Writing against white fragility in Haji Mohamed Dawjee’s Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of a Brown Woman in a White South Africa

Abstract

Haji Mohamed Dawjee’s essay collection Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of Brown Woman in a White South Africa draws on personal experiences in its representation of inequality and racism in South Africa. This paper argues that the essay collection participates in the reshaping of discourses of race that have gained new urgency from texts such as Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge and White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo. Sorry, Not Sorry introduces an urgently needed South African perspective, particularly through representations of white fragility in essays that are both personal and provocative. Dawjee’s essays embody the need to claim center stage and voice racial(ized) experiences, challenges, and concerns. In order to accomplish this, whiteness and white fragility are pushed to the margins.

Keywords:

• White fragility
• South Africa
• race
• racism
• wokeness
• performance

“I will no longer pay for your journey with my pain,” writes Haji Mohamed Dawjee, addressing white readers, in her essay collection Sorry, Not Sorry: Experiences of a Brown Woman in a White South Africa.¹ Sorry, Not Sorry explores what it means to be a person of color in a predominantly white world and in a South Africa of lingering inequality. Despite being far fewer in numbers, white South Africans still possess social and economic power in the post-apartheid era.² Dawjee explores these issues in her essays which deal with a wide range of topics, several of them addressing the position of people of color in South Africa. The complexity of white fragility emerges as central, defined by Robin DiAngelo in her bestseller, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, as the limited ways in which white people discuss, scrutinize, and understand their racial positioning. This paper examines how Dawjee addresses white institutional power and white fragility and the connection between the two from a personal perspective, drawing parallels between Anglo-American, particularly American, and South African trajectories of racism and white fragility.

The positioning of Dawjee, author also of a more recent essay collection Here’s the Thing, in her essays can be argued to be provocative and polemic, expressing a refusal to live in the shadow of white sensitivities. She defines herself as “brown,” as indicated in the title of the memoir, implying a position that does not draw on black experience of living in South Africa, something which she explicitly points out in an interview with News24, but as a brown woman or person of color.³ Dawjee states in the interview that calling herself black would amount to appropriation as it is a different experience. This is an important starting point for this paper, as South Africa has its very own, distinct historical continuities of racism and racialization that still reverberate throughout communities despite apartheid having come to an end some decades ago. It is a legacy that is not easily dealt with without considerable efforts, particularly on the part of those who still remain socially and economically privileged. This is one of Dawjee’s central messages in her essays.

The concept of white fragility has been discussed widely in recent literary texts. Notable works that have addressed similar issues and that predate DiAngelo’s text are Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, British journalist and author, as well as White Rage by Carol Anderson, professor of African American studies.⁴ In a South African context, Ferial Haffajee’s essay collection What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? addresses the role of whiteness in South Africa, published at the height of the Rhodes Must Fall and #FeesMustFall movements that addressed lingering colonial legacies and unequal access to education. Sorry, Not Sorry emerged in the aftermath of the protests, in the era of the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment, and in the time of Black Lives Matter, an American initiative which works for racial justice and for awareness of racially motivated violence against people of color, having increasingly gained momentum since its beginnings in 2012 and become a global movement.

While much focus has previously been placed on racism and racialization in American and other Anglophone contexts, the racial histories of which are far from identical,⁵ Dawjee offers a much-needed South African perspective on whiteness and white fragility. Her essay collection has received considerably less attention than its American and British counterparts, and it also builds on a more pronounced autobiographical dimension, presenting personal experiences of having had to deal with whiteness and white sensitivities. Race remains on the social and political agenda across the Anglophone world, and historical continuities of racism, as presented through the concept of white fragility and whiteness as a marker of privilege and power, have gained new momentum. White fragility has been noted as a relevant concept in South African contexts as well, as it “underpins the discursive construction of white victimhood,”⁶ and it is defined as “the inability to tolerate racial stress.”⁷ It is therefore a relevant concept to further examine in a South African setting.

Writers belonging to the so-called “born-free” generation, having grown up in South Africa post-apartheid, engage with questions of inequality and lack of prospects, as seen for example in Clinton Chauke’s and Malaika Wa Azania’s memoirs.⁸ Their concerns revolve around concrete legacies of injustice such as access to education. The somewhat older generation, represented for example by writers such as Ellen Kuzwayo and Lesego Malepe,⁹ deal with apartheid legacies as connected to personal histories. In terms of debating whiteness directly, Haffajee expresses surprise at the ways in which whiteness is seen as dominant still today in South Africa, defining herself as a “child of freedom”¹⁰ and challenging views of whiteness as dominant, seeing it as geared toward the past, as “the unfinished business of apartheid,” engaged in by the born free generation (ibid.).¹¹ In contrast to these views, Robyn Autry argues in her study on public memory and museums in South Africa and the United States that both nations have attempted to revisit the past and its impact on the present¹², indicating that going forward involves a past perspective as well.

Dawjee’s engagement with whiteness, or, rather, her act of distancing herself from whiteness and its lingering power in Sorry, Not Sorry, is not primarily geared toward the past but written for the future, a future which is to some extent visible in her more recent essay collection in which she asserts that women of color are not seen as individuals but as representatives,¹³ but that she is now free to “write what I like,” citing Steve Biko.¹⁴ Biko, murdered in 1977 by security police, is known for his political essays in I Write What I Like¹⁵ that outlines his views of race in South Africa and the futures of its population of color, being central for the Black Consciousness movement.¹⁶ Geoffrey Haresnape connects the movement with the Civil Rights struggle and Black Power in the United States, making another explicit connection between histories of racism in South Africa and the US. Connecting the discussion of white fragility in an American context with its counterpart in South Africa forms a continuation of scholarly analysis of trajectories of racism in the two nations. Dawjee’s contribution through Sorry, Not Sorry can be seen as having predated the personal, and perhaps collective, liberation she indicates as possible in Here’s the Thing. Examining the path to that point of self-liberation in racial terms is therefore called for.

Trajectories of racism

While the problem of racism and institutional discrimination is a global one, local contexts and histories need consideration, as the general always builds on the specific. Where apartheid can be seen as a particular historical period in South Africa that still reverberates throughout the nation in terms of economic and social inequality, the era of slavery and of colonialism have been significant for similar reasons in the US and the UK. A marked difference between the three nations is that in South Africa, it was a minority that imposed discriminatory and oppressive laws on the majority, whereas white people were and still are the majority in both the UK and the US.¹⁷ The US saw the emergence of the Civil Rights movement and South Africa its anti-apartheid struggle in the 20^th century, and Robyn Autry observes that while differences exist in why segregation has been carried out in the two nations, she argues that “there is general agreement about the centrality of racist thought in fomenting lasting social divisions.”¹⁸ A significant difference noted by Autry is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that worked to reconcile with the past in the immediate aftermath of apartheid, whereas the United States have not addressed their discriminatory past in similar official contexts.¹⁹ The efforts by American writers such as DiAngelo and Anderson can be seen as filling that gap, and the Black Lives Matter movement suggests that Americans of color have taken matters into their own hands, demanding justice and reparation.

Ashley “Woody” Doane outlines recent history of white supremacy in the United States and argues that it connects with hundreds of years of “European/white/American racism.” Further, Doane argues that the history of racism in an American context goes back to the treatment of Native Americans and the slave trade:

Enslavement and its aftermath – Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement – played a core role in the ongoing racialization of the United States and a racial discourse that focused on issues of “black and white.” Finally, the US established a regime of racialized immigration, where immigrants who differed from the Anglo-American core culture were often viewed as suspect until proven white and differentially incorporated into (or in some cases excluded from) American society.²⁰

Carol Anderson’s book White Rage draws on this history in its examination of racism and discrimination, past and present. However, her text has been perceived as having a somewhat different aim when compared to Dawjee’s text. As Peter M. Newlove and Shoshanna Bitz argue in their review of Anderson’s book, the author “catalogues longstanding systems of oppression in the United States while purposely including emotionally wrenching and disturbing stories and leaving the theorizing of emotional performance to those in other disciplines.”²¹ A central question is whether centering on whiteness, as Dawjee does to a significant degree in her essays, as well as directly addressing white people in some of them, works to perpetuate the place of whiteness as the center around which everything else revolves.

While Anderson’s approach to the history of racism and continued power of whiteness has been praised for its perspective, DiAngelo’s book has been met with some criticism, as outlined by Jessica Isom, J. Corey Williams, and Matthew Goldenberg in their review, arguing that DiAngelo, “a scholar who is White, has gained a wide audience advancing arguments that many BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors and scholars have made for years. However, this is not a reason to avoid White Fragility.²² Their comment makes a study of Sorry, Not Sorry even more valuable as a personal account of living “in a white South Africa”; a country that officially ceased to be white some decades ago yet still remains deeply unequal. Apartheid caused a rift between citizens, making whiteness “the norm, all Others were peripheral—culturally, economically, politically. The transition to the new South Africa, with the negotiated transfer of power, heralded the relativization of ‘whiteness’ in relation to the other social groupings within the country. The white population is now marked as one group among many, one band within the rainbow.”²³ As Dawjee’s essays show, reality for people of color differs to a significant degree.

In a more recent study, Melissa Steyn, professor with expertise in critical whiteness studies, argues that “South Africans have created distance between themselves and accountability for the past” in three ways in particular: “through constructing innocence, withdrawing, and claiming victim status.”²⁴ These notions are all critiqued by Dawjee, who states in the interview with van Rensburg for News24 that she hopes the reader of her book can put themselves in her shoes and learn about a reality they are not familiar with.²⁵ Further, she explains that people like her need to stop apologizing for their existence, and stop being grateful when they receive things from white people such as jobs or other opportunities.²⁶ Thus, it is indicated that Sorry, Not Sorry is written at least partly for a white audience, not unlike DiAngelo’s text on white fragility, and the two are here discussed together to some extent. Steyn further explains that in South Africa during apartheid, “[s]tate structures manipulated the economy, labor, the media, and the education system to produce a society that apparently evidenced the superiority of whites. Everywhere they looked, whites saw proof of the meniality of blackness.”²⁷ In Dawjee’s essays, this meniality is still present not only in her childhood but early adulthood as well.

Sorry, Not Sorry consists of twenty essays, some of which are explicitly autobiographical, revolving around Dawjee’s upbringing in Laudium next to Pretoria as an “Indian Muslim,”²⁸ a place in which residents “didn’t do anything really.”²⁹ The Dawjee family is depicted as having ambitions for their children, making the writer try a variety of activities, the purpose of which were that the “acquired skills would give me future prospects.”³⁰ One of the activities was horse-riding which Dawjee was not enthusiastic about, being “awkward, brown, less experienced.” Further, she detected discriminatory behavior among the people at the stables as they would address white children in a different manner: “They were engaged with them like the humans they were, whereas I always felt like we were being addressed as though we might be a little stupid or slow.” This was the case for other activities too, such as tennis: “My sister and I were once again the only kids of color at our lessons.”³¹ Dawjee writes that as a child, she did not yet understand what such demeanor meant. She also reveals having been subjected to racist slurs in childhood, having been called a “curry-muncher” and a “coolie” without understanding the histories of racism attached, eventually asking her grandfather about it.³² As Kathryn Pillay (2019, 63)[AQ] observes, the so-called “Indian Question” involved discriminatory practices against people of Indian descent even before apartheid was officially implemented, including measures to repatriate also those born in South Africa (p. 76).

Dawjee referring to herself as “brown” is significant in a South African context, as the term has been connected with the so-called Colored group, which is a “phenotypically varied social group of highly diverse cultural and geographic origins.”³³ Mohamed Adhikari outlines that many people seen as belonging to this group have African roots, whereas others have partly European ancestry.³⁴ It would therefore not traditionally have been seen as including those with Indian or Asian ancestry. In the “racial hierarchy,” Colored people “held an intermediate position between the dominant white majority and the large African majority,” and Adhikari argues that this intermediate status is embodied in the term “brown.”³⁵ Whether it is this history that Dawjee draws upon is not stated outright in the essay collection, but the positioning as brown is interesting and relevant. Ciraj Rassool observes that race and ethnic belonging still carry significance in South Africa in terms of group membership and identity. The categories enforced during the era of apartheid and created far earlier still exist and have taken on new meanings.³⁶ Most importantly, blackness became “an embracement of unity” from the 1970s onward, separating itself from “non-white” and from whiteness as being the norm.³⁷ Further, Rassool argues that another meaning of blackness emerged that encompasses for example those of Indian descent, becoming “a grouping of apartheid’s oppressed races.”³⁸ Rassool states that “Indian,” too, has gained new meaning, as “race has entered a realm of self-classification.”³⁹

The in-between position of “brown,” and refraining from referring to herself as black as outlined in the introduction, thus points to a view of blackness in Sorry, Not Sorry that sees it as attached to a particular place in South Africa and a particular past, and not the “grouping of apartheid’s oppressed races” as highlighted by Rassool. Pallavi Rastogi further explains in Afrindian Fictions that “collectivity is invoked through the articulation of a common ‘black’ identity rather than an Indian identity,” drawing also on a shared history of discrimination with other groups: “The term ‘black’ allows dispossessed groups agency in the ascriptive process, giving them the voice and power of large-scale resistance.”⁴⁰ Interestingly, Dawjee’s positioning seems to have shifted in Here’s the Thing, which for example contains an essay titled “For Black Women, Silence is Death,” in which Dawjee addresses the importance of black women speaking up about their lives and experiences, and she repeatedly uses the pronouns “we” and “us,” indicating that she sees herself as part of this group.⁴¹

The discriminatory behavior Dawjee detects in her childhood continues into adulthood, as exemplified in difficulties attached to viewing an apartment. Dawjee recounts that she would ask one of her white friends to “call an agent for me (if the agent was white as well).” At one viewing, the white agent proceeded to ask Dawjee if she really had the funds to buy the place: “‘No one like you lives here’,” clearly revealing her perception of Dawjee as not belonging to the right social and racial(ized) group. Dawjee later proceeded to make an offer to another agent: “When the racist agent walked in and saw me sign that paper, she made a U-turn and slammed the door behind her.” Dawjee ends the story with the following words: “If I were white, I would make a hobby out of viewing apartments.”⁴² These personal experiences of othering as recounted by Dawjee exemplify complex discrimination, as she was able to attend riding lessons with white children and able to view apartments, yet, metaphorically speaking, the door remained only slightly ajar and it required the help of a white friend to secure an appointment with the agent.

These experiences can be seen as examples of what DiAngelo discusses in her section on whiteness and status: “[A] significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race – ‘just human’.”⁴³ Further, she explains that the “dimensions of racism benefiting white people are usually invisible to whites.”⁴⁴ Dawjee’s experiences testify to this, as well as to the residues of meniality as outlined by Steyn. Dawjee’s memory from the horse stables addresses the same issue, as the white children were talked to as “the humans they were,” whereas Dawjee and her sister were treated as something less. Whether the racist behavior of the real estate agent was an unconscious manifestation of white bias is a different matter, but the behavior is represented as deliberate by Dawjee. The incident with the real estate agent can be connected with what DiAngelo calls “the good/bad binary.” The binary is based on the perception that only bad people can be racists, obscuring “the structural nature of racism.”⁴⁵

This structural nature is at the core of much recent research grappling with “the practices through which whiteness is systematically produced as implicit or unspoken.”⁴⁶ Johnny E. Williams explains that “systemic white racism is not merely a manifestation of individual white privilege; it grants whites license to enact their bigoted ways of thinking. These enactments are possible because whites authorize officials to implement their racist conceptions of being in organizing the world.”⁴⁷ In this context, Dawjee recounts an altercation at a bar she attended with her brother and friend, when “a drunken white dude from the senior society tripped me with his government-issue crutch.”⁴⁸ The conflict started with insults from the white man, who ended up calling Dawjee and her entourage “dogs.” Eventually they left after the white man had been escorted out, where he proceeded to trip Dawjee after insults had been thrown on both sides.⁴⁹ Afterwards, Dawjee’s white partner questioned the “commotion,” upsetting Dawjee further, until her partner “later explained that she was worried that the incident would play out with the standard narrative if it escalated any further. The headline would read: ‘Black hoodlums attack crippled pensioner’.”⁵⁰ The “standard narrative” can here be seen in connection to the white ways of organizing the world as explained by Williams.

Through the bar incident, whiteness is presented as being in opposition to other groups, with the white man drawing on apartheid rhetoric in his insults and with Dawjee’s partner being worried about the potential scandal the incident could have caused, as Dawjee and her group would likely be portrayed as the perpetrators. The essay ends with Dawjee’s thoughts about the fight, suggesting that bad headlines can sometimes be “the prize” one must pay to be heard, and that she has since been back to the same bar without any further incidents: “Not all whites, I guess.”⁵¹ The line reverts the stereotyping that people of color may be subjected to, implying, perhaps somewhat sarcastically, that not all whites are like the man with the crutch. This places white people in the perpetrator category, and the bar conflict testifies to different groups in South Africa still being locked in struggle for space.

In this context, Anthea Garman’s pertinent questions seem appropriate: “Can a new story be told about how to be white in South Africa? Can different ‘talk’ be put out into public? Can a different conversation be held about whiteness? And, probably more importantly, could such a conversation held here have wider import?”⁵² This paper attempts to address these questions in the following sections that deal more explicitly with white fragility and the consequences of such behavior. Dawjee’s writing introduces a novel perspective in these debates, questioning the focus on whiteness through its own claim to center stage, while still addressing whiteness as central in some of the essays. This mixed perspective can help provide the “new repertoire” Garman calls for, in order for “white South Africans to think differently about themselves in relation to the new reality they live within.”⁵³ Steyn, for her part, explains that “white people need to be helped to make a paradigm shift. This paradigm shift would entail moving from the ethnocentric positions of denial, defense, and minimization of difference that enable blindness, indifference, and lack of engagement.”⁵⁴ Dawjee’s writing indicates that a far more urgent issue is to provide people of color with ways of thinking differently about themselves and to once and for all leave the “meniality” behind, while she also writes against white fragility, addressing white people directly.

Fragility and performative whiteness

Robin DiAngelo explains that white fragility amounts to “a form of bullying; I am going to make it so miserable for you to confront me–no matter how diplomatically you try to do so–that you will simply back off, give up, and never raise the issue again. White fragility keeps people of color in line and ‘in their place’.”⁵⁵ DiAngelo adds that white fragility is not just about “defensiveness and whining” but can also be equated with “a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy.”⁵⁶ These notions are addressed in multiple contexts in Dawjee’s essays. In the interview with van Rensburg, Dawjee states that “we’re going to stop explaining ourselves.”⁵⁷ This can be understood as a somewhat similar statement to Eddo-Lodge’s decision to stop talking about race to white people. Yet, Dawjee’s approach is somewhat different and more directly provocative, offering her unapologetic perspective on various aspects of being a brown woman. She points out that at the heart of the book is the following notion: “It is actually your turn to listen, and our turn to speak.”⁵⁸ To some degree, DiAngelo and Dawjee can thus be said to speak to the same audience in an effort to educate white people about the intricate workings of race and whiteness, but their methods and topics in which they engage are somewhat different.

The need to break the silence is part of Eddo-Lodge’s writing too, in which she comments on the psychological burden for people of color to constantly face white privilege and white fragility:

White privilege is a manipulating, suffocating blanket of power that envelops everything we know, like a snowy day. It’s brutal and oppressive, bullying you into not speaking up for fear of losing your loved ones, or job, or flat. It scares you into silencing yourself: you don’t get the privilege of speaking openly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences. I have spent a lot of time biting my tongue so hard it might fall off.⁵⁹

This is echoed in Dawjee’s writing when she recounts visiting the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg with other fellow students. One of them made a comment about her hair, stating that during apartheid she “would have passed the pencil test.” Dawjee comments on the incident, arguing that it was a manifestation of casual racism, “worse than the in-your-face kind.”⁶⁰ The different layers of racism thus speak to the difficulty in properly defining it, and the reference to the apartheid past suggests that racism and discrimination, despite being global concerns, can take profoundly local forms that remain embedded in national histories. The question relating to hair remains sensitive in South African contexts, as reported by Janell Le Roux and Toks Dele Oyedemi, who address controversy that emerged in relation to a hair advertisement in South Africa that compared black and white hair. Le Roux and Oyedemi refer to the “intermediate position” of Colored women who are at the center of their study and observe that “the straightness and texture of hair defined racial grouping.”⁶¹ They also mention the so-called pencil test in the apartheid era, in which a pen was inserted into a person’s hair and racial category was decided depending on whether the pencil fell out or not.⁶² The incident at the museum thus takes on a specifically South African dimension, occurring, paradoxically, in a place dedicated to the education and commemoration of an era that may be over but the echoes of which can still be heard in Dawjee’s essays.

Dawjee addresses a white reader particularly in her essay titled “A resignation letter to performative whites.” The text is addressed to “you,” a white reader who engages in activities “to garner approval” and “to rebut arguments and prove that you are better than the rest without actually educating yourself on how not to act like an authority on the issues of race relations and inequality.”⁶³ These lines are relevant for several reasons, indicating that such performative activities may be carried out for purposes of self-image and status. They also manifest the willful ignorance that is part of white fragility. In the essay titled “Begging to be white?,” Dawjee raises the problem of white privilege still persisting in South Africa despite apartheid officially having come to an end: “The ‘whites only’ signs have been removed, but destroying physical evidence means nothing when the ideologies have stayed behind and continue to be recycled.”⁶⁴ Thus, fragility is connected with ideology, overlapping with white privilege. Dawjee’s statement about no longer explaining herself is contradicted by the essays in which she, in fact, explains herself to the presumably white reader. The essays thus present a somewhat conflicted approach to the ways in which privilege and fragility can and should be addressed by people of color engaging in conversation with white people. Dawjee’s essay collection as the chosen medium for this discussion speaks to her aim to reclaim her voice, that it is her turn to speak. Therefore, it is not really a conversation but a testimonial, a monologue that distances itself from white voices and demands to be heard.

This conflicted positioning is present in two other essays as well, in which Dawjee states that she prefers to deal with outright racists. In the letter of resignation to performative whites, she writes the following about people who are openly racist: “At least they wear their ignorance with conviction.”⁶⁵ Eddo-Lodge agrees and writes along similar lines: “White privilege is the perverse situation of feeling more comfortable with openly racist, far-right extremists, because at least you know where you stand with them.”⁶⁶ This indicates that white privilege and fragility masquerade as something else, and this is addressed by Dawjee who speaks of two kinds of whites that fall into similar categories of good/bad, as outlined by DiAngelo: “The good whites (those so tainted by their own moral superiority complex that they are unable to see the error of their ways) and the bad (those who openly wear their hatred on their sleeves).”⁶⁷ The example with the altercation at the bar as discussed in the previous section exemplifies such hatred, and so does, to some extent, the incident with the real estate agent. Defining whiteness as “performative” complicates the matter, and it becomes something far less tangible to deflect and resist.

A recent example of such performative whiteness in media, the “good whites” as defined by Dawjee, concerns the video, “I take responsibility,” which was released in 2020 featuring white actors speaking up against racism and tokenism, and taking responsibility for their own discriminatory actions in the past. The video gained widespread attention and considerable backlash. The “I take responsibility”-video was commented on, for example, by Rebecca Alter in Vulture⁶⁸ and Jordan Coley in The New Yorker, who raise questions about the visibility of such a performance and “the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence.”⁶⁹ Olivia Singh in Insider writes that part of the criticism with which the video was met considered it “performative,” which connects with Coley’s comment about the “appearance of political integrity.”⁷⁰ Further, Vanessa Díaz argues that “the video centers a white narrative and displays white guilt, the white savior complex, and white tears.”⁷¹ The centrality of whiteness is at the heart of Dawjee’s essay, as exemplified in her own work as a journalist.

In a story told in the very last essay of the collection, titled “Sorry, not sorry,” Dawjee remembers a column she wrote about domestic workers in South Africa, addressing what she observed in a park in Johannesburg with the blurb “White people can walk their dogs in South Africa, but not their children.”⁷² The column was not well-received by readers and attracted negative attention. Domestic work remains a contested issue in South Africa, with Zaheera Jinnah observing that such work often builds on “vulnerable conditions, including limited labor protection, low wages and little recourse to protect against exploitation.”⁷³ The tradition of employing domestic workers carries a historical burden, as indicated by Tamara Shefer, who notes that in the era of apartheid, employing black women “in white homes has […] been recognized as a particular space for the reproduction of the ideological and discursive practices of patriarchal racial capitalism.”⁷⁴ The tradition thus carries a gender aspect as well as a racial one.

A colleague wrote a response to deal with the backlash and to help clarify Dawjee’s point, which further upset Dawjee: “She needed to whitesplain my thoughts and sanitize them with her ‘wokeness’. I had spoken at her people. She needed to speak with them.”⁷⁵ Dawjee felt that the text was condescending, yet she chose not to confront her colleague: “I regretted not saying enough. Not standing up for myself enough. I regretted playing into the hands of white sensitivities and being careful not to hurt this person’s feelings. I put myself second.”⁷⁶ Here, Dawjee refers to the struggle for space and recognition, for a voice that can carry itself and be heard in its own right. The self-silencing can be seen as a by-product of the privilege of the other journalist.

In “The curious case of the old architect,” Dawjee turns to talking about institutional power still being in the hands of white people and recounts her own troubles with making her way in the media industry as a person of color. She remembers a competition for young journalists in which she took part where the prize was money and a paid internship at a magazine. Dawjee won along with three white students, making her question her own success: “Was I there to maintain a good BEE demographic while keeping the place appropriately white? Was I the box they would tick on the employment-equity form? Was I just a statistic while the other three were the pillars of institutional perpetuation?”⁷⁷ These lines provide a deeper perspective on the aversive racism as defined by DiAngelo and manifest the psychological burden of having to consider whether your success is an act of charity, or worse yet, and act of surface-level diversity or equal opportunity that only serves those wishing to appear more diverse and equal.

The terms “performative” and “wokeness” that emerge in Dawjee’s essays need some further clarification. White people are seen as performing political integrity and awareness, or wokeness in a negative sense, yet also seen as performing victimhood through their white fragility. This is the most important contribution of Dawjee’s essay collection and the provocative examples she gives of woke whites, or performative whites: it adds the concept of performance and performativity to those of wokeness and to fragility, and it provides examples of how these two notions of performative whiteness converge. The meaning of “woke” was far more positive originally than what its connotations are today: “When we are ignorant of our history, unaware of the social and racial context in which we exist, we are disconnected from ourselves and our capacity for woke‐ness.”⁷⁸ Alan Jacobs explores the meaning of the concept in his article and argues the following: “The term ‘woke,’ for those who have managed to escape it, means being aware of racial, gender, and economic injustice. It is employed today either in mockery of the woke or in ironic reappropriation by the woke, and it is probably irrecoverable for serious use.”⁷⁹ Dawjee, too, uses it in ironic or mocking terms, confirming Jacobs’s prediction that wokeness has lost its positive meaning.

Scholarly approaches to wokeness in an American context in which the term has been applied in recent years define it for example in the following ways: “Being woke gives one permission to forgo any projects of social- or self-improvement, for the work is already done;”⁸⁰ or as the belief that one is doing the right thing, yet still expects people to “conform to set White standards.”⁸¹ Dawjee provides several examples of such engagement and awareness, describing it as “a cloak made of personal gain – whether socially or politically – and the thread of insight is often lacking.”⁸² Woke behavior in this context can thus be seen as seemingly well-meaning efforts for the benefit of people of color, yet personal and collective gain remain at the core.

Dawjee explicitly elaborates on white people feeling uncomfortable with their own position and privilege and sees this too as “woke” behavior. Such people “do us favors, but then have the audacity to preach about equality and rainbow-nationness. Their freedoms and entitlement are so vast that they share with pride their fragility and struggles of being white.”⁸³ This connects particularly well with DiAngelo’s chapter on white women’s tears, in which she outlines why white women resort to tears when their racial beliefs and underlying white fragility is questioned, tears which work to turn focus back to themselves instead of the actual problem: “While she is given attention, the people of color are yet again abandoned and/or blamed.”⁸⁴ Dawjee writes that performative whites take over the struggle of people of color when they have no right to do so: “You set up tents of privilege on ground we fought hard to stand on. […] You will not colonize our pain. You have no right to it. It is not yours, nor is this fight.”⁸⁵ Dawjee attempts to move away from whiteness, to reclaim the stage and to expose the “cloak made of personal gain.”⁸⁶

Thus, Dawjee’s essay collection functions not only as an intervention in the debate on race and racism bringing focus back to the experiences of people of color but offers boundary-making and space-claiming rhetoric that relegates white people to the side-lines in terms of the struggle for equality itself. This goes directly against the call by researchers such as Steyn and Garman, with Garman arguing that “white supremacy must be faced, understood, and dismantled, and this must be done largely by whites themselves.”⁸⁷ Steyn states that “[i]t will require moving from denial and avoidance of uncomfortable emotions, through the temptation to escape into white fragility or retreat into spaces where secret lives of hostility to the demands of the current society can be lived.”⁸⁸ The focus on white responsibility is thus central in recent research, whereas Dawjee expresses that she regrets “playing into the hands of white sensitivities.”⁸⁹

What Dawjee appears to call for is a shifting of positions and for white people to acknowledge their “responsibility to come to terms with the oppression that accompanies privilege.”⁹⁰ Dawjee argues that “woke whites […] use their privilege when it suits them,” giving them the possibility to escape responsibility. Hence, becoming truly aware of inherent and structural racism is a “journey you must take alone.”⁹¹ The distancing that is represented in Dawjee’s essays becomes the only way forward from the self-silencing. Avoidance of responsibility has been defined as “white talk” by Nabina Liebow and Trip Glazer: “[W]hite talk is a discursive strategy that white people (and others) deploy either intentionally or unintentionally to avoid dealing with the realities of racism and white supremacy. Although white talk may succeed in making the speaker feel better, it often does so at the cost of making people of color feel worse.”⁹² Dawjee expresses this in terms of “I will no longer pay for your journey with my pain.” She writes that having constantly to question your own worth and capacity feels “like panic and pain. And they feel as though they will only go away if you make yourself small or disappear.”⁹³ The book itself is both a manifestation of that feeling while at the same time working to break free from any self-silencing and small-making forces. Anger relates to silencing in multiple ways and is briefly examined in the following section.

Anger as defense and as threat

The actions of “woke” whites as analyzed in the previous section are presented as further exacerbating racial divides. This is acknowledged by David Brooks (2018), who argues the following in his column for The New York Times: “The problem with wokeness is that it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it.”⁹⁴ Dawjee’s comment about paying for the journey toward awareness with her pain also suggests that not only is wokeness causing further rifts, it is in fact expressed and acted out at the expense of people of color. Hence the emphasis on no longer being sorry: “I am not sorry that you feel silenced. […] I am not sorry that my truth offends you. […] I am not sorry that I am no longer afraid.”⁹⁵ Within these lines is embedded not only the efforts of the author to separate herself from the role of mediator between people of color and white people, but also the potential anger of the performative whites she addresses as expressed in the word “offend.”

Anger is a topic that emerges several times in Dawjee’s writing, and it is also addressed in White Fragility. While Dawjee focuses on her perspective as someone who has had to take white sensitivities into account and silence herself as a consequence thereof, DiAngelo analyses the anger white people may feel when confronted with their privileges and racism. Dawjee’s perspective thus provides an important contribution that attempts to decenter whiteness. Anger can be seen to play an important part here, as it may be perceived as a threat when expressed by a person of color, yet perfectly justified when expressed as a reaction emanating from white fragility that is under threat. Dawjee confesses to being careful around white people so as not to upset them “because you are sensitive and fragile. Think about it. I should not have to walk on eggshells around you and your efforts.” With this, Dawjee again refers to “woke” whites and their “armchair liberalism.”⁹⁶ The writing indicates that the perceived threat of people of color who speak up about their experiences in explicit ways such as Dawjee, may invite backlash. The stereotype of the so-called angry black woman is relevant here, although it must be emphasized that Dawjee does not define herself as black in Sorry, Not Sorry. The aim of this brief section is not to generalize and, by extension, to trivialize, the experiences of black women, particularly not in a South African context in which group membership is extremely sensitive and historically contested, to encompass all women of color, but merely to discuss how the dangers of raising issues of race publicly are addressed in Dawjee’s writing. As her essays attest, the topic may still be discussed in this context in relation to who gets to speak about racism and on what terms.

Wendy Ashley, American professor in social work and therapist working for social and racial justice, discusses the features of the stereotype of the angry black woman and argues the following: “Many characteristics of the angry Black woman stereotype, including hostility, rage, aggressiveness, and bitterness may be reflective of survival skills developed by Black women in the face of social, economic, and political oppression. This trifecta of oppression is all encompassing and creates a pervasive environment of injustice.”⁹⁷ In contrast to these notions, Dawjee explains that it is “confusing” to be a person of color: “Being a person of color is hostility. It’s pessimism and pride all at once. Being a person of color is manic depression. Being a person of color is change.”⁹⁸ Notions of change, pessimism, and pride are all present throughout Dawjee’s book, in which she recounts numerous instances of racism, overt and covert. The word hostility is here important, indicating that some form of anger is present; an experience of othering that goes beyond mere exclusion. The story about the bar incident speaks to this. Another memory retold in the essay titled “Tinder is a pocket full of rejection, in two parts” is also relevant in this context, as Dawjee recounts a crush she had on a white boy called Michael while still in school, and some other girls bullied Dawjee into kissing him. She did this, with his consent, and the others watching took a picture of the two, causing Dawjee great anxiety. Eventually Michael got hold of the picture and told Dawjee he liked it and that he would keep the others from laughing at it. They ended up holding hands, but a teacher quickly intervened, telling Dawjee that it was not right since he was white, and she was brown. Michael’s mother also told Dawjee to leave him alone.⁹⁹ The experience exemplifies in most concrete and explicit ways the dangers of “speaking openly about your feelings without extensively assessing the consequences.”¹⁰⁰

The bar brawl, too, relates to this in multiple ways. Although the incident ended in humiliation for Dawjee, being tripped by the man and held back by her friends, Dawjee ends the essay by asserting the following: “Getting angry and saying something is worth it. Being the bigger person is exhausting and sometimes it’s just bullshit.”¹⁰¹ The pessimism and pride mentioned earlier are visible particularly well in these lines and in the confrontation at the bar. It is not just about how the people involved in the actual conflict react but those around them. This is where expressions of anger play such a significant role. This is further emphasized by Ashley: “Black women fearing the label of Angry Black Woman may suppress disclosures of anger and minimize its impact in their lives.”¹⁰² Dawjee confirms this too in her writing when stating that people of color have been waiting for “our turn. Waiting for the right moment to react. Waiting for the right words to say.”¹⁰³ Using the essay collection is a way to claim that moment and to make it the right moment. In terms of how people of color, or in the case of Nadena Doharty’s study, black women, are perceived through their anger, points further to the confusion Dawjee mentions: “Black women are aware that despite how they might perceive themselves to be managing their emotions, that is, no matter how softly spoken, articulate, educated, light-footed or introvert she is, she may still possess features that are a little too angry, a voice that is a little too loud and a demeanor that is a little too Black for others.”¹⁰⁴ Although Dawjee does not emphasize gender gaps in terms of expressing negative emotions, her writing exemplifies such notions. The essay in Here’s the Thing mentioned earlier in this paper, on the need for black women to speak up about their experiences, does emphasize the gender aspect of voice in addition to a racial one.

Similar issues are raised by Trina Jones and Kimberly Jade Norwood, who write that black women “know that if they push for diversity too hard, too passionately, or in too animated a fashion, then they will likely encounter backlash. They will be viewed as a squeaky wheel, a troublemaker, a discontent, as not being a team player.”¹⁰⁵ The backlash Dawjee experienced for her column could be seen as falling into this category of pushing too hard for diversity and being too explicit about race-related social concerns. Eddo-Lodge, too, has written about this complex position black women may find themselves in: “You learn to be careful about your battles, because otherwise people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. A troublemaker, not worth taking seriously, an angry black woman obsessed with race.”¹⁰⁶ The word “troublemaker” is here repeated, again raising the issue of voice and (not) being heard. Dawjee, too, speaks of anger and hate, offering something of a disclaimer: “It sounds as though I am a silent observer harboring an inherent anger toward white skin, regardless of the person who occupies it. That my words are the result of a gene that exists purely to hate you. That is not the case.”¹⁰⁷ The words exemplify some of the confusion she mentioned earlier: the desire to be frank and open about her reality as a person of color clashes severely with the desire to stay small and inoffensive, caring about the sensitivities of those to whom she directs the text.

A final point in this context has to do with the question of race and racism as identity politics. Doharty mentions in her article that black women who conduct research on race “might write themselves into the narrative of research with the awareness that their work will be read and received as potentially ‘identity politics’ or, not do so because of the risks involved in not having their work published.”¹⁰⁸ Using the term identity politics in this context suggests negative connotations, as it indicates that black women writing about their own experiences are furthering a very personal agenda and not making statements that have any general appeal or importance. It works to support the perception that there is no pattern of systemic racism, only one person’s private, separate experience. “Identity politics” becomes a way of potentially diminishing the message and impact of such research and implies that identity politics may work to emphasize the experiences of certain groups before others.¹⁰⁹ In the News24 interview, van Rensburg mentions to Dawjee that there have been a number of similar books in the last year, “almost as expressions of identity.”¹¹⁰ The question that inevitably arises is whether such an approach works to diminish the message of Dawjee’s book. It is a question as to whether only people of color have identity politics to deal with whereas white people are just the norm, or, simply, just human, as Dawjee and DiAngelo both state. Such a viewpoint once more places white people in a completely race-free category where identity politics only concern other groups. Arguably, all autobiographical writing is an expression of identity in multiple contexts and on several levels, regardless of racial or racialized group membership.

Throughout her essay collection, anger and frustration are present at least to some degree, and Dawjee writes as if she expects readers to be angry at her for claiming her rightful voice and space through her polemic and provocative essays that speak of her reality and experiences. She may have good reason to expect such reactions, as DiAngelo too states,¹¹¹ citing Sherene Razack and writing that white people “have a particular hatred for ‘uppity’ blacks, those who dare to step out of their place and look us in the eye as equals.” Thus, the hatred or anger referred to both in Dawjee’s writing, and in the context of white reactions to someone speaking their mind as she has done, amount to a defensive reaction such as the backlash after Dawjee’s column on maids in South Africa. They can be perceived as a threat if coming from a person of color. In the last essay of the collection, in “The sorry, not sorry manifesto,” Dawjee writes that “I am not sorry that I question you, that I doubt you, that I think you are different and that, sometimes, I think you are dangerous.”¹¹² With these lines, Dawjee requires white people to take responsibility for their own attitudes and perceptions. She urges them to embark on a journey toward greater self-awareness and awareness of others and their realities. Ultimately, the book is a step back from being a sounding board, a tool, a point of reference for white people seeking to understand race and racism from their position of fragility, and a step forward for people of color toward being able to thrive and not just survive.¹¹³

Conclusion

Introducing a South African voice in the contemporary debate surrounding race and racism is essential, as the realities of people of color are both unique and universal as the analysis in this paper shows. Dawjee’s experience at the Apartheid Museum and the racist comment about the pencil test manifests the local specificity of racism and racialization, as does the article she wrote about domestic workers, inciting backlash. Dawjee’s forcefully written essays demand attention in personal, political, and racial matters, not asking to be seen or heard but claiming a rightful place. The performance of white progressiveness, of wokeness, is exemplified in a number of ways, yet the encounters Dawjee writes about that cause her pain and humiliation are often based in overt racism. Both Dawjee and Eddo-Lodge argue that it is easier to deal with openly racist individuals than to take on progressive, or performative, whites and their seemingly accepting worldviews that eventually function only to serve themselves. Hence, the explicit nature of Dawjee’s writing: the message is that white people must take responsibility for their learning and for becoming aware of the racial privileges they enjoy. In a country such as South Africa, that is still dealing with its recent history and the legacy of apartheid, this is a most urgent message. Yet, Dawjee’s book also speaks to wider audiences and provides a much-needed perspective outside Anglo-American contexts. Dawjee’s positioning is somewhat different as she puts herself center stage and offers her essay collection as a break-up letter, pushing whiteness to the margins. Thus, a significant contribution of her book is that it simultaneously manages to scrutinize the power of whiteness while emphasizing the need for people of color to negotiate race relations on their own terms.

Disclosure statement

The author declares that there are no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes

1 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 79.

2 Cf. Adam, “Affirmative action and popular perceptions;” Archibong and Adejumo, “Affirmative action in South Africa;” Chatterjee, “Measuring wealth inequality;” “Inequality Trends in South Africa.”

3 Dawjee, Interview by Alet Janse van Rensburg, 2:04-2:32.

4 For a more detailed discussion of the two texts, see Englund, “Against Color-Blindness.”

5 Jennifer Patrice Sims and Chinelo L. Njaka observe in Mixed-Race in the US and UK that the two nations have a shared history of race, relating to slavery and immigration, and their study also asserts that people of mixed race in both countries “have similar day-to-day experiences,” 118. Robyn Autry notes in Desegregating the Past that American and South African histories of segregation and racism are “contentious and uneven” in both nations, 4.

6 Swartz et al, “The ‘Fuck White People’ Phenomenon in South Africa,” 141.

7 Ibid., 151.

8 Chauke, Born in Chains; Wa Azania, Memoirs of a Born Free. For a discussion of these texts, see Englund, South African Autobiography.

9 Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman; Malepe, Reclaiming Home.

10 Haffajee, What If, 16.

11 Ibid., 34.

12 Autry, Desegregating the Past, 8.

13 Dawjee, Here’s the Thing, 22.

14 Ibid., 26.

15 Lalu, “Incomplete Histories,” 107.

16 Haresnape, “Biko, Shakespeare,” 99.

17 Statistics South Africa reports that in 2022, there was a total of 60,6 million inhabitants of whom 81% were Black African, 8.8% Colored, 2.6% Indian/Asian, and 7.7% were White. “Mid-year Population Estimates,” viii. The British census from 2021 reports that 81.7% of residents in England Wales categorized themselves as White, with Asian being the second largest group of 9.3%. 31.6% saw themselves as belonging to the category “Other ethnic group,” and 2.5% to “Black, Black British, Black Welsh, Caribbean or African.” An American report by the Census Bureau indicates that in 2021, 75.8% of the US population was White, 13.8% Black or African American, and 6.1% Asian. 18.9% identify as Hispanic or Latino.

18 Autry, Desegregating the Past, 6.

19 Ibid., 7.

20 Doane, “Post-Color Blindness?,” 29.

21 Newlove and Bitz, “White Rage,” 123.

22 Isom, Williams, and Goldenberg, “White Fragility,” 1301.

23 Steyn, “Whiteness in the Rainbow,” 85.

24 Steyn, “Whiteness: Post-apartheid, Decolonial,” 10.

25 Dawjee, Interview by Alet Janse van Rensburg, 0:30-0:48.

26 Ibid., 1:00-1:25.

27 Steyn, “Whiteness in the Rainbow,” 87.

28 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 106.

29 Ibid., 33.

30 Ibid., 29.

31 Ibid., 30–1.

32 Ibid., 122.

33 Adhikari, Not White Enough, 2.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 10.

36 Rassool, “The Politics,” 345–6.

37 Ibid., 346.

38 Ibid. See also Erasmus, Race Otherwise, 42.

39 Rassool, “The Politics,” 365.

40 Rastogi, Afrindian Fictions, 27.

41 Dawjee, Here’s the Thing, 158–60.

42 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 44–5.

43 DiAngelo, White Fragility, 27.

44 Ibid., 28.

45 Ibid., 71–3.

46 Whitehead, “The Problem of Context,” 297.

47 Williams, “The Unblackening,” 44.

48 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 61.

49 Ibid., 63,64.

50 Ibid., 65.

51 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 65.

52 Garman, “Troubling White Englishness,” 216.

53 Ibid., 215.

54 Steyn, “Whiteness in the Rainbow,” 99.

55 DiAngelo, White Fragility, 112.

56 Ibid., 112,113.

57 Dawjee, Interview by Alet Janse van Rensburg, 1:36-1:40.

58 Ibid., 5:08-5:17.

59 Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking, 92.

60 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 144.

61 Le Roux and Oyedemi, “Indelible Apartheid,” 152.

62 Ibid., 153.

63 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 76.

64 Ibid., 37.

65 Ibid., p. 75.

66 Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking, 93.

67 Dawjee, Sorry, 75.

68 Alter, “White Celebrities Take Responsibility.”

69 Coley, “‘I Take Responsibility’.”

70 Singh, “People are calling out.”

71 Díaz, “Performative Wokeness/White Victimhood,” 366.

72 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 189.

73 Jinnah, “Negotiated Precarity,” 212.

74 Shefer, “‘Troubling’ Stories,” 368.

75 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 190.

76 Ibid., 190,191.

77 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 143.

78 Holmes and Lang, “One Year Later,” 308.

79 Jacobs, “Wokeness and Myth,” 35.

80 Boyce, “Racist Compared to What?,” 116.

81 Hayes, “To Be Woke,” 2.

82 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 193.

83 Ibid., 102–3.

84 DiAngelo, White Fragility, 134.

85 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 74–5.

86 Ibid., 193.

87 Garman, “Troubling White Englishness,” 211.

88 Steyn, Whiteness: Post-apartheid, Decolonial, 14.

89 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 191.

90 Ibid., 198.

91 Ibid., 78,79.

92 Liebow and Glazer, “White Tears,” 2.

93 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 79,143.

94 Brooks, “The problem with wokeness.”

95 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 197–8.

96 Ibid., 78; 76.

97 Ashley, “The Angry Black Woman,” 28.

98 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 46–7.

99 Ibid., 123–5.

100 Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer, 92.

101 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 62–65.

102 Ashley, “The Angry Black Woman,” 28.

103 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 47.

104 Doharty, “The ‘Angry Black Woman’,” 554.

105 Jones and Norwood, “Aggressive Encounters,” 2037.

106 Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer, 93.

107 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 75.

108 Doharty, “The ‘Angry Black Woman’,” 554.

109 Cf. Nash and Warin, “Squeezed Between Identity Politics.”

110 Dawjee, Interview by Alet Janse van Rensburg, 00:52-00:55.

111 DiAngelo, White Fragility, 95; Razack, Looking White People in the Eye.

112 Dawjee, Sorry, Not Sorry, 198.

113 Ibid., 196.