Thread by @pvanheus

My neighbourhood "community newspaper" is up in arms about the diversity training at #FishHoekHighSchool & proudly quotes MEC David Maynier saying that the "events happened last week never happen again". The events? Asanda Ngoasheng's diversity training which confronted learners

with the need to understand racism as systematic oppression. Seems that some of the learners, no doubt echoing their parents, are happy when racism has two sides (racism as prejudice) but get "worked up" when they are forced to confront racism as systemic. The poem Ngoasheng read

- "Water" by Koleka Putuma (pensouthafrica.co.za/water-by-kolek…) evokes this powerfully: racism as arising out of a system of white supremacy, racism as the social, economic and political oppression of black people *to the advantage of whites*. Putuma's poem about the water and the beach..

that beach that Fish Hoek tourism evokes in their description of "a glorious bay with a beautiful white sandy beach" - that beach in Putuma's poem becomes an uncomfortable place where Black bodies visit (only sometimes) under a white gaze. An awareness of power & oppression

seeps through every line of the poem & this - not the ongoing racism, not the 10 year difference in life expectancy, not the violent "business as usual" of ongoing spatial Apartheid - this *being made aware of white power and Black oppression* is what drives this backlash against

Asanda Ngoasheng's workshop. And the forces of white denialism are lined up - with their Church & Party allies - to shoot the messenger, to defend the laager & play the victim. *sigh* What kind of victims? The Echo uses the words of a Grade 10 pupil to replay a

"white genocide" trope. Honestly I'm tired. Tired of the utter gutter level of trash that is being spoken to avoid confronting the fact that *yes, still today* white comfort matters overly much in South Africa. Matters more than honestly, matters more than sincerity, matters

more than putting in the effort to just *shut up and listen* and do the listening work that is needed to even get to a place where progress-together is possible.