Young and stupid

The first time I learned about South Africa was from an issue of National Geographic Magazine, around seventh or eighth grade. The cover showed a white girl, dressed in what appeared to be a school uniform, in a class full of black students. The headline read something like “The Changing Demographic of South African Public Schools...” 

A lone white face isolated in a black majority? The image burned into my mind, because it was so different from anything I had seen growing up in the American suburbs. In fact, the opposite was true. My high school had probably 10 black students out of 1,200, and I could be overestimating. 

Then there were the history books: Brown v. Board of Education, George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, and angry white college students yelling at the Little Rock Nine. The world around me always seemed to have been marked by the standoff between resilient black individuals and waves of angry white faces.

I skimmed the Nat Geo article. It talked about an enrollment shift where more black students entered the South African public school system after something called apartheid. White representation was fading or moving to “alternative institutions.”

Ha! The tables have turned! What I saw was so contradictory to my reality, I thought, finally, here’s a place on earth where white doesn’t oppress black. In fact, black is on top. That’s extraordinary. I hope to visit some day. How’s that for some bona-fide ignorance?

Yeah, I still cringe.