The Lessons of Ubuntu

How an African Philosophy Can Inspire Racial Healing in America

Mark Mathabane

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781510712621
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

A roadmap to healing America's wounds, bridging the racial divide, and diminishing our anger. Mathabane touched the hearts of millions of people around the world with his powerful memoir, Kaffir Boy, about growing up under apartheid in South Africa and was praised by Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton. In his new book, The Lessons of Ubuntu: How an African Philosophy Can Inspire Racial Healing in America, Mathabane draws on his experiences with racism and racial healing in both Africa and America, where he has lived for the past thirty-seven years, to provide a timely and provocative approach to the search for solutions to America's biggest and most intractable social problem: the divide between the races.In his new book, Mathabane tells what each of us can do to become agents for racial healing and justice by learning how to practice the ten principles of Ubuntu, an African philosophy based on the concept of our shared humanity. The book's chapters on obstacles correlate to chapters on Ubuntu principles:

• The Teaching of Hatred vs. Empathy
  
• Racial Classification vs. Compromise
  
• Profiling vs. Learning
  
• Mutual Distrust vs. Nonviolence
  
• Black Bigotry vs. Change
  
• Dehumanization vs. Fogiveness
  
• The Church and White Supremacy vs. Restorative Justice
  
• Lack of Empathy vs. Love
  
• The Myth That Blacks and Whites Are Monolithic vs. Spirituality
  
• Self-Segregation: American Apartheid vs. Hope By practicing Ubuntu in our daily lives, we can learn that hatred is not innate, that even racists can change, and that diversity is America's greatest strength and the key to ensuring our future.Concerned by the violent protests on university campuses and city streets, and the killing of black men by the police, Mathabane challenges both blacks and whites to use the lessons of Ubuntu to overcome the stereotypes and mistaken beliefs that we have about each other so that we can connect as allies in the quest for racial justice.

PART ONE

THE TEN OBSTACLES TO RACIAL HEALING

Chapter 1

The Teaching of Hatred

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

—Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

When I ask black youths raised in America’s inner cities how they formed their first impressions of white people and what led them to learn hatred, many answer: the police. In the wake of all the deaths of black men and women at the hands of the police, it’s no surprise. I have little doubt that had the killers of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice spoken the language of Ubuntu, which humanizes through empathy, instead of the language of confrontation, the tragedies that ensued, which were driven by fear of black youths as predators, might have been averted. The officers would have erred on the side assuming that Tamir’s gun was fake, and that Michael’s attitude was nothing but bluster, which is essential for survival in a ghetto.

During the 2016 presidential campaign I was at a loss to explain to myself and my three children how the America I loved, which had given me freedom, opportunity, and hope, had unleashed the sort of hatred I thought belonged only to apartheid South Africa. The sense of helplessness was magnified by the fact that blacks and whites in the United States had united to denounce and pressure the white minority government of South Africa to enact changes consistent with American ideals of equal justice and freedom for all. Now those ideals were being made a mockery of by the resurgence of white supremacists whose goal of making America white again threatened my children’s future. I also found it ironic that the resurgence of white supremacism coincided with the release of Loving, a movie that chronicled the couple—Richard and Mildred Loving—who were plaintiffs in the unanimous 1967 US Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which invalidated the anti-miscegenation laws of sixteen states that made it a felony for blacks and whites to marry across racial lines. I wondered if those who were driven by hatred and religious zealotry would demand, if they ever came to power, a return to an America in which interracial and gay marriages were once more considered illegal. I remember the very words that would have made it a crime for my wife and me to become the proud parents of three wonderful children who embody the best in us. “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”

Like President Obama, my children, Bianca, Nathan and Stanley, have a white mother. My children are part of the millennial generation to whom interracial and gay marriages are as normal as any other. They have friends who are bisexual, and they consider it no big deal. They and their peers truly believe in an America that celebrates diversity and where the rights of all are protected and respected as long as they don’t infringe on the rights of others.

I remember visiting West Sylvan, my children’s middle school in Portland, Oregon, several times to talk to students about growing up in a South African ghetto, and about how education, which most American students take for granted, made all the difference in my life. As part of my presentation, I always talked honestly to the mostly white students, who knew blacks from a distance because of the segregation that prevails in many public schools, about racism. During the Q&A sessions, it was clear from the students’ questions that most of them hardly knew any black people, and in fact many even felt uneasy around them. Students often gaped when I described how I’d grown up in a shack without running water, how I never celebrated my birthday as a child, how I often scavenged for food at garbage dumps, and how I was forced to join a gang at age five because my family was constantly under siege from a racist police force whose brutality taught me to so hate white people that if I had a gun, I would have killed a white person who bothered me without remorse.

At this, many students gasped. Shocking as my confession was, I knew that the students, young and privileged as they were, deserved to know the truth about the destructive power of hatred and how it’s taught. I had learned from experience that it was the only way they could possibly empathize with the plight of their black brethren who were trapped in America’s inner-city ghettos. In these ghettos, innocence died young, children couldn’t afford to be children and live, and gangs and teenage motherhood rather than prom and graduation ceremonies were rites of passage for many. Without this knowledge about the impact of racism on black lives, I knew that few privileged white kids could resist the influence of the stereotypes that taught most white people in America to dislike, fear, and even hate blacks, the way white children were taught when I was growing up in apartheid South Africa.

I was barely five years old when I first learned to hate. My teachers were the police, as they are for many black children growing up in America’s inner-city ghettos. When I was growing up, South Africa’s police force, which was called Peri-Urban, was akin to the Gestapo. Its duty was first and foremost to enforce brutal Kafkaesque laws which upheld white supremacy. The most notorious of these was the Influx Control Act, under which were the catch-all Pass Laws. The act was ostensibly designed to regulate the movement of blacks from the rural areas to the cities, where there was work. In reality, the law was designed to terrorize black families on an almost daily basis and to break up black families so that, as the architect of apartheid, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd, put it, there would come a time when the only blacks in “white South Africa” would be workers.

To realize this dream, blacks were required to carry thick identity documents called “passes” on their persons at all times, and to produce them upon demand. These passes contained every fact about their lives—their place of birth, tribal affiliation, number of jobs held, place of residence, permits to live and work in white areas, arrest record, and whether one had paid poll taxes or not. Blacks called this document the “passport to existence.”

Interestingly, most of the policemen who enforced the Pass Laws were black; they were supervised by white officers. These blacks, who were often more hated than their white overlords, were similar to the kapos who terrorized their Jewish brethren in Nazi concentration camps and were always led by German SS officers.

Those who insist that racism was definitely not involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, miss the point. Under a system of justice founded on white supremacy, black police officers can be as racist as their white counterparts. In fact, they are often used by the enforcers and guardians of white supremacy in black neighborhoods to mask the fact of unequal justice. Their brutality as they try to please their masters often has a demoralizing effect on black people, who subconsciously begin to believe that there must be something inherently wrong with them if they are being terrorized by their own.

In his searing memoir Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates describes at length how he grew up fearing the police, both black and white, in inner-city Baltimore, how he learned to hate them, and how a black officer mistakenly tracked down and killed his friend Prince Carmen Jones, and yet was never charged with any crime. For me this hatred of the police was first instilled when Peri-Urban officers invaded our neighborhood shortly after midnight one bitterly cold winter day. My sister Florah, who was three years old, and I were sleeping on pieces of cardboard under the kitchen table because our family was too poor to afford a bed or extra blankets. We both shared a torn blanket, which our mother had reinforced with pieces of newspaper to ward off the cold during bitter winters in a ghetto that was situated at five thousand feet above sea level and had no electricity.

The police arrived in a pandemonium of barking German shepherds, gunfire, screaming children, shattering windows, and the thudding feet of half-naked black men and women fleeing their shacks and hiding in trees, under bridges, inside latrines, in muddy ditches, and in underground holes to escape arrest. After smashing the door to our house, the police hit me on the head with a truncheon, grabbed me by the neck, and flung me against the far wall for being slow in unlocking the door—I had delayed answering in order to give my parents time to escape. As my sister Florah, wailing hysterically, clung to me, I watched the police ordering my naked father to crawl out from under a rickety twin bed on which he and my mother slept. He’d hidden there after helping my mother wriggle out through the tiny back window of the shack and, bent double like an animal, disappear into the inky blackness. It was the hardest thing for my mother to leave her three children behind, helpless, to face the wrath of Peri-Urban, but she had to because if both my parents were arrested for the crime of living together as a family, we children would be homeless and alone.

The policeman, half my father’s age, reveled in his power as he interrogated my father in front of my sister and me. I’ve seen the same power exercised by policemen in America whenever they confront black men, as happened to me several times when I lived in North Carolina, New York, Missouri, and Oregon. A form of emasculation, it’s a way for them to remind black men who is master and has power. Black men can either meekly submit and be humiliated—or if they choose to assert their manhood, as some of them do, they often risk death. Eric Garner refused to grovel while selling “loosies” outside a Staten Island convenience store, not too far from where I once lived in a basement apartment, and he ended up dead.

My father, though a proud man who’d been raised in the tribes to be the protector of his family, knew this, and he chose to submit before police power by bowing his head, like a prisoner before the executioner, and answer questions in the groveling tones of a slave. The image, which seared itself into my young brain, became fuel for my hatred of the police and by extension my hatred of the white people who, by voting election after election for apartheid because it protected their privileges and allowed them to enjoy the highest standard of living in Africa, invested them with such powers of life and death over black people, who were dehumanized in the land of their birth.

“Why is your passbook not in order?” barked the black policeman, as the white officer leaned against the doorjamb, smiling and whistling a tune. “Where’s your wife? Why are you harboring your family as illegal aliens? Can you pay a bribe?”

As I watched the black policeman humiliate my father, I wished I had the white man’s holstered gun in my hand. I felt such hatred toward him that I’d have emptied its bullets into him and his black lackey without remorse or pity. The fact that the policemen humiliating my father were black taught me even then that race has nothing to do with brutality and sadism. Yes, they were doing their job enforcing laws the white man had written, but they had a choice not to worship the Moloch of white supremacy.

Thirsting for revenge, I watched the police handcuff my father as he asked me to fetch his pants from the bedroom. As my father dressed while being hauled off to jail, I vowed to someday make the police suffer as they had made me and my family suffer.

Many black policemen in ghettos like my hometown of Alexandra were burned alive by black youths called Comrades during the rebellion and the riots that engulfed South Africa during the 1980s. As the Comrades wrapped gasoline-soaked tires around their necks, about to ignite them, some of these black policemen begged for their lives. They insisted that they had become policemen out of necessity, to feed their families. The retort from the Comrades before a match was ignited and tossed at the policemen was often, “The black men you humiliated and carted away to jail at the behest of your white masters also had families to feed.”

As I watched my father being dragged to prison for the unpardonable crime of living with his family as forbidden by the dreaded Influx Control Act, I would have gladly, had I had the opportunity, lit the match to necklace a policeman, black or white. My father’s punishment for wanting to protect and provide for his family was spending six months toiling on white farms as part of a chain gang. We were never allowed to visit him, nor were we told to which chain gang he’d been sent. For a long time, my mother didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. Because my father was the sole breadwinner, food became scarce and we were forced to scavenge for leftovers at garbage dumps, drink boiled cattle blood begged from the slaughterhouse as soup, and eat weeds harvested near latrines. There were many days when we simply stared at empty pots while the sun was going down.

After my father was released from jail, the family’s problems went from bad to worse. He found out that he’d been fired from his factory job in Johannesburg, where he’d worked sinc...