Why white (and other) supremacy exists and persists
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In September 2017, I travelled to South Africa to try to understand reconciliation. I had been feeling the need to go there for over a year, but had to wait, first to sell my house and then for the weather to cool, and in the meantime I travelled around the rest of the world.
Family difficulties meant that I was greatly conflicted, I didn't know if I had a home to go back to, I didn't know if I would be accepted by my family ever again, as we seemed to think so differently about so many things. I felt hated, and yet I knew that I couldn't be anything other than who and what I was, even if it meant losing my family. I could no longer pretend to be what I was not.
My question, as I flew into South Africa, was simple, "How can we come to peace with the people who hate us, who judge us?" I had been reading books by Archbishop Desmond Tutu talking about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, about its successes and failures to work through the pain, the human rights violations, the crimes, everything that marked a traumatic and often bloody transition from the system of apartheid to a new system, a new way of life.
I visited his home, and the home of Nelson Mandela (where I felt more deeply the spirit of Winnie Mandela and learned more about her life) but I still didn't understand, I didn't understand reconciliation.
And then I did. I understood, in a quiet, empty street, the lie at the bottom of so much prejudice, "We are different." And, because of a little, black girl walking along the road, I also understood another fear, that sits so close to our baseless fear of difference that it often feels like one fear, "I am scared to stand out." Many of us are scared to be the one white person in a black area, the one black person in a white area, or the one woman in a man's world, because we think, often correctly, that all eyes will be on us. We will feel exposed. And yet, in my travelling, in my wandering off, I have time and time again been the only white girl on the bus, the only white person on the plane, the only white person on the beach, and I have only ever experienced care, concern and respect.
In letting go of the first lie, and understanding that shadowy fear that clung to it, I understood why we sometimes compare ourselves on the basis of skin colour, or some exterior difference, but it was in the teachings and writings of Nelson Mandela that I came to understand white and other types of supremacy, why they exist and how they persist.
Mandela knew that in order to dismantle apartheid, to try to end racism, all races had to be freed from the system. In his own words, about his time in prison:
���It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed���.
But how?
Mandela taught and wrote from an understanding of consciousness, from an understanding that however society might judge a man, woman or child, it was his or her own judgment that was paramount:
���I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.���
But Mandela understood that to the white man raised in the apartheid system, who had been taught since birth that he was superior because of the colour of his skin, to have that sense of superiority taken away would result in a crisis: a crisis of self-worth, a crisis of identity, a crisis of feeling that if he could not judge himself as better than those with darker skin, he was worse than them. Mandela knew that in order to dissolve white supremacy, it was necessary for white people to learn that they were enough, regardless of the colour of their skin, that they were enough without the extra rights they had enjoyed and the attendant privileges of being white. I can almost see Mandela in my mind patting a white guard on the back and saying, "It���s okay, you're not 'white' anymore, you're just white now."
"Social change is only the outcome of our change in consciousness." Thich Nhat Hanh
Our ego always wants to tell us that we are better or worse than others, never equal, otherwise we might realise we don't need it so much. That better or worse has been enshrined in and perpetuated by the legal and other systems, but Mandela taught, and I believe, that in order to dismantle those systems, we need to understand how we build our identity around and hang our self-esteem upon what we perceive as our differences.
To demonstrate this��� Can you imagine if Donald Trump woke up one morning and instead of being a white, straight, Christian man he was a black woman, or a black lesbian? Or a black, Muslim lesbian? How would he feel about himself? What level of existential crisis do you think he would face?
What if you woke up in the morning and were a different race? Would it radically change your opinion of yourself?
What if you, as in the film "The Infidel", had spent your whole life as a Muslim, and then realised you had been adopted from a Jewish family?
What if you believed yourself to be straight or gay, and then fell in love with someone you never expected and realised you were instead bisexual?
And what if, no matter what you believed about yourself, you realised that your family, your friends, your colleagues, everyone you loved, would now reject you, because of the colour of your skin, because of your gender, your sexuality, your religion?
Would you still be you?
Here's one more. What if you went to bed and woke up disabled? Because actually, that happens every day.
Christopher Reeve wrote an incredible, powerful book about becoming disabled called "Still Me". It���s in the title, and yet��� he also talked about the darkest times, about feeling that it wasn't worth going on.
When someone becomes disabled, they often lose friends. It���s hard. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately it comes down to the existential crisis of witnessing change. For some, it is the fear that this could happen to them, a fear they cannot look in the eye. For others, it is not being able to bear the loss of the person they were friends with, because this new person seems so different. For others, it is survivor guilt, or twisted emotions or complicated grief. None of it is the fault of the person who became disabled.
Black, white, male, female, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, disabled���
These are the big labels, and yet sometimes we set more store by other labels: our nationality, our profession, our height, our memberships���
During the time of coronavirus, many people lost labels, lost things which they felt defined them, so now more than ever we need to look again, at the people around us, at the way we label them, in the mirror, at the way we label ourselves and ask the deepest, most searching questions about who we are, and who we aspire to be. We need to ask if we are willing to be defined by the boxes on a questionnaire, or our income, our diet, our environmental stance, which way we vote, our age, or can we finally stop basing our identity on the way we differentiate ourselves from others? Can we embrace the things that make us the same, as well as the things that make us different, and where we have exceptional gifts, things that make us stand out at times, can we hold them as gifts not just for ourselves but for the whole world, and use them in service for all?
"In judging our progress as individuals, we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education��� but internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being: humility, purity, generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve your fellow man ��� qualities within the reach of every human soul." Nelson Mandela in a letter to Winnie Madikizela Mandela, 1977
���Pearl Escapes Fear of Success��� Kindle eBook:- ���https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearl-Escapes-Fear-Success-Howie-ebook/dp/B0831QWHK6
���Pearl Escapes Fear of Success��� hardback:-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearl-Escapes-Fear-Success-Howie/dp/1916303846
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��
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��
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Camino de la Luna ��� Reconciliation
Colour paperback
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Part 1
Part 2
(Without Pictures) eBook
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
For up to minute news check out my Facebook
Or follow me on Twitter
Click here to get my members posts direct http://eepurl.com/U3C3T
In September 2017, I travelled to South Africa to try to understand reconciliation. I had been feeling the need to go there for over a year, but had to wait, first to sell my house and then for the weather to cool, and in the meantime I travelled around the rest of the world.
Family difficulties meant that I was greatly conflicted, I didn't know if I had a home to go back to, I didn't know if I would be accepted by my family ever again, as we seemed to think so differently about so many things. I felt hated, and yet I knew that I couldn't be anything other than who and what I was, even if it meant losing my family. I could no longer pretend to be what I was not.
My question, as I flew into South Africa, was simple, "How can we come to peace with the people who hate us, who judge us?" I had been reading books by Archbishop Desmond Tutu talking about the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, about its successes and failures to work through the pain, the human rights violations, the crimes, everything that marked a traumatic and often bloody transition from the system of apartheid to a new system, a new way of life.
I visited his home, and the home of Nelson Mandela (where I felt more deeply the spirit of Winnie Mandela and learned more about her life) but I still didn't understand, I didn't understand reconciliation.
And then I did. I understood, in a quiet, empty street, the lie at the bottom of so much prejudice, "We are different." And, because of a little, black girl walking along the road, I also understood another fear, that sits so close to our baseless fear of difference that it often feels like one fear, "I am scared to stand out." Many of us are scared to be the one white person in a black area, the one black person in a white area, or the one woman in a man's world, because we think, often correctly, that all eyes will be on us. We will feel exposed. And yet, in my travelling, in my wandering off, I have time and time again been the only white girl on the bus, the only white person on the plane, the only white person on the beach, and I have only ever experienced care, concern and respect.
In letting go of the first lie, and understanding that shadowy fear that clung to it, I understood why we sometimes compare ourselves on the basis of skin colour, or some exterior difference, but it was in the teachings and writings of Nelson Mandela that I came to understand white and other types of supremacy, why they exist and how they persist.
Mandela knew that in order to dismantle apartheid, to try to end racism, all races had to be freed from the system. In his own words, about his time in prison:
���It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed���.
But how?
Mandela taught and wrote from an understanding of consciousness, from an understanding that however society might judge a man, woman or child, it was his or her own judgment that was paramount:
���I have never regarded any man as my superior, either in my life outside or inside prison.���
But Mandela understood that to the white man raised in the apartheid system, who had been taught since birth that he was superior because of the colour of his skin, to have that sense of superiority taken away would result in a crisis: a crisis of self-worth, a crisis of identity, a crisis of feeling that if he could not judge himself as better than those with darker skin, he was worse than them. Mandela knew that in order to dissolve white supremacy, it was necessary for white people to learn that they were enough, regardless of the colour of their skin, that they were enough without the extra rights they had enjoyed and the attendant privileges of being white. I can almost see Mandela in my mind patting a white guard on the back and saying, "It���s okay, you're not 'white' anymore, you're just white now."
"Social change is only the outcome of our change in consciousness." Thich Nhat Hanh
Our ego always wants to tell us that we are better or worse than others, never equal, otherwise we might realise we don't need it so much. That better or worse has been enshrined in and perpetuated by the legal and other systems, but Mandela taught, and I believe, that in order to dismantle those systems, we need to understand how we build our identity around and hang our self-esteem upon what we perceive as our differences.
To demonstrate this��� Can you imagine if Donald Trump woke up one morning and instead of being a white, straight, Christian man he was a black woman, or a black lesbian? Or a black, Muslim lesbian? How would he feel about himself? What level of existential crisis do you think he would face?
What if you woke up in the morning and were a different race? Would it radically change your opinion of yourself?
What if you, as in the film "The Infidel", had spent your whole life as a Muslim, and then realised you had been adopted from a Jewish family?
What if you believed yourself to be straight or gay, and then fell in love with someone you never expected and realised you were instead bisexual?
And what if, no matter what you believed about yourself, you realised that your family, your friends, your colleagues, everyone you loved, would now reject you, because of the colour of your skin, because of your gender, your sexuality, your religion?
Would you still be you?
Here's one more. What if you went to bed and woke up disabled? Because actually, that happens every day.
Christopher Reeve wrote an incredible, powerful book about becoming disabled called "Still Me". It���s in the title, and yet��� he also talked about the darkest times, about feeling that it wasn't worth going on.
When someone becomes disabled, they often lose friends. It���s hard. There are many reasons for this, but ultimately it comes down to the existential crisis of witnessing change. For some, it is the fear that this could happen to them, a fear they cannot look in the eye. For others, it is not being able to bear the loss of the person they were friends with, because this new person seems so different. For others, it is survivor guilt, or twisted emotions or complicated grief. None of it is the fault of the person who became disabled.
Black, white, male, female, straight, gay, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, disabled���
These are the big labels, and yet sometimes we set more store by other labels: our nationality, our profession, our height, our memberships���
During the time of coronavirus, many people lost labels, lost things which they felt defined them, so now more than ever we need to look again, at the people around us, at the way we label them, in the mirror, at the way we label ourselves and ask the deepest, most searching questions about who we are, and who we aspire to be. We need to ask if we are willing to be defined by the boxes on a questionnaire, or our income, our diet, our environmental stance, which way we vote, our age, or can we finally stop basing our identity on the way we differentiate ourselves from others? Can we embrace the things that make us the same, as well as the things that make us different, and where we have exceptional gifts, things that make us stand out at times, can we hold them as gifts not just for ourselves but for the whole world, and use them in service for all?
"In judging our progress as individuals, we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education��� but internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being: humility, purity, generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve your fellow man ��� qualities within the reach of every human soul." Nelson Mandela in a letter to Winnie Madikizela Mandela, 1977
���Pearl Escapes Fear of Success��� Kindle eBook:- ���https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearl-Escapes-Fear-Success-Howie-ebook/dp/B0831QWHK6
���Pearl Escapes Fear of Success��� hardback:-
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pearl-Escapes-Fear-Success-Howie/dp/1916303846
FANTASTICAL BOOKS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM
Japan Is Very Wonderful
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook - free of charge
��
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
Audiobook
��
free Feeling Real Emotions Everyday
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook - free of charge
��
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
��
Audiobook
��
Camino de la Luna ��� Take What You Need
Colour paperback
��
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
Part 1 (also available as an audiobook)
Part 2
Part 3
(Without Pictures) eBook free of charge
��
(Without Pictures ��� paperback)
��
Camino de la Luna ��� Unconditional Love
Colour paperback
��
Colour eBook- free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook - free of charge (temporarily!)
��
(Without Pictures ��� paperback)
��
Camino de la Luna ��� Forgiveness
Colour paperback
��
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook free of charge (temporarily!)
��
(Without Pictures ��� paperback)
Camino de la Luna ��� Compassion and Self Compassion
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook
��
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
Camino de la Luna ��� Courage
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
��
Camino de la Luna ��� Truth
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
��
(Without Pictures) eBook
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
Camino de la Luna ��� Reconciliation
Colour paperback
Colour eBook - free of charge on Kindle Unlimited
Part 1
Part 2
(Without Pictures) eBook
(Without Pictures) ��� paperback
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