Knots. I’ve had a few in my neck, my shoulders, and the pit of my stomach for a few days now.
I am a middle-aged, Afrikaans-speaking white South African male. My kind make good villians—for a myriad of reasons, some justified. Don’t deny it. I have learned to sense the stiffening backs and the conscending glances when I open my mouth to speak. And honestly, we don’t do much to help our cause.
Then individuals like the doctor who made the news recently for hanging a noose on the office door of a Nigerian-born colleague do the things they do, I get furious. Not just because of the incredible stupidity and insensitivity of their actions, but because white South African males know better than to try to claim we don’t know the history of the noose, or to try to claim a noose is a lasso. What I saw in that picture was not a lariat knot.
His actions were racist, and he knows it. He cannot spin his way out of it with pretty statements and half apologies.
I am livid because for the past four days I’ve been asked to explain his actions simply because I speak Afrikaans and people think it follows that I should understand.
I don’t, and I can’t.
So don’t ask me to.
That only accounts for half the knots in my body: to cure the remainder, please spare me the sanctimony of the vitriol I have seen on the good doctor’s medical profiles since July 3. I have lived in Canada enough to learn that my heritage is the key to unlocking Canada’s racist underbelly. I cannot count how many times being a white South African male has been taken as licence to make disparaging, racist remarks.
The conversations start like this, “Oh, you’re South African, so you’ll understand...” and then come the comments about Africans (in the diaspora and in whatever “shithole country” they’re from); about Tamils in the wake of the MV Sun Sea; about Chinese immigrants; Mexicans; Filipinos; Sihks, Muslims; Indigenous people; Eastern Europeans...
And so we return to the comments on the good doctor’s profile—I’ve picked only key words and phrases from among pages of similar comments: immigrant; citizenship revoked; deported; send him back; Canadians not South Africans should be getting the job; doesn’t have the qualifications…
How easily xenophobia surfaces (even against Caucasians) and with what abandon people wield these cliched markers of second-class citizenship over those of us who choose to make our lives in this country.
I had barely arrived in Canada when I was asked “How did you get in? You don’t wear a turban.” To which the man’s colleague replied, “We let him in because we need their doctors.”
In rural Alberta today, that hits too close to home for comfort.
And then those doctors fashion nooses, and all the Canadian stereotypes bundle up into knots in my stomach.