White Guilt: Cape Town

Cape Town is beautiful. Cape Town is vibrant. Cape Town is by the ocean and gives me life.

Cape Town was built by slaves. 

Cape Town was built by enslaved people who were imported into the cape by people who looked like me. They didn't enslave the local population because they needed them for trade and local knowledge. They instead shipped human beings like so much cargo in to do their hard labor for them. Then, as the city established itself as a refueling hub, they became a part of the global economy that begat the Transatlantic Slave Trade. And as the years passed on and legalized slavery fell out of vogue, governments made of people who looked like me made laws that didn't pay people for their labor and subjected them to poor housing in segregated parts of town and forced them into the most difficult jobs as if they weren't human beings with human needs. Human trafficking today, modern-day slavery, happens under our noses and fuels our global economy and we white people turn our eyes away just as people who look like us always have.

The white guilt is strong on this trip, in case that wasn't apparent.

But you, fellow white person, can walk with me through the Slave Lodge and stand in front of story after story of what it's like to be an enslaved person, to give birth to children who will never know anything but slavery, to live a life of torture without the hope of freedom. And you can hear the stories of those whose hearts were broken when their homes were bulldozed by the apartheid government because their multicultural and multiracial neighborhood was too successful. And you can walk through Soweto or the Apartheid Museum and hear the stories of the children who died because they weren't going to stay silent in the face of the oppression they faced. You can sit and listen to the stories of those who lived through the struggle and the extraordinary lengths that people went through to gain basic equality. You can do all of these things and feel a sense of sorrow sinking into your bones for wrongs that you yourself will never be able to fix, never be able to make reparations for, even though the trauma and economic impact echo through the generations.

But let me tell you that your white guilt is not enough. My white guilt is not enough. If we let it paralyze us, we only hurt the situation more.

Because we are not powerless. We cannot change the past, this is true, but we can work to uncover it and to tell it better. This is the work that the team uncovering the São José Paquete Africa wreck is doing, so that we might better understand what those who were enslaved went through, and more fully mourn their loses. We can remember the pain that was brought to people and vow to never let it happen again. We can learn from the past to imagine a brighter future, as the District 6 Museum does. And most of all, we can put our money where our guilt is. We can invest in black businesses. We can support every educational opportunity that gives black children an advantage. We can speak out against latent racism. We can celebrate black culture. And while we're at it, we can look at the other wrongs in our history and see what responses they require from us. Better schools, better scholarships, better opportunities should around for the descendants of those who suffered because of the greed of others. 

Others who looked like me.

God, there is so much work to do.