Activating a Thought Leader In Me

 While we fight for equal pay amongst women and men, we need to separate the category of women; there are black women, then there are white women. Within these categories, there are clear wage gaps and clear value of the one, over the other, with the other being black women. I have come to realise that white people do not realise their privilege and supremacy complex, there fake fading smiles when you walk past them, almost to say, “What are you doing in my space”. I don’t think they realise  that we can see right through those half baked smiles. There coldness and uninviting energy makes you self-aware and reminds you, that you are in the wrong place, this is not your space and as long as you can remember that, you will be okay. However white people are not the only problem black women face in corporate, black men also contribute to the demise of black women in the workplace. I worked for a company that was ran by black men and fell victim to the corporate abuse that b...

4:00 am every morning she is up, she leaves the house at 5:00 am to open up shop at 6:00 am, when everyone else wakes up or when they leave the house. She has to make sure she is there early for those who too are early, she needs to make sure all her products are on display for the morning crowd. I wake at 6:00 am like the rest of the working class; I get ready for school, prepare my books and make porridge. I make my way out of the two-room tin house I share with my mother and two of my sisters. They too get ready the same time,  my sister and I  walk to the bus stop and make our way to Bryanston to school, while the other makes her way to Lonehill. Alex seems like a faraway reality from our school lives. We might not have much at home but no one knows it here, I have a new blazer and shoes, my old ones were getting smaller, I gave them to my sister. They were still in good condition, we have to make sure they are, we don’t know when we will afford to buy them again. M...

A taxi just seems so wretched and black. I prefer my car and should my car breakdown, lucky for me, there are so many options, Uber, Taxify and a good old cab. This is the new generation of black South Africans, who grew up in former white neighborhoods and attended fancy white schools or model C schools. The reality of poverty and lack, seems like a foreign subject to them. Them that speak with English that confuses even their white counterparts, “is he black or white”, you really can’t tell over the phone, but that is good, isn’t it? Now they can get better service than the black person who sounds black, just as long as they don’t use their real name, they should be find. The desire to distance ourselves from poverty, has turned to the desire to distance ourselves from blackness. There seems to be so many things wrong with being black and the further one distances themselves from this image, the better it feels for them. The “Kasi”, seems to be a foreign land to those who live ...

2013 I wrote this post after attending my first Black Students Union meeting, with a minority group of  students of the university I attended in the USA. The conversation was interesting and issues that the African Americans community are freely and radically  speaking about today, were those we spoke about in enclosed rooms and among ourselves. I decided that I wanted to share this post, untouched and unedited, as it were in 2013 when i first wrote it. With increasing unrest of race and social issues for brown skinned people in America, this post is just as relevant now as it was then.  Post:  Today I went to the Black Student Union meeting at Bellarmine University. Today the topic of discussion was "What is Black Culture?" A very intriguing question.  I think no one can really define what black culture is because culture is so diluted, culture is determined by different elements of different places people live in. Culture can never really be def...