With Mandela's passing, many people are thinking about the profound impact of his life and message. This is my interpretation:
During apartheid, "black" and "white" were useful labels, only because they helped describe the apartheid problem.
Now, I discipline my mind to recognize that these labels are as arbitrary, for classifying people, as shoe size. There is no "poor black problem", only a "poverty problem". There is no "white capitalist system", only a "capitalist system". There shouldn't be "black economic empowerment", only "economic empowerment".
By using these old labels we lie to ourselves, we tell ourselves that white people are different to black people. This teaches us to be prejudiced, which IS racism, and is exactly what our heroes fought against.
Of course, it is incredibly difficult to maintain this mental discipline when the average white person in South Africa is SO much wealthier than the average black person. But, unless we train ourselves to see, not a white person, not a black person, but just a person, we continue to recreate the racism we think we've defeated.
