I tried to confront my old school about racism, this was their response
Imagine a field of crickets. Imagine a field of confused crickets.
When I published Wembley College, We Need to Have a Chat a few days ago — a piece of writing that was not only an outpouring of emotion for me but a list of factual and undeniable racist incidents that I and many others can attest to — I was ignored. It was deleted from their Facebook page, and promptly swept aside like the inconvenience to them it was.
Cause that’s what it was to them — an inconvenience. Not a reflection of some deeper truth about their institution, or themselves. Not a sign that some of their pupils had gone through traumas that no child should go through, but something to be quickly swept under their very unkempt rug.
So I went deeper, I made a post on Facebook, tagged them, and asked, mainly; why they didn’t see this as an opportunity to open a dialogue? A few hours later the headmistress called me and she was not happy.
After greeting me and finding out where I lived to see if I could come in person (because every war veteran wants to go back to the site of the explosion that wounded them) the headmistress asked me why I was so angry. She, a white woman, asked me, a black one why. I. was. so. angry. After reading a 2000 article detailing the answer to the question, my pain and my anger still weren’t valid. “Racism” I answered “Racism makes me angry”.
She told me how this happened years and years ago long before she took over, I told her I was an adult now and could finally process what happened. She asked me to tell her the whole story from beginning to end. Imagine, saying you had a racist experience throughout the time you were at a school and being told to explain the whole story from beginning to end. For me to do that, I would have to start from the day I entered that glittery classroom in fourth grade and repeat every day of my life — from the time it was deemed apppropriate for one of my classrooms to dress up in a Hitler costume in fifth grade to the time Jimmy Davis announced in Matric that the room smelled like “a black person’s car” and Sabrina Wellman thought that the right person to try calm down or discipline in that situation was me. I didn’t tell her this but I did tell her that the whole story was in the article, “yeah” she responded, “but that was very confusing”.
I can take many an insult, I can take many a jab but I will not be told that the writing that I studied, get paid for, and have amassed tens of thousands of views because of isn’t clear and concise simply because it doesn’t fit a pretty narrative. Because it doesn’t fit her narrative.
She did try take up my suggestion that we have a chat. After an email that never arrived, I decided that wasn’t her intention. Or who knows — maybe she just got my name wrong and the emails keep bouncing. Of all the micro-aggressions I went through at that school, the most annoying was how until the day I graduated, or rather escaped, they got my birth name: a simple three-syllable song “Musonda” wrong and did not take to correction. I have a plethora of certificates at home where I’m called Masanda or Musondo to prove it . I belong to the bemba tribe and in my culture, a name is not just a name — it is a whole history condensed. I am named after my grandmother’s grandmother who is probably named after her grandmother’s grandmother. Our names are hardly ever new, they are our ancestors brought to life again. And every time someone gets my name wrong I feel like my whole lineage is being insulted.
Wembley College’s motto is “Leadership with Enthusiasm” but given their reaction to this recent situation and many other things, I’ve hardly ever seen them live up to it. Leadership does not wait to be called out. It does not wait to be dragged onto Facebook or Twitter. It confronts its problems head-on and if they want to be seen as leaders, at least in a world where both black and white exist — they need to lead the conversation. I’ve seen South African schools get accused of racism and handle it respectfully and beautifully, this was not one of those occasions.
Wembley College, let’s have that chat.
Part of a series of articles that include:
