{"id":13636,"date":"2017-06-23T01:06:15","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T08:06:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=13636"},"modified":"2017-06-23T01:06:15","modified_gmt":"2017-06-23T08:06:15","slug":"tell-me-your-story-give-me-some-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/tell-me-your-story-give-me-some-hope\/","title":{"rendered":"Tell Me Your Story, Give Me Some Hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

My heart hurts. That\u2019s the thought that keeps rolling through my mind as I try to figure out how to put my feelings about Kaffir Boy<\/em>, Mark Mathabane\u2019s autobiography, down on paper. It hurts because Mathabane\u2019s description of coming of age in South Africa\u2019s apartheid once again shines a light on just how cruel human beings can be to each other. It hurts because the recurring theme in Mathabane\u2019s story is his belief in America as the land of freedom. It hurts because white people and black people believed the lies told by settlers and missionaries claiming that black people had been cursed and white people tried to save them.<\/p>\n

Kaffir Boy<\/em> is an incredible story of hope in the direst circumstances. Mathabane\u2019s meticulous recounting of what he faced in the first 18 years of his life are beyond anything my imagination has the capacity to absorb. It was a life where police raids, starvation, physical abuse, and government sponsored degradation were daily events. Mathabane tells his story with a tightly controlled mixture of rage and hope. Despite the in depth detail with which he describes his hunger, humiliation, and the dangers he faced, there is a sense of distance to the telling which gives the impression that the story, sordid as it is, has been sanitized for the readers.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t even know how to capture the emotions that have taken over as I read this book. I wish I could say that the hope and pleasant ending to the book were enough to leave me in a place of hopefulness as well. Instead I find myself wondering what life was like for Mathabane when he arrived in America in the Fall of 1979 to attend college. Did he indeed feel as if he had walked into a utopian society where black and white people were given equal freedoms, equal legal standing, and valued each other as equal human beings? Or did he quickly sense the fact that, while there are laws in place to perpetuate equality, systemic racism exists on many levels? Was he free from racial epithets such as \u201ckaffir boy\u201d or were they simply replaced with those somewhat unique to American society? And was he as frustrated by the gender hierarchies that exist in the \u201cland of the free\u201d as he was by those patriarchal systems which kept his mother tied to a man who freely abused her because he had \u201cpaid\u201d for her?<\/p>\n

If I was asked to share the one lesson I received from Kaffir Boy<\/em>, it would not be that there is always hope. It also would not be that, in the end, human decency will win. And it would most certainly not be that good things come to those who wait. Instead, the one lesson I take from this book is that there can be no reconciliation or even understanding until we risk ourselves enough to hear the stories of those we fear, despise, misunderstand, or distrust. When asked by white tennis players, \u201cHow can we live with you people (blacks) when you hate us so much,\u201d Mathabane replied that, \u201cfor as long as meaningful contact between the races was forbidden by law, the stereotypes each race had of the other would persist\u2026Apartheid thrived on the enmity and fear between black and white.\u201d (327) What the white players wanted to know was why they should give up power and risk being trampled on the way they had trampled on black citizens of South Africa. Why risk giving up privilege and power to people who are not on the same level as they?<\/p>\n

In order to achieve even tentative reconciliation, those with privilege and power must choose to set it aside and hear the stories, complaints, and charges of the oppressed. It isn\u2019t enough to pass laws saying that people will be treated equally if those who belong to the privileged group can\u2019t acknowledge the ways they flourish under a system of inequality. Some white people in South Africa were saddened and angered by the things black people endured, but they were not moved enough to lay aside privilege or leverage power to force a change. It\u2019s hard to give those things up! It\u2019s even harder when you haven\u2019t taken the time to hear stories of the people who do not have the same privilege and power. As we read in Welsh\u2019s The Rise and Fall of Apartheid<\/em>, it wasn\u2019t until De Klerk was willing to hear Mandela\u2019s complaints and charges and to acknowledge the sin of apartheid that the steps could be taken to reconciliation. In return, Mandela had to swallow the bitterness that years of pain had bred, and try to trust.<\/p>\n

In September our DMin cohort will travel to South Africa where we will hear the stories of people whose lives were impacted by apartheid. I\u2019m eager to hear what has changed as well as what hasn\u2019t. Is there, as there is in America, still an underlying thread of racism, or has the work of reconciliation diminished that threat? The cynic in me says it is still there, while the optimist wants to hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My heart hurts. That\u2019s the thought that keeps rolling through my mind as I try to figure out how to put my feelings about Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane\u2019s autobiography, down on paper. It hurts because Mathabane\u2019s description of coming of age in South Africa\u2019s apartheid once again shines a light on just how cruel human […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[975,1006,1005],"class_list":["post-13636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apartheid","tag-kaffir-boy","tag-mark-mathabane","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13637,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13636\/revisions\/13637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}