America's Swart Gevaar

An excellent opinion piece here in yesterday's New York Times by Roger Cohen who spent some of his childhood in Muizenburg. (His parents immigrated to London).

"Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.

Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.

Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman."

Using his experience of apartheid South Africa and the fact that it is no more, he draws a comparison to Barack Obama's recent speech on race.

"It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”

Read the full piece here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/opinion/20cohen.html?em&ex=1206158400&en=f37f26e473175c8d&ei=5087%0A