Desmond Tutu's View on Racism

Desmond Tutu's View on Racism

"We live in a country that has many casualties and disasters. Some of

these are naturally caused, but many are caused by man in his

inhumanity to his fellow man.You have to have the sensitivity of love

not to hurt people's pride. Don't be a do-gooder. Sometimes all that

is necessary is to visit a banned or detained person and show that you

do not fear contamination and that you don't fear the system. . ."

NOTE: The above collected statement is taken from a speech Desmond

Tutu gave in December 1981 to a group of women. This speech can be

found in its entirety in Hope and Suffering compiled by Mothobi

Mutloatse and edited by John Webster, William B. Eerdmans Publishing

Company, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1983.

"One of the ways of helping to destroy a people is to tell them that

they don't have a history, that they have no roots."

"There is an old film called The Defiant Ones. In one scene, two

convicts manacled together escape. They fall into a ditch with

slippery sides. One of them claws his way to near the top and just

about makes it. But he cannot. His mate to whom he is manacled is

still at the bottom and drags him down. The only way they can escape

to freedom is together. The one convict was black and the other white:

a dramatic parable of our situation in South Africa. The only way we

can survive is together, black, and white; the only way we can be

truly human is together, black and white.

"In our African language we say 'a person is a person through other

persons.' I would not know how to be a human being at all except I

learned this from other human beings. We are made for a delicate

network of relationships, of interdependence. We are meant to

complement each other. All kinds of things go horribly wrong when we

break that fundamental law of our being. Not even the most powerful

nation can be completely self-sufficient.