The truth nobody told you

The secret that nobody wants to tell you
So Bruce was 10 years old, and that day was going to be a great day because his mom’s going to take me to the beach. So they got in the car and hit the traffic lights, and stopped there, so as were continue driving on the coast road to the beach, a bus bears down towards him and above the driver’s head is a big sign saying WHITES ONLY.
As they arrive at the beach, he saw a big fence down the beach dividing the big beautiful white sandy section and a small black rocky section so he turned to his mom and asked “mom! Why is there a fence down the beach?” and she replied “dear, it’s to keep white people separate from the black people.”
So he was just 10 years old and on this journey alone he learnt that black people are really dangerous and might hijack their car and they need to be kept separate, he was 10 years old and was already a racist.
So let’s fast forward his life, which now seems to look pretty rosy. He was successful in his academics and relations but he was numb inside… if somebody would ask him how he was, he would immediately lie that he was perfectly fine.
After the transition of South Africa from apartheid to a democracy, a lot of white people wore badges saying ‘new south African’ which meant that they embraced the change in the society and he also proudly wore the badge. But one day his mentor came and asked him “how many black friends do you have?” and he immediately lied, “3”, because he couldn’t actually think of one, so his mentor replied “you mean to say out of 58 million black people, you know only 3 of them?”
That moment hit made Bruce realize what kind of a hypocrite he was. Here he was wearing the new liberal South African badge when in fact he was still a racist, when his black house cleaner came to clean his house he would get really uncomfortable and couldn’t wait for him to leave, would never sit with a black person in his class or even in the bus. Just because there are things that you didn’t like, doesn’t make those things meaningless, after all, the world doesn’t stop existing if you just close your eyes., so Bruce just decided to do something about his sick approach towards those people, decided that he was going to get to know his culture and eliminate his fear of black people.
He rented a house in a black ghetto and that place in English was known as the ‘crap-yard’. Bruce was driving to his house that he had never seen before, and the street deserts completely, except for two men. He opened the door to his new house then went back to car to unload the stuff, but then noticed that a crowd had started to gather around his car. He really thought he was in trouble and then a woman comes up to him, wearing a look of utter confusion on her face, asks him “what are you trying to do?” and he simply replied that he was moving in. The crowd around his car was kept getting bigger and bigger. Their expression of disbelief was definitely obvious while they shook their heads.
She asked “why are you moving in?” and now at that point he was thinking things are going to go a lot smooth if he just said “you know I wanted to get to know this culture more so I came here to know you guys a little bit… please don’t hurt me, I am not dangerous” but he knew what would happen if he said that, he would never be able to conquer his fear of black people and would always remain a hypocrite pretending to be a liberal south African. He just took a deep breath and said “well I recently discovered I am a racist and I am terrified of black people and I have come here to conquer his fear.”
What followed were total looks of disbelief around, he could imagine them thinking why would this crazy white guy ever visit the crap yard, shift from a mansion to a dilapidated house and then admit he was a racist. So the woman comes towards him and asks him “can we help you to carry your boxes?” and he thought “oh no! now they’re going to steal everything I own, if I say no, they’re going to be offended ” but in that moment he caught his racial condition which was the exact condition he was there to eliminate so I said “sure, why not.”
Then one by one they carried his boxes from his car to his house and of course nothing gets stolen instead a party follows like nothing he has ever experienced before, he was hugged, kissed, fed, treated the most loved person who returned home after a long time, which was exactly opposite of what he had expected them to treat him like.
That evening he went to bed, a little tired, was kept awake by the sound of gunshots and the police sirens because something had happened next door. He woke up the next day went outside and did what everybody else did, which is taking breakfast on the street because in that society everything happened on the street. While he was eating a small boy walks by, wearing his bag, and as he sees him, immediately stops and says “you live here?” giving an expression of disbelief and Bruce just nodded. Then the little boy looks down to his feet again and says two words that Bruce is never going to forget.
“Welcome home”
And in that moment a decade of racial conditioning just evaporated taking his numbness with it. And then he walked off, in seven days God created this world, but in that one moment that child created mine. He was like a letter written not with ink and pen but with the spirit of life, and he surely did deliver the message.