Dear Sir/Madam

It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that I am resigning, after only five months of service.  I must begin by telling you that I don't want to want  to leave.  I don't want to want to because I believe the world is unjust and cruel to young black South Africans, and that the beleaguered education system is one of the things that needs to change in order for any of this to change.  I don't want to want to go because I believe that the impetus for change lies not in big government, but in groups of individuals who form communities who form movements.  Oh, how I wish I didn't want to go.  But I do, and so here we are.  

Why do I want to go, though?  Well, where to start.  Maybe it is because, in my heart of hearts, I am a romantic idealist.  I believe in social change and justice, and I believed that I could make a career and save the world all at once.  When you offered me the job, you unwittingly offered me a chance to do research and make a difference: you told me, with one acceptance letter sent on a sunny Saturday morning, that I could become a save-the-worldologist!  Such glorious news! And so I gladly believed you; I took the weight of all my hopes and dreams that this fucked up racist, classist, sexist world can change and placed them in this job, my first forray into the realm of the real (read 'my first real job outside of university', or 'my first job that I wasn't doing just to make quick change').  It's possible that that's the heart of the matter.  I put too much at stake when I arrived at your doorstep five months ago, pencils sharpened, save-the-world senses tingling.  You had me at "It gives us great pleasure to inform you", but you never quite stood a chance against my blind idealism.  

No matter, my eyes were quickly opened.  I remember thinking in my first few weeks here how, as a group, the people I worked with were not entirely welcoming.  At first I put it down to my self-consciousness and my incredible neediness.  But I started to realise that maybe the reason I perceived this place as unfriendly was because it rejected me as a black woman.  I am black, but I complicate your closely-held and defended assumptions about what that means.  I can write eloquently, I can speak for myself, I can decide for myself how best to address racism when I encounter it.  I allow you into my life, but on entirely different terms than you are used to: I see you as a fellow save-the-worldologist, not as my personal saviour.  Therefore you have trouble recognising my blackness.  You also seem unable to recognise my identity as a woman.   I am a feminist, which means I subscribe to the idea that I am no less a human being than a man (in fact, I may be more so, but that's womanism), and I will not try to approximate masculinity in order to get ahead in life.  So, when the only women who are able to 'get ahead' or have their views heard are those who approximate masculinity (and its attendant patriarchy) that sends a clear message about what you think of me as a feminist woman.  This place that you created didn't like the things that make me, from the word go.  I don't foresee a future in which it will.  

On a related note, my save-the-worldology aspirations, idealistic as they may be, are fully informed by all of those things about me.  I am black, I am a woman, and I want to see social change.  This means (for me) that I want to empower people, in the same way that I have been empowered, to create their own sustainable change.  I know to impose my own ideas would be tantamount to reinscribing oppression that I have experienced in my own life.  For me, sustainable change means financial independence, job security (though, so much for that for now), freedom from racial and sexual harassment, and a world in which I can engage with fellow citizens and state structures alike about the best way forward for this world.  I have the good sense to know that my sustainable change is another woman's privilege, and that I cannot impose my definition on another human being.  I realise - and I know you do as well - that the power to define sustainable change is in itself a function of my privilege.  Unlike you, I choose to grapple with the complexities of promoting social change by empowering people with the tools to define their own change.  You see the complexities and the grey, and you choose to ignore it in favour of simple black and white solutions.  I understand you do it not because it is the easier option but because it is the popular option: one quick survey of news stories and you'll see just how black and white (literally and figuratively) the global political discourse can be.  But that's just the thing: you don't claim to be just another voice in the current discourse, you claim to be the voice. Of an entire generation? Really, guys? Isn't it dangerous to claim omnipotence when you are only representing a particular viewpoint?  Especially when that representation doesn't carry any of the nuance or complexities you know it should?

Ultimately, that's why I am leaving.  I have been party to a dangerous game that has veered me off my righteous save-the-worldology path.  In all seriousness, I know I have been using that as a joke, but I am dead serious about changing this world.  It is not nearly what it should and could be, and it is a cruel and unjust place for too many of its citizens.  I need to devote my life to changing that.  But in the last five months, I have been a part of something that looks like that's what it is, but that will ultimately do more harm than good.  You can't save the world if you are in the business of black and white, and if you cannot see it for the complex, mutli-narrative place it is.  

And, so, as much as I deeply regret it, as much as I wish I weren't too chicken-shit to tell you the truth about what I see in you, I will leave without much of a fuss.  As sad as I am about this experience, I will take from it a deeper knowledge of just how deep the damage to our world runs, and a renewed commitment to save-the-worldology.  I wish you every success in your endeavours, as I am sure you wish me in mine.  

Do your worst.  

A little writing, a little healing

Ok, so I know this blog is supposed to be about topical race-place-gender-space-related stuff, and this is a major transgression.  But I am coming out of the back end of a truly awful week.  Just horrible.  And when I feel awful, I need to write it out, expel the words from my body, put them somewhere where someone else (my six followers! yay!) can see them so I don't feel so terribly alone with my angst.

Here's what happened to me this week.  My body finally succumbed to the stress of my job (not that the work itself is stressful - I arrive at work, and immediately begin to ooze stress), and the regrettable emotional eating that is a direct result of said stress, and I developed a raging tooth infection.  I think it is absolutely perfect that the pain in my body is coming, at this present moment, from my head.  It's as if my head wants a break.  From all the thinking.  Why am I spending all this intellectual energy - that I ought to be spending applying my fairly well-educated mind to some professional pursuit - analysing my workplace?  My mind is sick and tired of working at a place where half of all I do is think about all the very good, very clever reasons why I need to leave.  And so my head sent me a message via an infected tooth:  Get the Hell Outta Dodge.

Aside from the tooth, and all the very expensive family drama that came with it, my partner was also sick this week.  First he had a persistent cough and then developed a more worrying, aggressive UTI.  Which meant a lot of nervous tension on my side.  Which is where it gets vaguely confusing for me.  If you're other people - other, saner, normal, well-adjusted people - you express your worry for your partner by making soup, or a get well card...or something.  (I don't the frack know what well-adjusted people get up to.) If you're me, you develop a full-blown nervous obsession.  Last year, this meant I would call him every five minutes, to make sure he was still feeling as well as he was five minutes before.  This year, my thing seems to be to develop relationship-related queries that I simply have to bring up this very moment, even though he has a fever.  What the frack is wrong with me, you ask?  I am working on it.  Anyway, I realise his being sick is not exactly something that "happened to me" and it is an ugly thing to behold in myself, this selfishness.  The only way I can make sense of my reactions to his bouts of ill health (other than that I am a selfish monster) is that they indicate bigger Things, Things that need to be thought over, and then, written about (maybe not in that order).  My partner is a quadriplegic, which means many things, one of which is that his body is not as strong as any of us would like it to be.  He had a huge health scare 6 months into our relationship and ended up in hospital for a week.  I get scared when he is sick.  So scared that I make every illness an Event, crowding out whatever he is feeling with my own drama.  So, there are Things.  I will think, I will write.

Finally, yesterday, I left work a bit later than usual (for a Friday, anyway), and my bus buddy colleague and I were stuck waiting for the bus.  No big deal, we do this every day almost.  Only yesterday, on a Friday, the bus never showed up.  I panicked quite a bit.  No, no, I was positively hyperventilating.  For all my hyper-awareness about how "crime can happen anywhere" and "townships are as safe as suburbs in South Africa", I could not think anything else other than "I am stranded in a township on a Friday evening, ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod".  Luckily, I was not alone (shoutout to my level-headed, extremely patient colleague and friend here) otherwise I would have never made it home for all my carrying on and fussing.  So, another ugly revelation about myself.  Not only am I a selfish jag, I am also slightly racist and classist.  I kept saying to my colleague (as we walked briskly to the taxi rank) that this right here - the woes of having to transport my body in and out of the townships everyday when I do not have car and only have a learner's license - is one of the reasons I will leave this job soon; I do not love the work, I care very little for most of the people who work there (in fact, some I find odious - there, I said it), so what is the point of the cost and the high drama of taking public transport so far out?  If it was a job I loved, it would be worth it, right?  Which is all very well, except what I was saying that it is only worth going into townships for something I love.  Otherwise, big fracking nuisance.  So could part of the fact that I hate my job (it needed to be said) be that I cannot deal with the reality that confronts day in and day out in the area where I work?  My privilege, and the violence it wreaks on people's everyday existences is writ large, for all to see, in the townships.  Maybe that is where my discomfort comes from.  The bus travels steadily from the cushy suburbs, where I live, past the mostly coloured areas, out of town into the the mostly black areas.  And as we travel along this path, you literally see the poverty levels rising before your very eyes.  It is a complete mind-fuck.  And yet, still, when I take the bus home, I feel relieved as I begin to approach the cushy 'burbs.  What does this say about me?  How can I sit here and write and think about racism, structural inequality, neoliberal this-that, and still breathe a sigh of relief the moment I see lush middle classness?  Can I honestly be both this wide awake socially conscious being I have always thought myself to be, and this raving loon who can't be around poor people past 6pm on a Friday night?

I don't have many answers today.  But I can honestly say that I am glad this week is over, and (as fey and middle class as it may be) I am glad I can return to the relatively safety of my head to Think About Things.

On white maleness

I have been away for a few weeks.  It's a very long story - one which I am hesitant about telling - but it needs to be told.  At the end of last year, I got a new job.  Dear reader, this was a partly maginificent ego boost for me, but mostly, it was a veritable lifeline.  Hitherto, all my work experience had been gained within the restrictive walls of the university world, and for the last part of that journey, I laboured under a fairly abusive boss.  Add to that the terrible job market (forty plus job applications submitted, three rejections (not counting the people from whom you never hear back - where do unread CVs go to die, I wonder), only three call backs) and you can see why by December, I was quite near nervous exhaustion.  The new job was an oasis in a desert of self-doubt, self-loathing and deep despair.

And so, with such promise, it began this year.  Less oasis-like than I thought.  There are several things making my work life difficult; some of which I remember claerly but cannot share for fear of reprisal if my anonymity were ever compromised, others that are minor irritations, exercises in the absurd that are easily laughed off.  But then there are those which make my skin crawl, they are so dangerous and evil.  The place where I work is a civil society organisation, aimed at addressing a key social issue facing South Africa's young, fledgling democracy.  I work with many young people who come from working class and poor communities.  I also work with many young people who come from middle class communities.  We are all united by a need to change what we see happening in this country; we are all united by our love for this country, and this continent.

Here's what I object to.  Over the last few weeks, I have noticed, and it has been confirmed in conversations with some colleagues, that there's a certain pecking order that permeates the life and the operations of the organisation.  At the proverbial 'top' of the organisation (civil society does not like to admit its hierarchies are formal, hence the quotation marks), you have mostly middle class, and, yes, mostly white people.  In the 'middle', and at the (regrettably) 'bottom', you have mostly working class, black people.  Now, I hear you: I myself am middle class.  But by virtue of my 'newness', and, my disillusion, I am not at the 'top'.  I am (regrettably) one of the many 'not at the top' middle class people recruited by the top, because they 'need' our skills and our middle class educations.  Here's the thing though.  The people who I refer to as the 'top' are not evil, and overtly racist.  They are not even subtly racist.  I believe, with much respect, that they love their country, they see injustice, they are determined to act.

But here's where true colours show for me: what kind of action is needed?  The 'top' believes in raising awareness: getting their constituents together, educating them about the problems they (constituents, mind you) are facing, and organising them into awareness-raising action, largely conceptualised by them (executed, of course, by the 'not at the top', and the 'middle' and 'bottom' folk).  The results of this are constituents who are called in to meetings to be told of their problems, and of the solutions someone else has worked out for them.  I attended an awareness-rasing meeting (in lieu of a planned action) where one of the constituents asked me to explain something she was painting on a placard to be used in the aforementioned planned action.  Neither the placard, nor the action are her idea, neither involved any substantive input from her.  So, what really are we doing?  Going into communities that have been disempowered and victimised countless times over and doing...what exactly?  Telling people what their problems are, and what has been decided for them?  How is that any different from the disempowerment and victimisation experienced during Apartheid, experienced at the hands of the new administration?

Why is this happening, though?  As I said earlier, I do not believe the intent of my bosses is malicious.  But here's the thing about white maleness (and note, dear reader, I use white maleness here as a proxy for privilege - not everyone at the 'top' is white or male): it cannot be evaded, it cannot be shrugged off.  In spaces where liberal, progressive, anti-racist white maleness takes up residence, it still operates from the assumption that it knows best.  I watch it at work, telling people what they need to care about (in the midst of a myriad of social problems), and precisely how to care about it.  It's why I got my job, even though there are many people in the organisation far more qualified to speak and research and write with authority about the problems facing their communities.  White maleness, even when it is well-meaning, is still white maleness.  It cannot recognise the value in world views that have not benefitted from the feeling of being central and normative all their lives.  How can it?  It has been central and normative for time immemorial.

I am not saying that because of white maleness, or, more broadly, privilege, the people at the 'top' and the countless other people like them cannot work in civil society, or make a difference in their country.  What I am suggesting is that in order to do the work they want to do, the work that needs to be done, it is necessary for them - for me - to stare the ugliest parts of our privilege in the face every single moment.  What are the things we take for granted in our engagements with people who are not privileged?  What are we assuming about what they understand, and what they need 'help' with?  How are we implicit in the constant - nay, daily disempowerment of people whose identities are not normative or centred?

If we go into change work thinking that we have these answers - or worse, not even asking these questions - we run the risk of not only reproducing the problems that brought us to this work, but of becoming a worse evil than that which we assume we are fighting against. 

*Gratitude and love to a friend whose insight and bravery I have borrowed heavily from to write this post.