‘White racists need trauma healing’: Thuli Madonsela

Former public protector Thuli Madonsela believes white racists should be helped to heal so they don’t wound others.

She joined Sunday Times deputy editor Mike Siluma in conversation after she set the cat among the pigeons with a post on her X account suggesting race supremacists need to be helped to heal from their post-transformation trauma.

Madonsela said supremacists need to accept they are not superior to others.

“It's not always just about race though, it's [also] about gender. Anybody who was raised in that just because they look a particular way they deserve more than others in a society based on human rights, social justice and acceptance of equality of all human beings, to them it feels like a loss of a right as opposed to loss of an unmerited privilege.”

White people should not teach black people to deal with their trauma as they would make wrong assumptions. “White people should help other white people to understand that the ‘loss’ is not really a loss as such but changed expectations.”

The topic harms white and black people, said Madonsela. “For everyone’s sake, in the same way that when it comes to gender we say we need to do ‘man work’, we have to do white work and white people have to do white work."