Jan 20, 2023 · 49 min · 10 segments
On this episode of Investigating Ikigai, we chat to my friend and colleague, David Elliott. Dave is a Methodist Minister who uses his various platforms to raise awareness of social injustices and…
So I was going to mention you've taken your studies further now and you, for your sins, are doing a master's and I know you're bringing that to a close and you're writing a couple of your final chapters.
But yeah, maybe if you can just briefly say what exactly your master's is all about.
And in my honours, I remember I was dealing with this sort of internal strife around race and identity.
It's one of the things that comes up quite a lot when you're in a seminary space like we were in, I think, because for the first time in my life, I was confronted by the fact that I formed part of my minorities.
And I was confronted by cultures and ways of thinking and ways of being that was so dramatically different to my own.
And I thought, I think this should be influencing how I think and how I behave.
I shouldn't behave like sometimes other white people have especially throughout history, but especially also honing in to the present.
How are people navigating being white in the present South African context? And so my master's was then a chance to kind of expand what I did in my honours, where I started off looking at some of the engagement between critical whiteness studies and black theology.
My master's has blown that really way wider than I expected it to go, unsurprisingly, because you just read so much more and do so much more.
And the core focus of it is trying to discover and understand what are the enduring legacies of things like apartheid and colonialism within the South African context.
And so it starts from the place of exploring what have South African black theologians said up to this point, starting in like the 60s and 70s with black consciousness, with the early black theology, the James Cones of the world as well.
Moving into the 1980s, where the relationship between race and class is starting to be explored quite sort of expansively.
And then in the 1990s, culture is brought in as well, and the three start to weave together.
Eventually, you end up with this wonderfully beautiful and complex framework about human identity, about race identity, about what it means to be black, to be white.
So I was going to mention you've taken your studies further now and you, for your sins, are doing a master's and I know you're bringing that to a close and you're writing a couple of your final chapters.
But yeah, maybe if you can just briefly say what exactly your master's is all about.
And in my honours, I remember I was dealing with this sort of internal strife around race and identity.
It's one of the things that comes up quite a lot when you're in a seminary space like we were in, I think, because for the first time in my life, I was confronted by the fact that I formed part of my minorities.
And I was confronted by cultures and ways of thinking and ways of being that was so dramatically different to my own.
And I thought, I think this should be influencing how I think and how I behave.
I shouldn't behave like sometimes other white people have especially throughout history, but especially also honing in to the present.
How are people navigating being white in the present South African context? And so my master's was then a chance to kind of expand what I did in my honours, where I started off looking at some of the engagement between critical whiteness studies and black theology.
My master's has blown that really way wider than I expected it to go, unsurprisingly, because you just read so much more and do so much more.
And the core focus of it is trying to discover and understand what are the enduring legacies of things like apartheid and colonialism within the South African context.
And so it starts from the place of exploring what have South African black theologians said up to this point, starting in like the 60s and 70s with black consciousness, with the early black theology, the James Cones of the world as well.
Moving into the 1980s, where the relationship between race and class is starting to be explored quite sort of expansively.
And then in the 1990s, culture is brought in as well, and the three start to weave together.
Eventually, you end up with this wonderfully beautiful and complex framework about human identity, about race identity, about what it means to be black, to be white.
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