How my white privilege landed me in prison

White privilege is sometimes up for debate among white people. The naysayers traditionally assert that they have no privilege because, well, apartheid is officially over and there’s affirmative action, and their dad came over from Germany or Portugal with nothing.

To that I say, “Okay, but then how come I was able to do this?”

And I tell them this story.

It takes place – as many of my worst exploits do – in the erstwhile Grahamstown, now renamed Makhanda.

We were white university students, with time to kill, pocket money to spend and beer to drink. It was the Rag season, which involved students getting day drunk, then stumbling through the city, such as it is, asking residents for charitable donations.

For me, one of the defining evidences of white privilege is that white people like myself can hang around drunk in public, and it is somehow seen as charming, or kind of rock’n’roll.

If a poor black person does the same thing, it’s vagrancy. You can be arrested.

A white person needs to do a lot to be arrested. We don’t often end up in the holding cells. At that point in my life, I had not seen the inside of such a holding cell. It was a place of terrifying fascination.

At that stage, that Rag weekend, my fascination with holding cells was at its height. I wondered what it was like. How filthy? How terrifying? How rude were the police? How scary the fellow inmates? What, indeed, was it like inside those few cells behind the police station in New Street?

As I continued my rock’n’roll, day-drinking rampage across town, rattling a tin of coins, chugging a succession of beers, and periodically collapsing in a bush, I mused on this. I was curious about jail, but I didn’t really want to go to jail.

I mean, jail is actually quite rock’n’roll as well, as long as you can factor out the gangs and the violence, and the being deprived of your freedom part. Wouldn’t it be interesting to just sort of pop in to jail? Check the place out for a bit, with friends, and without any kind of long-term commitment?

I mused along in this vein, sipping beers, collapsing into bushes and gathering a small coterie of fellow day-drinkers. The rock’n’roll kind, not vagrants.

I began hatching a plan.

By the time evening fell, we had built up a head of steam. Our rock’n’rollness was slipping over into full-on vagrancy, and our curiosity about jail was almost unstoppable.

The Rag campaign was long over, and we were also kind of at a loose end.

So what we did was this: we went to the police station, and we volunteered for jail.

More accurately, we asked to spend the night in the cells under false pretences. We told the policeman in the charge office that we were a bunch of friends up from East London. We had run out of money and we couldn’t drive, so could we please spend the night in the police cells?

The cop had no problem with that. He ushered the five of us through to the cells, found an empty one and locked us in. Still nicely buzzed, we had a whale of a time, joking and shooting the breeze till the wee hours, ironically trying to order take-aways through the door hatch and playing some one-bounce football with an abandoned can.

In the morning, bright and early, we were freed and sent off on our way, ready to tell all our friends that we’d spent the night in jail and how rock’n’roll it was. We had not so much as glimpsed a criminal all night.

Over the years, I’ve come to have a slightly different perspective on the thing. That exploit was not so much rock’n’roll, as Exhibit A in what an entitled white person I can be. Who else could be so convinced of their own privilege that they not only volunteer for jail, they get put in jail and come out completely unscathed and unrepentant!

Only the likes of me, your loyal correspondent, white as the driven snow, still buzzed from the day-drinking, and entitled as you please. The worst part is not that I got away with it, but that I somehow thought I deserved it! I believed I had to right to go to jail and to be looked after. Kept safe.

White privilege is a fact, a function of an unjust, exploitive and oppressive society, and you can’t blame yourself for that. But feeling you deserve it, well that is entitlement, and that’s on you. On me.

Since then, we have tried to be better. We’d be lying if we said we’d never again seen the inside of a holding cell. But at least those times we did, it with suitable embarrassment, caution and deference to all concerned.

Volunteered for jail! I still can’t believe it. Yussis.

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