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Oct 30, 2022Liked by Shikha Dalmia

A couple of things Ms. Fairbanks writes of here ring true in light of some of my own experiences. One in particular is the phenomenon of someone who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be, if not outright racist, at least extremely bigoted. Yet their behavior and actions vis a vie individuals who are among the group that's the object of their disdain don't comport with their rhetoric. I had a friend who could say some very ugly things about Black people in general on the one hand, and in practically the next breath speak genuinely fondly and appreciatively of Blacks he'd worked with in other jobs in the past. And when a Black man was hired to work in the same department where he and I worked together, my friend went out of his way to give him a hand when the new hire had a question or needed a bit of help with something.

I'm not sure what this kind of behavior is about, unless it's about expectations. Either through nature or nurture, bias of one kind or another is instilled in all of us. We come to expect certain things from "certain people". But when we meet and interact with *those people* and those expectations aren't met, perhaps it throws us off our game a bit, and frees us to be a bit more the people we actually are underneath the blanket of bias that we've learned, or, more often than not, been taught.

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I am going to buy this book. I will be honest I have never really given South Africa too much though as I was a little young for when all the change was happening and I don’t enjoy race issues naturally. However, recently I have learned that certain people in the media(fox) try and imply that the post apartheid governments have run a first world country into the ground. So I want ammo basically to know that is not true. This book sounds like it’ll give mixed ammo for me haha

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A very touching and reflecting article. It shakes my memories of watching documentaries about Mandela and apartheid. I was in Cape Town in 2019 and told by some colleagues that the main hate and hostility in SAR is not between white and black Africans, but between Xhosa and Zulu community members.

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