Look, I want to believe that those opposed to De Kock’s presence were earnest and that Beukes acted to protect the wellbeing of those emotionally overwrought by his presence – those who still feel, despite what he has paid for his sins, that De Kock remains the devil incarnate, or more viscerally, De K*k.

I’m loath to trivialise the wounds of people. None of us has any right to criticise victims – the humiliated and scarred – for locking their pain in the past. And although that might be the case, often the causes of that pain are lodged in the foreground of their souls.

People had every right to feel uncomfortable and shocked by De Kock’s presence. I don’t believe he assumed he was going to roll in there and be welcomed as a hero. Damaged though he is, he doesn’t strike me as the sort of soldier who wears his hubris on his sleeve.

In fact, one writer, Palesa Morudu, whose brother, a young man of 22, was “disappeared” by De Kock, recalled the shock and horror of seeing De Kock at the festival in an insightful Daily Maverick article: “I saw a broken man when I looked at him.”

But this was not the right of the white liberal crowd, including my friend Beukes, who, by chasing De Kock away assumed unearned moral high ground over him.

We speak about this so much but I suspect whiteness, and a specific ideological DNA of whiteness, is immune to hearing us: black South Africans do not need you to do anything for us – even if it is well intended.

By asking De Kock to leave, the privileged liberal – and it doesn’t matter that there were black folks who were traumatised – is claiming the agency and urgency of black people to do things for themselves.

To deal with their trauma and shock in a manner of their own choosing.

Chasing De Kock from the event – and by implication the festival – is a dishonest act aimed at expunging whiteness of its guilt. If De Kock is a beast, he is a white beast, a product of the beastly whiteness that protected and maintained the racial, economic and cultural privilege of all white people, including the liberals and white cosmo-polites who would rather we swallow the Kool-Aid lie that they were all down with black people during the now sexed-up “struggle”.

Whiteness – and with it its “reasonable” blacks – will remain whiteness to the majority of black people who cannot even afford a book, let alone be invited to a book event dominated by whiteness.

To the dispossessed, all white people are, necessarily, part of the problem. As such, white people cannot be expected – or lay claim – to be agents of whatever radical redress and self-affirmation and healing black people need.

There’s no doubt that it’s a dangerous time to be alive. Say one wrong thing on social media and you just might be lynched by the whole nation.

Try “save” a black person’s emotional wellness and you’ll be called a white liberal trying to gain a moral high ground.

[source: timeslive]