honest logic to guide us or are we submitting to emotion. The more we formulate our opinions using critical thinking based on logic and reason the more adept we become in identifying emotional thinking and preventing it from manifesting any further. The surest sign of an emotional cognitive process is that there is never any real concrete answer. Settling on an answer following an emotional thought process usually results in some form of bias or hypocrisy.
Thinking honestly and critically about things are usually no fun though, because they don’t relieve feelings of frustration or anger and humans always want a quick fix… But, if you value your intellectual capacity you would avoid being a hypocrite and submit to the boring reality that is the truth. And the truth is:
That telling black folk that colonialism had some benefits is like telling a person who grew up in a dysfunctional and highly abusive home that they at least had a roof over their heads and access to food. There is no logic in this, and such arguments would usually be offered by a guilty party to mitigate what happened and placate their own feelings of guilt. Once the child becomes an adult, the abusive parent needs to be sensitive, remorseful and genuinely sincere if they wish to win back the trust of that individual. The same goes for us white folk, even if some of us had nothing to do with apartheid, a little bit of sensitivity and respect, coupled with humility might go a long way.
What the premier said was hurtful and insensitive, a moment where emotional thinking overcame logic. And lastly, we as white South Africans can never fully understand, because we are not the ones carrying the scar of oppression in our immediate past.
