I wanted to understand why racists hated me, so I befriended Klansmen
There is a fine line between collaboration and dialogue. In South Africa, there were a significant percentage of oppressed people who tried to get along with the (white supremecist) apartheid government. They participated in the sham elections that gave them political scraps. They governed the Bantustans that were used to deprive black people of citizenship by driving them into a tiny proportion of the country.The apartheid government ultimately was a creature of greed masquerading behind an ideology. It enabled a part of the population to loot the wealth of South Africa for its own gain, using others as a pool of cheap labour. It deliberately, as a matter of state policy, gave blacks an inferior education, so they could be “hewers of wood and drawers of water”. Yet it was always open to dialogue, as long as that dialogue enabled it to survive on its own terms.The apartheid government did finally capitulate, but only after it realised that it was utterly alone and isolated and almost universally reviled, and the collapse of world communism meant that it wouldn’t be shielded by its erstwhile allies. FW De Klerk, the then leader of South Africa, boldly ended apartheid, but has tended to equivocate about its evil. And many white South Africans remain somewhat ambiguous, at best, about the evil it wrought. Would white South Africans have eventually seen the light if they weren’t isolated and treated as pariahs for much of the 1970’s and 80’s? I expect not.Although I can admire the subject of this article for trying to reach out to individual racists, care needs to be taken to not read too much into his message. Evil ideologies still need to be condemned, unequivocally, since they crave legitimacy, and are often not just “idealistic but misguided concepts in the marketplace of ideas” but well thought out mechanisms for the exploitation and oppression of others.