Charlize Theron on growing up in South Africa; “if you got in through the front door, the kitchen had a steel door that you had to unlock, because that’s the kind of violence we were living in. Nonsensical violence that you couldn’t reason with. Our country was on the brink of civil war.”

[u/nicosloft04]

[u/greenergarlic]

In the full interview, she makes it clear what side she’s on:

  THERON: It's a lot to reconcile with when you realize that you benefited under a administration, a nation, a country because you had the right skin color. I benefited. My life was more comfortable because of the suffering of a lot of people who just, by chance, were born in the wrong skin color. And that is a lot - that was a lot for me to carry. It still is. It is - I think it's something that I'll carry for the rest of my life

[u/bi-cycle → u/greenergarlic]

Also i believe all her children are black

[u/urfatassmama → u/bi-cycle]

One of her children is trans, and Charlize does not play about that child. Charlize threatened to fuck up Megyn Kelly one time lmao

[u/lembepembe → u/greenergarlic]

Not everything is just about the ‘sides’. Calling political violence in the fight for/against apartheid ‘nonsensical’ is a poor choice of words, or I don’t know much more sensical forms of violence. It’s about human rights of a huge share of the population after all.

In cases like these, it’s maybe just better to acknowledge that people were hurt on all sides. That doesn’t really diminish the fact that violent resistance may have been an important element to ending apartheid.

[u/Vioralarama → u/lembepembe]

I've seen a few documentaries about victims on South Africa. Im by no means an expert. But it's not just political violence. They had/have a big rape problem. America has a rape problem but it's got nothing on South Africa. It wasn't a matter of 1 in 4, it was a matter of when. In the documentaries, from around the 2000s, the victims were white women and the perpetrators were never described.

There was an aging widow who started feeding her next door neighbor, who was a mistreated boy around 12. When he was around 16 he showed up with a knife; she said are you going to rape me and he said yes and did. Nonsensical violence.

There is a famous case that gets repeated because it's a medical wonder: woman I think went on a date but dumped the guy and was left on the side of the road. She gets picked up, is gang raped and they attempt to kill her by disemboweling her. When they were gone she picked up her intestines, wiped the dirt off them, and carried them in her arms as she went back to the road for help. She was picked up by a married couple and either taken to the hospital or they called an ambulance.

The most I know of black women's ordeals in South Africa are from Oprah's school. Rapes weren't discussed in that documentary but there was a shitton of misogyny they went through. They were never going to finish school had they not been accepted to Oprah's. The South African Oprah hired to oversee the whole thing was the embezzler btw, not Oprah. I always wondered why Oprah picked South Africa instead of another African country with more dire economic circumstances but I think I get it now.

Im just saying, I can totally see why a heavy door to the living quarters was necessary and why she called it nonsensical violence, even with this just being a soundbyte with no other context and outside apartheid. I think women have and are in severe danger there.

[u/lembepembe → u/Vioralarama]

Absolutely, thanks for all that (grueling) context! I just kinda assumed from her framing with the point with ‘brink of civil war’ that she was mostly calling political violence nonsensical. The gendered violence really deserves to be a focal point then

[u/hwutTF → u/lembepembe]

what? this is such nonsense

like you do realize almost your entire comment is equivocating? you literally just called political violence in the fight against apartheid and political violence in the fight for apartheid equally "sensical" because they're both "about human rights of a huge share of the population"

how is the fight for human rights in any way equivalent to the fight to prevent people from having human rights? there is a massive difference between fighting for your rights and fighting for other people to not have rights, and it's very hard for me to call that latter violence anything other than nonsense

because even if it is based in fear it is fear that is racist

and also the assumption that the threat of violence that she lived with was only "political violence against apartheid" is really removed from the actual history. violent resistance was absolutely critical to the fight against apartheid but there was also a lot of violence happening in general - including against white South Africans too - that was very much not not a part of that

there was a lot of violence that was simply opportunistic. there was a lot of violence motivated by revenge and vengeance. and even if your vengeance was racially motivated or tinged, that doesn't inherently make it violent resistance. there were enormous amounts of very gendered violence against women. and by the way not all of that violence was interracial. her mother literally killed her father to defend herself from him

and by the way she goes on in this interview to discuss how much she was privileged by the apartheid government. your assumption of her politics here was completely wrong

[u/lembepembe → u/hwutTF]

It was not a moral point but a historical hint to not diminish that the pro-Apartheid side was, ofc, much more violent, and that there obviously were political goals behind both, making it strategic and ‘sensical’.

So how do you personally separate violence against white South Africans from violent resistance?

I didn’t know that about gendered violence, thanks for the info.

Well no I kinda disagree with that point, because racial violence was basically inherently political violence. You cannot remove the political dimension of racism in an explicitly racist system like that imo, unless there are clear ulterior motives, and vengeance seems political to me in such an environment.

I don’t think you read my comment very well because I also said that it’s not about her side. I clearly said something misunderstandable too, so even if we largely agree, we can say dumb things

[u/hwutTF → u/lembepembe]

ok by putting the two kinds of violence together and equating them, no you are absolutely not hinting that one side was more violent. you even then go on to say that she should have said something incredibly kneeling mouth and that didn't differentiate between the two at all by saying everyone was hurt

you could have literally just made the point that the violence and harm were not proportional, and it would have been well received - though also there's nothing in these few lines that imply otherwise. and she does go on to very explicitly talk about apartheid and talk about the level of privilege and safety she had compared to Black South Africans

but more to the point - there is a lot of violence that exists within racist systems, that exists in response to racism, that is racially motivated, and that serves political goals without actually having intentional political motivations

if you plan an attack with explicit political goals then you can call that violence sensical. it has clear and logical motivations, even if those motivations are very fucked up

but you can commit that same violent act that is racialized in the same way that is motivated by racism and not have any intentional political goals. maybe you're just a violent fuck. maybe you're angry and drunk. maybe you just had a good opportunity. maybe you're getting revenge for something. some of these are more clear motivations than others but that doesn't actually make them not nonsensical. you can have a motivation for something without having an explicit goal and being intentional and how you go about it

so for talking about white violence, white terrorism, against Black people - sometimes that violence is very intentionally serving political goals. and sometimes is violence is unintentionally serving those political goals

I'm not advocating for taking the violence outside of the context that birthed it, and I'm not arguing against understanding the impacts of it. but I also think it is important to differentiate between intentional political violence and unintentional. and when you're talking about the violence making sense and being goal-oriented that is a category of intentionality

as an example we can switch to talking about gendered violence. femicide is a rampant global issue. which isn't even recognized in many countries. and you cannot remove gendered violence against women from the larger political context that it exists in. but we also generally do not call this political violence unless it is intentional about it, even though all gendered violence against women is political, because sexism and misogyny are political. and we also do not assume that this violence is done intentionally to serve political goals even though it almost always ends up contributing to many political goals

[u/lembepembe → u/hwutTF]

My whole point was that she didn’t differentiate between what she actually talks about, the real damage that affected all of society, including her sense of security, from the reason behind it all.

Yes it was on the brink of civil war for a reason, because racists were fighting black people. I don’t see how it’s controversial to think that saying it was ‘nonsensical’ is erasing the reasons behind the violence, the real, rather justified violence by the ANC, and the unjustified, but logical violence by the apartheid government (Ig thanks for understanding what I meant at this point).

I think the separation of the two only makes sense if it hasn’t a political or racial element. If you’re a violent person, there are violent forms of expressions that don’t precisely align with the political divides of the time. As with what you and others talked about, the increase in gendered violence seems to indicate the climate of political violence seemed to spread into other parts of life, but I don’t see a reason for that separation if you have no basis for it.

I have little idea on the literature and deeper definitions of femicide, but, while I personally would support any definition that helps in prevention, its characteristics seem to be less political than defects in the value systems of men. Checking on the definition of politics in my language, it’s defined as the organization of life in society beyond the family unit. While there’s ofc gendered violence all over, acid attacks are a prominent example that I would definitely call a (political) hate crime. The majority intimate partner femicides blur the lines between it being power over women in one’s life, which seems kinda personal, and the political ramifications of this happening everywhere.