By Matt Whiteman
I met a xenophobic, racist, white South African man on the plane last Sunday and he said a number of absurd things that I strongly disagreed with but which at the time I was unable to adequately defend against. He came on incredibly forcefully, and I was so stunned by some of his comments that I didn’t know where to begin and I eventually just gave up and left, shaking with rage and muttering to myself.
Here are just a few paraphrased samples from our 3 hour long argument. He actually said these things I promise… you can’t make this stuff up. I apologize if this gets a bit ranty:
Him (fully knowing who Robert Mugabe is…): We have a big problem with refugees crossing into South Africa from Zimbabwe. Why can’t they just go home?
Me: Well I think poverty in general and the situation in Zimbabwe are both pretty complex subjects, and there’s a whole course at UBC on the dynamics of migration and settlement. Plus, how can you even rationalize sending them back to the environment that is responsible for bringing them to be refugees in South Africa in the first place?
Him: Harumph! Complexity-shmomplexity. I don’t like taxes. Out!
***
Him: … okay then, explain to me why Namibia, Botswana and Vietnam went through decades of conflict but are now sporting good economic growth and have their HIV/AIDS problems under control?
Me: I don’t know enough about any of those countries yet to be able to answer you intelligently… and wait, doesn’t Botswana have one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world?
Him: I win!
***
Him (practically yelling at me at this point): France and Germany were completely destroyed after the Second World War, and they rebuilt themselves in a decade. We’ve spent over a trillion dollars on Africa over nearly 60 years, why the hell can’t they get their act together?
Me: Well… you see the thing is… The Marshall Plan, uhh… well you see Europe is… huh.
***
Him: Why do African people keep electing corrupt politicians? I mean how stupid do you have to be? It’s the corrupt politicians that are the reason everybody is poor and dying!
Me: Well what is it that led them to corrupt behaviour? Corruption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. After all, if the politicians are corrupt, then the elections are probably not legitimate in the first place, are they?
Him: But after all this time, they’re still doing it. Have they learned nothing? (I know, this argument got old pretty fast for me too)
Me: Well the colonial governments weren’t exactly run by the Dalai Lama, and nation-states they inherited didn’t exactly run like a rube-goldberg machine. And don’t you think that colonial history still might have something to with it? And there’s this whole thing about dependence and debt, you see… and don’t forget civil conflict and endemic disease and pretty unfortunate geography.
Him: So now you’re reducing it to geographical determinism? What a fool! Well what about in the cases where they are more legitimate than others? They still vote for the personality rather than the policies.
Me: How many degrees do you have?
Him: Two – and I paid for them myself! And that’s another thing, why should my taxes go up in order to subsidize education and services for someone who can’t pay for it themselves?
Me: Easy for you to say. And don’t you think your two degrees might have an effect on your level of political literacy and thus your ability to vote in an informed way?
Him: No, these people have had every opportunity, which they have wasted at every turn. Both big aid and grassroots volunteering are a waste of time. The only solution is to become ENTIRELY uninvolved and let the continent destroy itself.
Me: (twitch)
***
He eventually boiled it all down to a matter of cultural inferiority, and it took every ounce of will-power not to say something truly hurtful or to slug him right there on the plane (I imagine that would not have made me very popular with CATSA). I spent the rest of the day fuming at home, reading and writing down as many counter-arguments as I could come up with.
At some point in the conversation, Shakespeare would have said, “I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see that you are unarmed!” It did indeed dawn on me that I was losing an argument to a complete idiot, but saying so wouldn’t stop him from being an ignorant racist, so I pressed on.
Now I realize it’s unfair to rant about him without him being here to present his side of the story himself, but I felt it was my responsibility to not let this guy get away with saying these things, and at the time, I’m ashamed to say that I fumbled and felt like I’d forgotten everything I’d learned, and ultimately couldn’t rise to the challenge. Maybe it was because I didn’t know the history and politics well enough, or maybe because I still haven’t learned how not to default to one-dimensional counter-arguments. Maybe it’s because I was afraid of what would happen if I made a bigger scene by calling him a racist to his face. What made me even more angry was that I had to resort to homogenizing complexity myself to be able to advocate for the continent at all. It left a bad taste in my mouth to even start trying to defend my position by saying: “well hasn’t there has been a lot of brutal conflict in various parts of the continent that make things like building infrastructure and sustaining trade really difficult?” I can still hear his voice vividly in my head as I write this, and I’ll admit, I feel very small.
I realize now why it became so hard to argue against him – not only because he was so forceful, but because it’s easy to fit a lot of really loaded language and ignorant assumptions into a single, forceful sentence, while it’s much more difficult to unpack all those assumptions and respond thoughtfully and adequately in an equivalent amount of time. So when I would begin to respond, he’d cut me off after my first sentence and immediately retaliate with another insane rebuttal.
I realize also that it’s probably unfair that I portrayed myself as having the last word in most cases. I’m not writing all this because I care who won the argument. I’m not trying to flaunt my “impeccable liberalism” as Binyavanga Wainaina would have it, or my moral or intellectual superiority. But I should remind you that the conversation was 3 hours long, and even though I didn’t have any checked baggage to claim, I stayed with him by the baggage carousel for 20 minutes after I deplaned before I realized that I could spar with him all day and I would never be able to change his mind. We parted without ever knowing each other’s names. I cannot remember ever being so mad at a complete stranger.
I couldn’t believe there were people like this out there, especially not ones that carry a Canadian passport (by naturalization for him). It scares me that people like him could be teaching kids or managing government programs (although I never asked him his profession).
I write this because I think it’s important to learn how to put people like this in their place; it’s important to remind people that this kind of racism, arrogance and bigotry are real in a big way in Canada. Remember this the next time you refer to Canada as a “developed” nation.
