SHANTHINI NAIDOO: Calling tall white men: there is a cure for undeserved privilege
Think about how to use your privilege to change someone's life for the better
I have rewritten the intro to this article several times. The first iteration was when I overheard a student asking her mother why she was having trouble finding a job "even though she wasn't born during apartheid". The next was when people were complaining about taxi drivers dropping older people off at odd stops. Then billionaire businesswoman Magda Wierzycka tweeted that South Africans could change the country by employing more "cleaning ladies and gardeners". The theme keeps recurring. And along with the many examples of privilege in action are questions about how we are changing the country with our hiring practices. The way to create constructive change in South Africa is to have discussions we should have had 20 years ago. As business leaders, do you have discussions about privilege? As employees, do you raise the question of your privilege in the workplace? Hylton White, a social anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, said privilege was important to address i...
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