Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SideburnsOfDoom | Hacker News Reader

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SideburnsOfDoom

There is a suburb of Cape Town called Bishopscourt. It is high up on the hill, near the botanical garden, and filled with Anglophone old money, trees and mansions. (1)

It gets it's name of course from the "official residence of the Archbishop of Cape Town" (Anglican / Church of England).

It was of course a "whites only" area under Apartheid until 1991 (2). Black people there could be assumed to be house or garden servants.

When Mr Tutu was installed there as the first black Archbishop of Cape Town in 1986, he moved in without seeking exemption from this law (3). He would put on his jogging outfit and take his exercise on the streets there, smiling and waving to neighbours as if it was the most normal thing in the world. And in time, it was.

That is praxis.

he was one of the best of us, always seeking a way to reach out.

1) "ranked sixth richest suburb in South Africa" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishopscourt,_Cape_Town

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Areas_Act

3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_Tutu#Archbishop_of_Cap...

An inspiration. The best way to challenge insanity is to simply ignore it and move forward without consideration.

You can't debate apartheid because it's farcical to begin with. The terminology even - exemption - makes our brains feel fuzzy, confused. What is this "exemption"? I'll just do my thing, thanks.

We could all learn something from this.

> The best way to challenge insanity is to simply ignore it and move forward without consideration.

That's a tactic to be used in specific circumstances, such as by the Archbishop in a specific, peaceful neighborhood. It's for people who are safe.

For a vulnerable person, it can be very dangerous: violating norms can end in being arrested or lynched - that's what lynchings and oppression are. That is the problem. Civil rights tactics such as lunch-counter sit-ins worked because they were carefully strategized and organized, and many people still got hurt and killed. For example,

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=civil+rights+birmingham+fire+hoses...

“You can’t reason someone out of an opinion they didn’t reason themselves into.”

Or in the words of Desmond Tutu: "There is nothing more difficult than waking someone who is only pretending to be asleep."

That's a bit of a spun story. There was apartheid proper, and technically apartheid. By that time, '86, my colonial school had black students. Tutu didn't need exemption, and wasn't being particularly rebellious.

IDK, memory and a check in Wikipedia confirms that things were still pretty bad in '86 and '87.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_in_South_Africa it's a litany of explosions and killings, and the turnaround may have been in the works, but it doesn't surface until December '88 when "Nelson Mandela is moved to Victor Verster Prison" (from Robben Island)

I don't recall school in integration in '86 near me and yes, I would have noticed. If you had that you were lucky.

I wasn't assuming that Mr Tutu was taking any great personal risk, but he was driving progress with cheerful good humour.

I was not lucky - the following year there were fully multi-racial schools, equal numbers.

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