A response to Tessa’s comment
Recently, I was told by a lady whose ancestors descended from the Caucasus mountains that I should “get over my victimhood” as she went through “far worse than I did”.
I won’t mention word for word the exchange in question that led to this. But essentially, with the large platform she had, she had written an article that I deemed somewhat dangerous. An article whose key points were first, that writers should not support each and secondly that only 1% of them (including her) would really make it because there was a level of intelligence, of intellectualism that the rest of the community did not possess which led to things like writer’s block and eventually their downfall.
She said this with a platform. With over 300 people to broadcast her sweetest thoughts to, she got on her soapbox and chose the nastiest most demotivating ideas to spread into the writing community and thus the world.
But that’s not the point of this overflow of words. The point is that I have a bunch of articles pinned about the racism I and many other of people colour experience to this day at private schools in South Africa. This included a plethora of experiences, most of them not mine, about the trauma literal children have gone through in trying to pass through spaces considered not their own. Tess read this, told me she had gone to a far older and more expensive school and told me to “get over my victimhood”.
She, as a middle-aged white woman, who had schooled in South Africa and had benefitted from all the privileges of apartheid and colonialism; said I, a black twenty-something, whose entire lineage had suffered because of it — had a victim mentality for even acknowledging that these injustices existed.
According to the grandest but most unreliable of sources, Wikipedia, victimhood is “an acquired personality trait in which a person tends to recognize or consider themselves as a victim of the negative actions of others, and to behave as if this were the case in the face of contrary evidence of such circumstances”.
I would like Tessa to write me an article, detailing the contrary evidence. Detailing the ways I benefitted from apartheid, detailing how racism doesn’t exist in South Africa anymore, and detailing how children of colour do not suffer complex traumas at these disproportionally white institutions and detailing how as a white woman and all the intersectionalities that came with it it was possible for her to go through worse racially.
Tessa, the difference between you and I, is you write for yourself — I write for other people. You write to point out the horrible things people are capable of and how they could never amount to someone like you, I write to point out the horrible things people experience at the hands of race and gender and the things they could have amounted to if it wasn’t for the inequalities of these two things.
So Tessa, tell me about my victimhood, let’s discuss it. Tell me about how I am not actually a victim of racism and tell me as a white lady how you are, so much more than I or any of the children I wrote about are.
Tell me the truth Tessa, or rather, as I’ve picked up from your blog — the truth as YOU see it.
