Hello Keith

 

My brusqueness, and crudity of expression, has got in the way of my educative influence.

 

Let me as brutally clear - Ubuntu is open to all: it was merely my imperfect expression about the tendency in the academy – since Margaret Mead – for some unethical ‘white professors’ to ‘expropriate’ native knowledge as their own, and enhance their careers and bloat their ego’s. Most of my doctoral reading on Indigenous experiences of having their ways of knowing ‘stolen’ and/or denied in the academy points to this kind of ‘racialised theft’. My writing was driven by my tacit awareness of that literature of ethnic and Indigenous abuse.

 

But in the Foucauldian way you remind us about, Keith, you have triggered a memory for me. As my scholarship through critical race theory, whiteness theory, and postcolonial theory I focused on whiteness as privilege as my first representation of whiteness. With the help of Black friends and colleagues and the ‘resistance and denial’ of some White friends, family and colleagues I began to articulate in my writing and research the idea of whiteness as hate; by which I mean White supremacy and racism (e.g., apartheid). Over the past two years working with Asma Al-Kindi, my dedicated activist wife, who is Chair of the Black and Asian Workers Support group for an urban British local authority within the Race Equality Scheme legislation I have come to work, as an activist with committed, dedicated, self-critical and wickedly insightful White activists. Through my participation in a Whiteness Theory list I have been so moved by the frank and deconstructivist statements of White colleagues such as the question I mentioned before – ‘How should White people behave to other White people in the face of a racist incident?’.      

 

Though such wonderfully inspirational White people as this – and my White Afrikaner Oupa – I’ve been moving into a phase of representation of whiteness as accepting love. My white Afrikaner grandfather Hendricks was one of those valiant, brave and stubborn white people who married a Black woman and with her parented ten children, my father being the first of those. I’m sure he was inspired by Ubuntu (and my phantasy is that he was!).

 

But you are right in making your point about my brusque treatment; though it is your love in making your critique so invitational that draws me on in Mutse Atsi – I See You.  

 

Once and for all, and then keeping my promise of yesterday, I did not intend to suggest – though I can see how I came over as if I was suggesting - that being White by self designation somehow excludes one from Ubuntu in some idiotic bio-logic!  

 

Nothing could be further from my partial and particular truth. I hope my last posting on Whiteness cleared up the misconceptions arising from my imprecise writing. When I get passionate my fingers click quicker than my meanings translate into choate expressions.  But I love Barbara Nussbaum’s wisdom in this – Ubuntu is connected to the heart. I take this to mean that Ubuntu is not connected to skin colour. It isn’t in my mind, being and action. Sometimes my words are wonky though – thanks for confronting that in an invitational way Keith. I am influenced by your educational standard of judgment of honest critique ‘gifted’ in invitational hope.

 

Peace

 

Yaakub