One of the most disorienting and most important parts of traveling to a new place is that it takes the vague idea of people and places you have in your head and turns it into concrete, complicated reality. I recently came across a familiar Mark Twain quote: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." No matter how charitably you imagine a place you have never been, your mental image will inevitably be affected by stereotypes when there is no personal relationship to dilute them. I don't think this could be more true than in the situation of an American traveling to Africa - introduced to me first as the wild jungle land of The Lion King and shortly after as the tragic and impoverished homeland of the slaves who built our nation. Of course, by the time I boarded my flight to Johannesburg via Dubai earlier this summer, my perception of Africa was much more complex than this. Sometime between then and my first viewing of The Lion King, I began to think of Africa as a place of more cultures and people and complexities than I could ever hope to understand in my lifetime. I'd seen the accurate world map with Africa front and center and had heated discussions about colonialism and exploitation with my white South African best friend. None of these things meant I knew anything at all about Africa, but at least I didn't claim to. None of this prepared me for how much I didn't know though.
The second I stepped off the plane in Johannesburg, Africa was no longer the far away and exotic place in my imagination. It wasn't The Heart of Darkness or The Poisonwood Bible. It was the air that was a lot chillier in real life than any of my day dreams and the airport where I was looking for a bathroom. Africa was no longer just "Africa," it was South Africa and Nigeria and Ghana and the DRC; Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg; Melville, Maboneng and Klipptown; the corner of 7th and Main and the intersection of 8th Ave and 3rd St. Anything I thought I knew or stereotypes I tried to pretend I didn't know fell by the wayside as Johannesburg came into detail. Traveling is humbling. For every site I see and person I talk to, I become aware of a thousand others that I will never have a chance to understand. But still, I learn so much.
Before this dialogue, I liked to think of myself as a very racially aware person. I go to Black Lives Matter rallies and call my friends and myself out when our internalized racism shows. I realized after coming here, however, that there are still many aspects of racism that I am scared to confront. Whenever my white South African friends spoke about the rise in crimes rates after Apartheid or a concerned adult told me to be careful in South Africa because it's a dangerous place, I rolled my eyes. I still would; everywhere is a dangerous place, and contrary to the underlying messages in those statements, black people aren't just criminals. Coming from a country with a huge problem with police brutality and racial profiling, I'm really sensitive about those kinds of messages. One thing that coming to South Africa made me confront which I was avoiding was that - yes, black people aren't all criminals - but in a country with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world that falls on almost entirely racially lines - some times black people do commit crime. Nothing about that has to do with the color of anyone's skin specifically, but crime is a result of poverty and poverty is racial in South Africa (among other places). In some ways, I am so scared of being guilty of racial profiling, that I think I have ignored crime as a consequence of poverty that ultimately hurts black South Africans much more than it will ever hurt me.
There were several instances in which being in South Africa forced me to confront the realities of crime in ways I was avoiding. The first of these occurred only a few days after we arrived in Johannesburg, when a couple of classmates and I were mugged at gunpoint in Melville. In most ways this was just a random occurrence, and my first instinct was to fight back against any ideas that I felt like bought into the stereotyping of South Africa. Muggings occur in America too, guns exist in America too, and white people carry them out too. You can't blame what happened to us on stereotypes. What I needed to confront that I was avoiding, that maybe got me into this situation in the first place, is that although this isn't a purely South African problem - it also cannot be considered entirely a coincidence. Income inequality is extreme in South Africa and one of the greatest predictors of crime. Black people are more likely to be impoverished in South Africa, therefore more likely to need to resort to crime to make ends meet. White people are more likely to have money and congregate in Melville. This incident itself was random and doesn't change my perceptions of the safety of South Africa. It is extremely unlikely to happen again. But I've realized that I am doing an injustice to the circumstances of people's livelihood by ignoring the systemic poverty and racism that leads to such occurrences. I want to spend more energy understanding crime as not a problem caused by poor, black people but as a problem caused by a government who continually ignores their needs.
The second I stepped off the plane in Johannesburg, Africa was no longer the far away and exotic place in my imagination. It wasn't The Heart of Darkness or The Poisonwood Bible. It was the air that was a lot chillier in real life than any of my day dreams and the airport where I was looking for a bathroom. Africa was no longer just "Africa," it was South Africa and Nigeria and Ghana and the DRC; Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg; Melville, Maboneng and Klipptown; the corner of 7th and Main and the intersection of 8th Ave and 3rd St. Anything I thought I knew or stereotypes I tried to pretend I didn't know fell by the wayside as Johannesburg came into detail. Traveling is humbling. For every site I see and person I talk to, I become aware of a thousand others that I will never have a chance to understand. But still, I learn so much.
Before this dialogue, I liked to think of myself as a very racially aware person. I go to Black Lives Matter rallies and call my friends and myself out when our internalized racism shows. I realized after coming here, however, that there are still many aspects of racism that I am scared to confront. Whenever my white South African friends spoke about the rise in crimes rates after Apartheid or a concerned adult told me to be careful in South Africa because it's a dangerous place, I rolled my eyes. I still would; everywhere is a dangerous place, and contrary to the underlying messages in those statements, black people aren't just criminals. Coming from a country with a huge problem with police brutality and racial profiling, I'm really sensitive about those kinds of messages. One thing that coming to South Africa made me confront which I was avoiding was that - yes, black people aren't all criminals - but in a country with one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world that falls on almost entirely racially lines - some times black people do commit crime. Nothing about that has to do with the color of anyone's skin specifically, but crime is a result of poverty and poverty is racial in South Africa (among other places). In some ways, I am so scared of being guilty of racial profiling, that I think I have ignored crime as a consequence of poverty that ultimately hurts black South Africans much more than it will ever hurt me.
There were several instances in which being in South Africa forced me to confront the realities of crime in ways I was avoiding. The first of these occurred only a few days after we arrived in Johannesburg, when a couple of classmates and I were mugged at gunpoint in Melville. In most ways this was just a random occurrence, and my first instinct was to fight back against any ideas that I felt like bought into the stereotyping of South Africa. Muggings occur in America too, guns exist in America too, and white people carry them out too. You can't blame what happened to us on stereotypes. What I needed to confront that I was avoiding, that maybe got me into this situation in the first place, is that although this isn't a purely South African problem - it also cannot be considered entirely a coincidence. Income inequality is extreme in South Africa and one of the greatest predictors of crime. Black people are more likely to be impoverished in South Africa, therefore more likely to need to resort to crime to make ends meet. White people are more likely to have money and congregate in Melville. This incident itself was random and doesn't change my perceptions of the safety of South Africa. It is extremely unlikely to happen again. But I've realized that I am doing an injustice to the circumstances of people's livelihood by ignoring the systemic poverty and racism that leads to such occurrences. I want to spend more energy understanding crime as not a problem caused by poor, black people but as a problem caused by a government who continually ignores their needs.
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