WELL, June – Youth month – is almost done! Seeing as it is the 40th anniversary of the Soweto Uprising, this piece is dedicated to all the young people out there who are making things happen.
I often think to myself how lucky I am to have been born when I was, at a time when the entire country was optimistic for the future and embracing that “kumbaya” spirit of togetherness.
Leaving behind a century filled with bloody violence, being born in 1999, I grew up speaking isiZulu and English in equal parts, and playing with Peter from down the street and Stofi from across the street without a care in the world.
Yet here I am, ten years later, supposedly wiser, but far from the colour-blind oasis of my childhood.
Sadly, this country has been hit with so many reports of racism and discrimination in the past year that it’s starting to feel as though we are all passengers on the Titanic waiting for it to go down.
Recently, we celebrated Africa Day at my school with an evening of culture, and performance. A friend of mine decided to perform a poem about her love of being black.
As it turns out some parents found this piece, that was meant to be nothing more than a celebration of who she is, offensive.
“Well if you wanna be my baby it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white!”
The next day some friends and I were discussing her poem, and I thought, “Wow! It’s 2016 and here we speaking about this of all things. Race.”
One of these girls made the statement that race will only stop being an issue when people stop acknowledging it.
The basic logic behind this statement makes sense, yet, colour is more than just skin tone.
In fact it very often is more about culture, than skin tone. Being black, you grow up trying to avoid getting the term “coconut” thrown at you.
This is a phenomenon where, a black boy or girl is considered black on the outside, but white on the inside, because he or she speaks English a lot, or can’t play the basic games of jump rope, or even because he or she doesn’t come out to play.
It is a term that says, you are not one of us, and we’re all after that ever elusive feeling of being a part of something.
However, my biggest issue with this approach is that it’s basically like walking around with your eyes shut to the world, repeating the mantra “there’s no such this as colour”, like Dorothy trying to wish herself back to Kansas.
When it’s staring you in the face everywhere you go, it’s impossible to not see colour, and refusing to acknowledge it is simply ignoring the problem not solving it.
On the flip side though, as much as I love black culture, being black is such a small part of who I am that the idea of focusing intently on colour seems pointless to me.
I happen to have brown skin…cool. I happen to have kinky hair… cool. However, that’s not how I want anyone to ever describe me.
They should describe me with words that highlight my strengths, my desires, my fears, my moments of weakness and of triumph, because that is who I am.
I guess the day colour stops being an issue is the day it stops scaring people.
The day the word black isn’t said with trepidation or disdain if you’re white, and the word white isn’t an insult or a cause of pain if you’re black.
Unfortunately, considering that in the year 2016 we still have teenagers sitting around discussing race, tells me we’re still a long way from that.
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