why white people need to remember with care
I realise that lately my friends and I spend more time in conversation about our childhoods and our formative years than we do about our lives today. Our parties are dominated by music from the 1990s and so are some of our fashion choices. We laugh over childhood stories that were once traumatic because in one another we have found kindred spirits who can relate to some of the events of our childhoods. We share memories of growing up in the townships, attending white schools for the first time and moving into white neighbourhoods.
There is safety and validation in sharing among people to whom your life experiences are not alien. I have found that sharing childhood memories with my white friends tends to elicit sympathy and guilt, which can make one feel the distinct discomforting otherness of their experiences.
Perhaps I enjoy the trips down memory lane with those with whom I have a shared history despite it being somewhat traumatic because some of us are able to deeply reflect on it in a way that defuses the trauma and also because there are no surprises in the past. It’s like watching a movie we have seen before; we can do so with some ease because we know that we make it through high school after all. Because of our present vantage point we can remember our past with a fuller context, a better view of our trajectory and with a kind of wisdom that can only be attained from prevailing over the difficulties that most of us grew up in.
But I admit that I have a problem with white memory or nostalgia. Any time a white person of my generation or older reminisces about or recounts a past alien to mine, I cannot help but feel aggrieved. Also, when this sharing happens without contextualisation or deep reflection, it can be particularly insensitive and somewhat callous.
A black friend of mine, who lives in the suburbs, was a spectator to such white nostalgia when the community WhatsApp group chat took a trip down memory lane, with her neighbours sharing memories of an idyllic childhood in this suburb, which they also happened to have grown up in under apartheid South Africa. A time when my black friend could not, by law, have lived in this suburb. My friend could not relate to these memories of suburbia and to some extent was offended by the nostalgia.
Yes, we know our white counterparts had it good with their regular, carefree trips to the movies, well-stocked libraries, ice cream parlours and the zoo. We know they grew up largely unrestricted compared with our very contracted lives, but having it confirmed over and over again can ignite an unwelcome resentment. You would think by now with the awareness of how much the majority was deprived of, that there would be some sensitivity in how white people remembered.
This WhatsApp conversation was personal to me because my grandmother worked as a maid in that same neighbourhood. She was probably one of the reasons these white childhoods were so abundant. The white families that Gladys Mankayi laboured for until she dropped dead in 1987 have more memories of her than I do. So whenever I hear my white counterparts share memories of their childhoods unreflectively, it is not innocuous – I know that in some cases like my grandma it came at the cost of her health and life. It is a reminder of what was taken from us. More often than not their picture-perfect childhoods were only possible through the denial of our own.
What is whole in them is void in us. The past is never just the past. It is highly contested and charged, and can derail any budding friendships or communities. For the chance to form truly sustainable bonds, let’s remember with care.
