sometimes...

Yesterday I was running and I saw a group of three women in the village. Greeting is a big part of the culture here and I always greet people when I'm running so I greeted these three women in Setswana. One of them began yelling at me. I did not understand all of what she was saying but she was calling me a "boer" (a name for Afrikaners that is sometimes-including this time- used as a slur). She was yelling and looking at me like she wished terrible things to happen to me. I'm not sure but I think she spit at me. All I did was run past and say hello.

This wasn't the first time something like this has happened. Unfortuneately there is a lot of racism in this country. Periodically I am called slurs for white people, for "coloured" people (people of mixed decent) and for Indian people. The racist legacy of apartheid has become part of my life.

For some reason this woman calling me a boer really got to me. As a middle class white girl from the US I'd never been called a racial slur before I came here save posturing teenagers calling me "cracker" behind my back when I was subbing. This is new ground for me. It's incredibly painful to be written off as an enemy by the people in my village because I'm white.

Every once in a while I'll talk to someone and get a "you're not like other whites... you're an American" response which is as offensive. Sure, there are a lot of racist white people in South Africa (there are a lot of racist white people in the US) but there are also a lot of racist black people in South Africa who not only hate whites, "coloureds", Indians, "chinas" (people from Asia who are not from India or Pakistan) they also hate people from other African tribes. Sometimes I feel like I'm surrounded by a country of people who are held together only by a border because there is so much hate between South Africans.

This history of this country is horrific. Apartheid was an attack on the humanity of every South African citizen and the population remains wounded. In some ways I think, "I can see why black South Africans hate white South Africans. White people did terrible, terrible things to black people for years" but this line of thinking becomes a supporting argument for racism and that's not a road I wish to travel. Anytime people begin to hate based on nothing but assumptions things really get awful.

I know I'm not being clear about all of this. I can't seem to articulate what it is like to live in a racist society that sometimes seems to be destroying itself because people are unwilling to see beyond their conceptions of race and power. In my truly American mind, all I can seem to think is "this sucks".

Really, though. This sucks.