This thread (which is one of the powerful threads I have ever had the privilege of participating in), makes this article seem very timely. It’s about Sandra Laing, a black girl born to white parents during apartheid in South Africa. Everything was fine for her until she attended school, and then got kicked out because administration said she was clearly black. Her parents fought hard to get her reclassified as white and eventually succeeded–only to have Laing fall in love with a black man and ask to get recategorized as black (an effort that failed because of her father’s refusal to give Laing her birth certificate).

A snippet from the article:

When Laing was expelled and reclassified coloured (mixed race), she could not legally enter a restaurant or cinema with her parents or brothers, or share a bus seat or church pew, or be buried at the same cemetery. Her father, Abraham, a man of extreme determination and stubbornness, fought hard to have his daughter reclassified as white. His press campaign created an international scandal, and the government was embarrassed into changing the law in 1967, so that descent — not appearance — became the determining factor in classification cases. Laing was classified as white again. The trouble is, she still looked black.

When we meet at her home in Johannesburg, I look at the exact colour of her skin: pinkish toffee. She seems awkward and shy, not comfortable in her skin. That’s no surprise. Her reality was distorted. Literally, she was told black was white. When she was expelled from school, the police drove her home. She had no idea what she had done wrong. She thought it was because she punched the girls who called her Blackie or Frizzy, or because she’d told the teacher they’d filled her shoes with water or stolen from her purse. How skewed was this reality.

“I would fight back and then be punished. They would lock me in the bathroom the whole day. And when you get punished for defending yourself, you don’t even want to fight any more, so I would just go and sit somewhere alone.”

When she was 16 she ran off with a black man, Petrus Zwane, from Swaziland. Her parents, who had fought hard to keep her at home and to keep her white, were broken. Her father charged Petrus with abduction and had Laing detained

in prison until she was given the choice: her lover or her family. She chose her lover. “I felt more comfortable with coloured and black people.” At 16, she didn’t realise the finality of this decision — that she would never see her father again.

The one thing that I’ve noticed as I have surfed stories about Laing today is that although the racism of apartheid is mentioned and acknowledge, the *sexism* of apartheid is not. I wonder what would’ve happened to a black boy born to white parents–and then I see that Laing’s brother actually was obviously mixed race–and had a much different life than Laing did. If that was because he chose not to reject his white status as his sister did or if it was because he was a boy or maybe a bit of both, I don’t know…but I think it’s important to point out that Laing’s mother and Laing herself were the ones who’s truthfulness and identities were consistently challenged throughout the years.

But even more so–I think Laing’s story as well as the testimonios of the women on the FFJ thread clearly show that as much as we want to put things like race and gender into a nice clean box–we can’t. They always explode all over things we love and need most, like our parents, like our homes, like our own bodies. And eventually, you either learn to stop fighting or you get too tired to. And men threaten to kill anybody who brings up that tender soft pain ever again and grandchildren are told their history starts with their mother.

I’m not a big fan of reconciliation. I never have been. But…what is keeping U.S. citizens from opening up to that tender achy horrible pain…and just feeling it? Not even with the goal of reconciliation, even. But just feeling it. Admitting, after all this time, that it is there.

And that you can trust yourself that you are seeing correctly.

And that sometimes, for all our code words and sterilized academic speak and hateful racism and willful ignorance, it really is just as simple and complex as a white father lovingly applying skin bleaching cream to his black daughter’s skin.

And there’s no other choice or way to understand it except with tears.