You dranked my juice

It’s confession time. A conversation about juice has Milisuthando Bongela considering her black privilege and its proximity to whiteness 

“You dranked my juice,” he said to me after I opened his bottle of juice and drank it.

“I know. I drank it because you were on the phone and I like that flavour,” I explained, hoping he had heard me say drank instead of dranked.

“It’s okay,” he said, “I don’t mind that you dranked it first. How did it taste?”

“Good,” I replied. I shifted the conversation, but stopped listening because I was fixated on the language error in his speech.

“It’s drank you know, not dranked,” I said quietly, anticipating an acerbic response meted out by a mind bigger than my own. My mind knows more, but isn’t necessarily wiser than his.

“Did you understand what I was saying?” he asked.

“Yes I did.”

“Then that’s all you need to consider.”

And with the logic of those seven words, I was cut to size.

It didn’t end there.

“Decolonising is practice, you know,” he declared. “We may communicate in the oppressor’s language, but I don’t respect it enough to want to be good at it.”

He said he wished I had done it when he was attempting to speak my home language, isiXhosa, which he does not speak fluently.

I guarded my words when I realised that I had just re-enacted a scene I saw too many times and hated as a child.

“You just reminded me of my white school teachers who used to beat this language into us,” he said with a smile that disarmed my defensive position.

I didn’t feel bad as much as I felt misunderstood. In my mind, I wasn’t one of those judgemental Anglophile black people, because I’m “conscious”, I’m “woke”, I understand how oppressive systems work.

His words lingered and settled in places that were longing for them ... You have to question your proximity to whiteness and what that means for you if you have chosen to fight against whiteness. You have to betray the arrogance of thinking that the world beyond that proximity needs to be corrected to those (and your) standards.

You can’t be the thing that you want to destroy. So what if you’ve read Biko? What are you doing with his teachings, besides repeating them and wearing them to dinner parties? What are your own thoughts? You want to be free. You need to think about how to free yourself before you free other people...

I drank my own juice at this point and wondered whether I corrected him because I love the language or because I couldn’t help myself from exerting an unconsciously perceived “better blackness” over him because of its proximity to whiteness both in language and attitude.

How often is a wedge driven between the black African person and his or her true essence, which is whole and perfect and should revolve around itself? But in the world, this essence is dismissed or judged according to an imported and oppressive pyramid scheme of standards.

Fix your hair. Your skin colour is an adjective. Where was your father? Don’t use the olive oil. Why are you late? The fees have fallen, so everything must go back to normal. I didn’t recognise you without your blue overalls, William. I’ll never use another black agency. It’s pronounced Khaan not Cans...

We, the privileged blacks, the colonised, the sufficiently inhabited by foreign ways of being, the comfortable ones, just like our handlers, like to make effigies of poor people every day, paying lip service to their wellbeing, but we burn them in the perennial flames of our judgement for not being like us, just like our white handlers did to us.

Despite my daily efforts to save the world from structural injustices, I still chose to judge a black man because he used an English word wrongly instead of accepting the fact that I understood what he was saying and letting that be that.

Have I become a benevolent elitist, trying to dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools? Self-deprecating speech is unbecoming, but in this case I wonder about some of the nice things I’ve become used to, like filter coffee and using words like “patriarchy” in everyday speak.

I’m not sorry for my relationship to these things, but I can’t pretend that I have divorced my class privilege just because I am aware of it. I know my privilege is a lazy, cheating parasite, but I’ve been too concerned with the things outside of it to realise that I should also be fighting the injustices that live so comfortably in my own head.