Niggling questions

Niggling questions, lingering from a discussion over the weekend, looking forward to, hoping for, more discussion and better articulation of these ideas which are, for now, mere fragments of thought.

What are you? Who are you? How do you self-identify? To what rigid, commonly-used category of people do you belong?

Why does it matter?

Here, in this place, it is a necessary signifier of guilt. This category is guilty of causing harm to another category. With obligations of recompense. And fundamental to the lives of everyone in these two categories.

Why does it matter? Surely, here of all places, the categories are half the crime? All other consequences followed from them? They were the original sin. Used to sustain unequal power-relations but the categories themselves not morally-neutral. The choice to categorise was the original sin. The categories were the foundation of the system.

Rejecting the categories is just a refusal to acknowledge guilt. Or a refusal to sustain guilt? What if it is? What if guilt is no longer useful, nearly 20 years after? What if categorization, sustaining a system of guilt and victimhood, cannot be used, simultaneously, to do away with that system? What if the future, the way to a better situation, can only be built on compassion between two equal, uncategorized human beings?  What if compassion is a more useful mediator, is more important to fixing the problem, than justice?

What if I self-identify with a group, yet refuse to carry the guilt you assign to that group? What if I help because I am human, refusing to accept as normal other human suffering? What if I do more good than you because I am not trapped in the philosophical entanglements of putting a price on guilt? What if I get things done because I reject your categories, all categories? What if psychological emancipation can only happen when we (I) start by rejecting categories and assuming, and being open to, for everyone, multiple, complex identities? Diagnosis of the current problem, rooted in history, not current fact, is consumption (TB), never HIV. What if we are making the same mistake in South Africa with race and poverty?