Comfort zones, if author Roy T. Bennett is to be believed, are where your unrealised dreams are buried.
Perhaps I have subconsciously always wanted to be a TV news anchor because this column now has a ‘talk show’! (airing weekly on our social media platforms).
I am well and truly outside of my comfort zone.
Interviewing has been my life’s profession, but doing that very same thing in front of a camera is a whole new ball game.
It’s terrifying!
But being out of one’s depth is strangely thrilling.
You are sure to fumble and make plenty of mistakes but hey, life is more exciting this way.
You also do not have to look far to find inspiration. I get to sit down with world-changing entrepreneurs and activists.
They are coming out of the North Coast woodwork faster than woodborer infestation, so there is no shortage of material.
Recently I had the privilege of interviewing Sheffield resident Justin Foxton.
Justin is, among other things, a speaker, writer and advocate for change.
He and his wife Cathy started The Peace Agency – an umbrella NPO for several projects helping orphans and vulnerable children.
Advocate Thuli Madonsela is their patron.
Justin and Cathy started married life with no intention of having children.
A month or so later they were saying yes to running a baby home and life did a 360.
It was not long before they became adoptive parents themselves and the seeds for The Peace Agency had been sown.
I won’t give the entire interview away but I will say that Justin is not one to shy away from uncomfortable conversations.
He likes to examine the dominant narrative and pick it apart.
He refers to himself as a ‘recovering racist’ and he shared with me how Lolly, his adoptive daughter, helped him see the world through her brown eyes.
Adoption made him realise how blind he had been all his white life.
“The world according to Lolly was a white world, full of pink dolls, pink characters in story books and kids’ magazines, caps that were designed for white kids’ hair, pink leotards and pink Band-Aids. Her teachers were all white and the support staff were all black. The waiters were all black, but the managers were all white. One day early in her talking years she asked the poignant question: ‘Why are all the black people walking and all the white people driving?’ We told her about apartheid,” said Justin.
He believes racism should be redefined as a system.
Yes, you can be ‘racist’ towards someone and these are criminal offences, but you can also be a regular nice guy, with black friends, who’s never said a racist word but still be complicit in a racist system that favours white people.
This goes against the dominant discourse perpetuated by most white South Africans. We tell ourselves over and over again that apartheid ended a long time ago and we certainly do not have ‘white privilege’, at least not anymore.
Thanks to Black Economic Empowerment we argue, we are now the ones being discriminated against.
I believed this once.
That I had worked hard in school, at university and throughout my working career and where I was had nothing to do with race.
It was all my own sweat and effort. ‘We all have equal opportunities now,’ I would say.
You only have to cross the N2 into Shaka’s Head to know this is an utter fabrication.
A conversation with Justin will make you question the world around you.
There are so many things that we believe as absolutes that need to be unravelled.
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