Reviews tagging 'Racism'

The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning by Eve Fairbanks

1 review

memmaj's review

challenging emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

4.75

This book was an immensely emotional read for me. I am a white South African who lives in Australia and my mother was a white liberal Afrikaaner who was involved in the struggle and my dad a white English South African was conscripted into the border war, and I now work in racial and gender justice in Aus. So much like RSAs history my own family history is complex, challenging and confused. At first I did not think this book should have been written by an American, however now I have come to the conclusion I appreciated her POV. There were many points in this book that I had to stop to pause or cry in a mixture of anger, hope and sadness.  South Africa is a wonderful, rich and deeply traumatised country and Eve does a great job in demonstrating its complexity without demanding that it fit into a narrative of nationhood, that  it can’t and will not fulfil ( and not should it). I do wonder how it reads for white people not from RSA, however I do think there is plenty to derive from the book. Finally, as an Afrikaans person, who feels equal shame, horror, and pride in the identity, it was so wonderful to see that represented in a book, it’s never been reflected back to me in the way that this book and it’s musings on the identity within it. Final note, the book refers to “Australian Aborigines”, “Aborigines” is a deeply offensive term and the (generally) preferred term is Aboriginal and Torres STrait Islander People. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Racial slurs, War, and Racism