Speaking and Communicating Podcast

But the person at the bottom sees the person at the top, not as a human, but as part of a cog in a machine that is crushing them.

And so, we are both dehumanized.

No one wins when one group of people is benefiting at the expense of another.

When we are stripped of our humanity, we all lose.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Ndlela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

My guest today is a long time friend who is not only friends with me, but I've known his entire family for decades.

Seth Myles Randall, who is also my compatriot, by the way, hailing all the way from South Africa, but now based in Arizona with his beautiful family, is here to talk to us about so many of his experiences and compare his experiences as a white South African under the apartheid and post apartheid systems versus his experiences in America.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi, Roberta.

Lovely to see you.

And I'm excited to get to see you again.

Yes, it's been such a long time.

How have you been?

It has.

Good.

Thank you.

Lots of exciting things to talk about, and I can't wait.

I can't wait as well.

So, for the benefits of our listeners and viewers, please give them a little bit of your background.

So, I am essentially a public speaker and coach.

The business I ran in South Africa before coming to the United States was a business coaching business.

So, I had an entrepreneurship program that entrepreneurs who were being incubated into put into the supply chain of larger corporates.

And so, I would work a lot with helping them grow their businesses, but then I would work more on the personal development side.

So, helping each entrepreneur to really unleash their potential and minimize any self-limiting beliefs and hang ups that they had about being successful in the workplace.

And specifically, I worked with black-owned businesses as part of South Africa's Black Economic Empowerment Program.

Now, that we're living in the States, I have taken some time off to be a stay-at-home father while my wife gets to pick up her career.

And so, it's been an exciting and challenging transition from that point of view.

But it's also giving me a lot of time to reflect on where I want my career to go in future and the sort of impact that I want to have.

And I think this conversation will speak to some of that in terms of what I've learned about people and societies, the sort of power differentials in society that end up dehumanizing people within that system.

That's really what I'm excited to talk about in terms of my speaking platform going forward.

I'm looking forward to it as well.

But first, give us a bit of your background as a white South African, because I've touched a little bit over the episodes, how some of my experiences as a black South African under apartheid were.

As a white South African, just give us a brief overview of what was that like for you?

Absolutely.

I was born in 1979, which is really the height of apartheid in South Africa.

And I grew up in a wealthy neighborhood in Johannesburg, a nice, leaky neighborhood with tall trees and beautiful gardens.

And white South Africans at that time were almost entirely oblivious to the reality of apartheid.

And it's hard to believe that that was the case.

And I think often it sounds like an excuse when people say, well, we didn't know what was going on, or how could you not know what was going on?

And yet the whole system was constructed in a way to shield the benefactors of apartheid from the reality of what they were benefitting from or the cost that those benefits came at.

So what I mean by that is I grew up in this idyllic neighborhood, went to a lovely school.

The only black people I ever interacted with were our gardener.

We came and worked, we call it a garden in South Africa, your yard in the United States, and made sure that was always beautiful and the pools sparkling and everything was lovely.

My mother didn't believe in having maids.

She wanted to do her own housework, and she wanted us to learn how to work hard at home.

So we didn't have a maid like most white South Africans did, but we had a lady who would come once a week and help with ironing and a few other tasks.

We knew her, Cordelia, I still remember her, lovely, lovely woman.

Patrick was the man who worked in our garden, and they were really my only exposure to black people.

Then going to school, if the schools were completely segregated, and so I only knew white people in school.

And so it's very easy for a child, I was 12 years old when we left South Africa and moved to Swaziland at the time.

That's really when the scales fell for my eyes as to what apartheid was, and the price that the nation was paying for me to have grown up in the upbringing that I did.

That's when all of my views started to be challenged.

I went to an international school, Waterford-Kamklaba, United World College.

It's part of a movement of United World Colleges around the world.

And it was established during apartheid with the express purpose of providing high quality education for children of all races, because it was in a small kingdom next to South Africa.

So Eswatini, for those who don't know, it is a small country sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique.

It has been independent from its colonial power, the United Kingdom, since the 60s.

It is a very peaceful nation.

The Swazi people have ruled themselves since the 60s.

And so you don't have the same racial dynamic in Swaziland that you have in South Africa, where a white minority was ruling over a black majority in the country.

The king of Swaziland, who ruled over his people.

And so racial tension was essentially non-existent.

And so I was in an international school there, and I was suddenly surrounded by people of all different cultures, out of about 450 students.

There were about 50 nationalities represented from all over the world.

And suddenly my world view began to be shaped around the idea that, oh, wow, we're all the same.

We're all the same.

We have different cultures.

No, that was the outcome of that experience.

The first thing on my mind was...

So firstly, to go back a little bit, I grew up in a home that was maybe a little unusual, in the sense that we had a strong liberal tradition.

Now liberal in the South African context meant that you were anti-apartheid.

And so our family grew up in this liberal tradition.

My great uncle was a publisher, and his company published anti-apartheid literature.

As a result, he was placed under house arrest for three years because he was challenging the government.

And so I was always raised in a home that ostensibly eschewed the evils of apartheid.

Here's my question regarding that, because I was in apartheid the first 18 years of my life.

You know when apartheid ended, and the South Africans who remained in the country, obviously a lot of them fled Australia, New Zealand, America.

Suddenly, we had these white people who said, oh, we also fought apartheid.

Whereas to us, it was just Joe Slovo and Donald Woods, the one who told the rest of the world about the death of Steve Beagle.

We did not know about that actually families like yours existed.

Like I said, it almost sounded like you were a unicorn if you were a white South African actively fighting against apartheid.

You know, I can't claim to have actively fought apartheid myself or my direct family.

But we yeah, we had that.

So for him, it was an active fight against apartheid.

Understand also that when we talk about fighting apartheid, there's a difference between someone being in the bush or being exiled from their country and fighting in that way where they're stripped of all of their comforts and stripped of their society in order to stage that fight.

And someone who fights within the comfort of a system that still caters to them.

And so I think there's some legitimacy in people's apprehension around, well, did you really fight?

You know, how badly were you fighting?

That's why we were not aware.

It kind of sounds nice when they say, oh, we were fighting too.

Oh, wow, we were not told that, I guess the news kept it from us.

But then when you are in Swaziland, where you were not within a majority population, white people who look like you, sometimes I find that if I speak to some white people, they say, for instance, if I walk into a room full of white people versus if a white person walks into a room full of black people, they suddenly go, whoa, I'm in danger.

They're very aware of it.

Yes.

Did you feel that?

Did you feel that the comfort of leafy suburban white South African versus now being in Switzerland, everybody else is different?

I miss that or this new stuff seems kind of cool.

So at first, we absolutely did miss it.

I remember my sister and I, every time we would go back to Johannesburg to visit, we would be like, oh, thank you.

We would get all dramatic and kiss the ground and say, we're back, we're back.

And it did feel like a bit of an exile for us as a family.

Our dad's dragging us off to the Bundus for his job.

But very quickly, I don't know how long it took for this to happen, but very quickly, we absolutely fell in love with Swaziland.

We fell in love with its natural beauty, but mostly we fell in love with the people.

Through my religious community, I interfaced with Swazi people from all walks of life, and I was just won over by them as a people.

Just their warmth, their goodness, their authenticity, the ability that they have to be authentic and honest about what their life experiences are, versus Western culture, which is a lot more guarded and a lot more aloof socially.

Yes, exactly.

There's a very strong sense of community, and there's just an openness and a warmth that is captivating.

And I was in this rarefied environment within the school system where people were brought to the school principally for the academics.

The problem with South Africa is that your socio-economic boundaries happen to coincide with your racial boundaries.

So growing up in South Africa, it was very easy for me to subconsciously believe that Africans are less educated than Europeans, because the Africans I'm interacting with are less educated.

The man who works in the yard, the lady who owns...

Just a caveat to that, a whole full grown man who has a family and a wife was called a garden boy.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And treated with, I would say, almost kind of paternal respect.

When I say paternal, this paternalism of like being kind to someone, but from a position of unquestioned superiority, if that makes sense.

Even when they, speaking of meaning housekeeper, even when they talk about them, even today, there's this page, something about sharing good stories about South Africa or something.

They will have the black housekeeper and they say, Oh, she's been with us for 20 years.

Oh, she's lovely.

It's almost like you're talking about one of the furniture pieces.

You know what I mean?

You're not talking about a whole full grown up woman with a husband and kids.

It's almost like this little child you're coddling as if she's brain damaged.

The only point of interaction that we have is within my realm.

And now in South Africa, we have a narrow middle class, which includes some black people.

So we've got a more and more integrated middle class, white and black, all different races in South Africa.

We talk about whites, blacks, coloreds and Indians.

The term colored in America has a very different connotation.

Let's not start that conversation.

Yeah, yeah.

There it's a self-label for an ethnic community.

And so whether you're a wealthy black family or a wealthy white family, you've got a maid who either lives in a small little room on your property, but outside of the main house, or they commute daily from a township outside of Johannesburg, and they travel two hours to work and then two hours home.

You don't see that person's external life.

So you don't see them catching the taxi and traveling in the dark back home and lighting a kerosene lamp, or going to a modest home in a township.

You don't get to see that, you don't see her with her family.

So you don't contextualize her as a full human being.

To you, the person you see is the function that she plays within your life, which is the sweet benevolent housekeeper or minder of your children.

I think for me, where rarely my eyes were opened was, we came to the United States under less than ideal circumstances.

My wife is American, we married and we're living in South Africa, living a, I would say, a very privileged business owner, land owner lifestyle.

I ran a business, we owned a home, and it was a wonderful life.

Because of some visa complications, we had to very unexpectedly come over to the States.

My wife had to come home and ended up needing to stay here.

So all of a sudden, I went from being at the top of the social order to being lower down in the social order as an immigrant.

I remember at one point, I was in a sales job.

So because I had owned my own business and done a lot of entrepreneurial work back home, that doesn't translate well into a CV that businesses would be interested in.

So your options here would be start your own business or start again at the bottom of the pile.

So I went into sales.

We didn't have enough capital for me to wait out a business starting from scratch.

And so I went into sales, which is how I started my career in South Africa.

And I kind of worked from sales into general management, et cetera, et cetera.

So I was in a sales position.

Things weren't going well for us as a family.

I had developed a disability with some spinal problems, some mental health concerns, and we were really, really struggling.

We were struggling to put food on the table.

We were struggling to pay rent.

And for the first time in my life, I knew what an existential struggle felt like.

It wasn't just, yikes, my salary isn't covering our bills.

It was, yikes, will we have enough money to keep a roof over our head?

Or will we have enough money to buy food at the end of the month?

Which in apartheid times, that was every day for a black person?

Still, in South Africa, it's every day lived experience for 80% of the country.

As a result of apartheid, it is still the lived experience of the majority of black South Africans.

And so in a sort of temporary sales position, I was trying to get into industries that earn high commission, so I could up our standard of living.

For a short time, was selling solar power, until I realized some of the dodgy things that this company was doing in terms of non-disclosures to its clients, and I wanted no part of that.

But through that experience, I met someone who was impressed with the way that I presented myself.

And he said, listen, we're looking for a salesperson, why don't you come and work at this company of mine?

In trying to negotiate a basic salary that would keep food on the table and a roof over our heads, this owner let it slip.

He essentially said to me, not in so many words, but he said, I like how desperate you are.

It means you're going to work really hard.

And so I don't want to give you enough of a basic that you start to feel comfortable.

Essentially, he didn't say this, but I want to keep you desperate, because then you're really going to work hard for me.

Because I was saying, listen, this basic doesn't cover my living expenses.

And while I wait for the months that it will take for sales to come in and earn the commission, I don't know if we're going to be turned out of our apartment kind of thing.

Eventually, he did concede to more money, but it was a very sobering moment.

And I think it's only in reflection that I start to see this.

When I showed up for work, I was masking the fact that at home, things were falling apart.

We had a little baby who had some health challenges.

I was experiencing significant health challenges.

I have two children on the autism spectrum.

I had my own mental health challenges.

My wife was struggling.

We were rarely, rarely in a bad place as a family.

But when I showed up at work, I made sure not to let any of that show.

And so when I saw this manager who I felt was exploiting me, I would smile and laugh at his jokes and never let on to the fact that my life was crumbling in the background.

In the sort of cutthroat corporate environment that we find ourselves in modern America, we know that if we show weakness, it could mean the end of our career.

Would South Africa be the same if you had the exact same circumstances and you went to corporate South Africa as a white South African?

Would you have that same level of pressure?

So here's the thing.

In South Africa, I had pressure, absolutely.

What it made me realize was that when Cordelia would show up to iron our clothes, she was always kind, she was always smiling, she was always upbeat.

And so the assumption is that Cordelia is happy.

When domestic workers show up to their employers' homes in Johannesburg to this day, they don't bring the challenges and the darkness of apartheid's legacy in South Africa with them to the workplace.

What they do is they show up and they smile and they ask where they should start cleaning.

When the white family starts planning a vacation, the maid smiles and is excited for them and helps them prepare and helps them pack.

A holiday that she may never take in her life.

Her kids have probably never seen the ocean, but she must smile and put on a brave front, watching this family enact a life that she will never have.

And it started to strike me how dehumanizing that system is.

I just remembered there's a lady, she was our neighbor when we moved to the suburbs after apartheid ended.

It was June 16.

You know what happened in June 16, 1976, the Soweto riots.

Absolutely.

For the purposes of background, black students were protesting the use of Africans as a medium of instruction in schools, which means we would have all failed school and became, you know, domestic workers and garden people.

So we were talking about June 16, and she makes the comment, this is a much older white South African lady, and she goes, oh, that day I was so scared because the police, instead of protecting us in our neighborhoods, meaning the white suburbs in the 70s, they were busy in Soweto.

You are worried about your own protection.

When they were busy means they were killing black students.

I had a friend I worked with.

She was in second grade in Soweto that day.

She was hiding under a desk.

That's why she's still alive today.

So you are saying you felt unsafe because for once, the police are not there to protect you in a white suburb.

Instead, they are busy killing black students who are saying, we don't want to learn in Africans.

Your black domestic worker is in your house, cleaning your house, while her kid is being shot by the police in Soweto.

But she was still smiling in your house, and yet you are worried about your safety.

This is the craziness of, I call it the apparatus of inequality.

It blocks both sides of the equation from connecting the fair humanity.

When we would drive to Johannesburg from Swaziland, we would see countryside farmland, and then we would get to Johannesburg, and we would see glistening skyline swoop into our beautiful leafy suburb.

At no point in my lived experience until I was a teenager did I ever see evidence of how black people were living.

And someone pointed it out to me, if you were to drive along one of the busiest highways in South Africa, there is the highway, then there's Alex, one of the most densely populated places on earth probably, poorest, just one of the hardest places to live, right next to the high-rise Santon skyline.

People didn't even know Alex existed, because intentionally, it was put in a dip, and they planted pine trees along the highway.

So you cannot see it when you drive.

And you literally didn't see where people were living, because what would happen if you did, it would tug on your humanity, and you would say, oh, wow, look how these people are living.

And so in the white imagination during apartheid, all that they were fed through the media was the threat that black people posed.

So we chatted another time, and I was talking about how during the lead up to Mandela's release, there were bombings and civil unrest.

In our white schools, we used to have bomb drills where the alarm would go off, and everyone was taught to dive under their desks.

Then they would announce this is a fire drill or this is a bomb drill.

If it was a bomb drill, we would open all the windows so that a blast wouldn't send glass shattering everywhere.

We would hide under our desks, and then we would file class by class down to the school field.

Everyone would be counted to make sure everyone was safe, and then we would return to class.

And this was supposed to prepare us for the event that the big scary ANC would bomb our school.

Now, the threat was not imagined, but what was removed from the narrative was the context within which those bombings were happening.

Of course.

I spoke to someone who said, Oh, Nelson Mandela was a terrorist.

That's the only story you have about him.

Absolutely.

You don't have the Soweto riots where over a thousand students were killed and that kind of thing, which then begs the question, one, obviously, we were all fed different things.

Remember, we even had separate TV channels, one for black people, TV2, one for white people, TV1, I think.

And why would you watch each other's channels?

Because they were different languages.

Different languages too.

So you guys are going to be fed something that we don't know.

We're going to be fed something else.

It was perfect, perfect separation.

But then it brings the question of if any white person is listening and they're wondering, one, I didn't create the system.

Two, I'm also working hard.

Why do you say I'm a beneficiary of it?

What would you say to them?

So I think we've got to just be realistic about the way in which we live.

Let me talk about my existence in South Africa.

I grew up in a, what I now recognize as a very privileged environment.

By virtue of your skin color, whether you were part of the creation or perpetuation of apartheid or not.

So let's look at born freeze in South Africa, the term we use to describe people born after 1994, our first democratic election.

There tends to be an attitude amongst white born freeze that I had nothing to do with apartheid.

And so there is a reticence to be held responsible for something that you had nothing to do.

Now there's some validity to the argument that I shouldn't be punished for something that my forefathers did.

But where that falls flat is, as a white born free, you are in all likelihood, and I don't want to minimize the fact that there are poor white people in South Africa.

And experience that almost didn't exist during apartheid.

But for the most part, the vast majority of white South Africans will be born in a suburb to parents earning enough to be able to give them a decent lifestyle, send them to a good school, a school that would be a reasonable feeder school for one of the few universities in the country.

And so for a child born into that environment, if they are to apply themselves, if they're to work hard in school, their life is lined up for them.

You do well in school, you get into university, you do well in university, you get a job, you work hard in your job, you build a career.

Let's look at the average black South African.

Born free, same thing.

They, in all, statistically, are most likely to be born in a township where the quality of education is vastly, vastly different.

No labs, no library, no sports facilities, no chemistry, experiments, nothing, nothing.

Exactly.

You're in a class of 50 kids, probably in grade one.

So the chances of you getting into university are extremely low.

When you get into university and you get your degree, let's assume that you are really outstanding academically and you somehow manage to educate yourself in spite of the system that gives you an education.

If by some miracle you get into one of the few universities, you finish your degree and you go back to the township.

Now, if I am honest with myself and I look back at my career and I look back at the career of my siblings, every single one of us, our first job, the job that kind of broke us into the job market and got us onto the trajectory towards where we ended up in our careers, all of those jobs were accessed through what we refer to as social capital.

For instance, my father worked at Investec Bank and he had my sister meet with the HR director there to give her some pointers.

And in their discussion, he happened to say, oh, my husband runs his own business and he happens to be looking for someone with just your skill set.

I wonder if you'd be interested in interviewing for him.

My start in the business was similar.

I can look at different things that I accessed through social capital.

You know someone.

Now, if you were to confront me in South Africa and say, your career was handed to you on a gold platter, I would say, what are you talking about?

And yet relative to the kid in the township who has none of that social capital, my life was handed to me on a gold platter.

Why?

Is it because my parents are harder working?

Is it because of anything other than my skin color?

And so 30 years after the end of apartheid, we are still living the legacy of apartheid.

It has not.

And if you look at generational wealth, if you look at the opportunities here in the States, it's much the same.

I have spoken to white Americans who feel quite dispossessed politically.

They would describe themselves as having grown up poor.

When you speak to them and you start interrogating, well, when your parents die, will you inherit anything?

Well, yeah, just get their home.

How nice.

You know that black people during apartheid, we were not allowed to own property.

I remember my grandma.

Precisely.

She's paying rent for 99 years.

So black people would pay rent to the government just for existing for 99.

You were not allowed to own.

There was no black person's name at the deeds office.

So they didn't leave us anything.

I remember teaching in South Korea at my last job before moving to the US where there's a South African couple, they're friends of mine.

They were engaged and they were saving money to go back home and start a life in South Africa.

Their grandfather left them three paid up farms with black staff working on all three farms.

And they got to choose which one they wanted.

That's how they started their life.

Because our ancestors were not allowed to own property, they couldn't leave us anything.

So any black person, we know about the new black middle class, they are starting from scratch to have 30 year mortgages and that kind of thing.

We were not left anything.

The playing fields are so uneven that we don't even recognize that it's the playing field.

You know, I can think of many white South Africans who would say, well, my parents are poor.

They struggled.

I'm not inheriting anything from them.

And my response to that is, you're absolutely right.

However, is that because you're white?

Is the reason you're not inheriting anything?

Is the reason that you're poor?

Is the reason that you've had to fight tooth and nail to achieve anything in life?

Is that because you're white?

Or is that because other forces in life have taken their toll?

Because the reason that that person living in Alex doesn't have anything is directly because of the color of their skin.

This is where we compare apples with pears.

We say, well, some white people work for everything that they get.

You know, some white people are disadvantaged.

They are poor white people living in squatter camps.

And now the question is, is the reason they're living in a squatter camp because they are white?

Because the reason that black people don't have what they have is because they are black.

There's the distinction.

Now people would say, well, because of affirmative action in South Africa, people will say, well, it is because they're white.

And this is where I have a bit of a hard time taking that on board fully, because most of the means of production, something like 70% of the means of production in South Africa are still held by white people.

Between 7 and 9% of the population, and we own 70, 80% of the means of production of the capital, of the land, et cetera, et cetera.

I find it hard to swallow when people say we're being disadvantaged because we're white.

What you just mentioned, the selective unicorn cases versus the majority.

Even in the selective unicorn cases, the difference is that during apartheid, unskilled white workers were guaranteed a place of work at the rail station.

If you weren't connected socially, let's say that you rarely were a poor white person by white standards, you would get a job working at the railway or working for the government in Transnet.

Those jobs that used to be earmarked for unskilled white labor are now earmarked for unskilled black labor.

And so all of a sudden, white people have to compete in the marketplace.

And what I would say to a white South African who is disillusioned is I would say, come to a developed nation and see how competitive it is.

When I came over to the United States and I started applying for jobs, I would see people with PhDs fighting for the same job that was way below my qualification level.

When I came to America, and tell me, I want you to really be honest with me, Seth, and tell me if you've seen this in South Africa.

I have never seen a white man pick up a shovel and work in construction in South Africa.

No, I'm serious.

It's only black people who do the job.

The white guy is always supervising and being the boss.

I remember asking my friend, because she's South African, I said, I didn't know white people actually worked in construction.

Yeah, absolutely.

There are only bosses and directors of the black labor that does the actual construction.

If they're unskilled, and let's say they don't have a university degree, and they don't have a scarce skill, then they would be a supervisor over black laborers.

It was my first time, like you said, it becomes competitive.

And when you move into other countries, because even in Australia, I had a friend who said that, who said, what are you talking about?

White people work in construction in Australia all the time, but in South Africa, that never happens.

I remember I came to study in the States back in 1998 or so.

I was in one of the dormitories, and in came a guy my age with a pail of water, and he was the cleaning crew, and he came to clean the bathrooms.

And I remember having this pang in my heart and feeling, this poor guy, what must have gone so wrong in his life that he's cleaning our toilets?

Why don't I have that same pang when an adult black man comes in to clean the toilets?

That's not shocking to me, but a young white man, why?

Because suddenly I see myself, and guess what I was doing two semesters later?

I was cleaning the floors on night shift.

I was doing exactly the same thing, because that's what students do to make money to pay for their education.

But you never see that in South Africa, as you see.

Your reflection in South Africa is not in those positions.

I want us to do a part two of this, because I want the part two of this conversation to be more going forward.

What is it that we can do to bridge those gaps that we've talked about?

I think today we've given a really good background and comparison of the two countries as well, South Africa and America, since you've had these eye-opening experiences in seeing both.

But just in conclusion, what is the one thing that you want us to take away from today?

Firstly, when you have these power differentials, whether it be between rich people and poor people or one race, white, black, whatever power differential your society has created, because you find them in every society, South Africa isn't unique in that sense.

We need to realize that both the person at the top of the power differential and the person at the bottom of the power differential is being dehumanized.

Because to the person at the top, they see the person at the bottom only in terms of what they provide the person at the top.

But the person at the bottom sees the person at the top not as a human, but as part of a cog in a machine that is crushing them.

And so we are both dehumanized.

No one wins when one group of people is benefiting at the expense of another.

One group might have higher living standards, but they don't win.

Because when we get stripped of our humanity, we all lose.

We all lose.

Say that again.

And when we are stripped of our humanity, we all lose.

Having that experience with this boss, feeling like I would show up at work and basically tell him through my body language and the way I acted around him that it was okay that he was taking advantage of me, that I knew he was taking advantage of me, it suddenly took me back to a time in South Africa where we had bought our first house, we were financially really stretched, and we needed a gardener because my back was starting to give real trouble, and I needed help in the yard.

And we had a back room.

It was in horrible shape.

It had blistering walls with mold and just awful.

But there was a guy who worked for my mother, who was desperate for a job, and he said, please can I come work for you?

And I said, I don't have the money to pay you.

But if you want, you can stay in the room for free.

You know, you can earn the room by doing one day of work for me in the garden.

Well, he was delighted because he had a place to stay where he was actually allowed to bring his wife and his child.

In most scenarios, he wouldn't even be allowed to have her with him.

We had a good relationship.

I treated him with respect, et cetera.

It suddenly struck me, and we're still in touch to this day, but it suddenly struck me, I was doing the exact same thing to him that this employer was doing to me.

I was saying, you're desperate enough to settle for something that I would never accept for me and my family.

And I'm going to be okay with that because it helps me out.

And so I was exploiting his desperation.

Now I can dress it up and say, well, without that, he wouldn't have had a place to stay, and he would have been out of options, and he would have been worse off.

Sure, I was better off having that job than not having a job.

But the fact that he was nice to me, the fact that he smiled and was really pleasant, doesn't mean that he didn't know that he was being taken advantage of.

And I suddenly realized that this whole system, even as the benefactor, I'm losing my humanity because in my mind, he's okay with that.

He's okay with that.

Why?

Because he's black, he's tough.

He grew up in Malawi, he can handle it.

Black people can handle things, white people can't handle.

Remember when we started seeing, because back home you have people with placards standing on the street begging for money at the traffic lights, and you're like, oh yeah, they're black.

They do that all the time.

But as soon as you see a white person, you go, what could have happened?

What?

How bad?

Yeah, how bad is this?

How did they end up here?

White people don't do this.

White people don't do this.

I had a situation where I was applying for welfare here in the United States, because we weren't making ends meet, and we were looking for assistance.

And I had the person who was looking at my case kind of questioning me about my grocery budget.

And I remember thinking, I know where you live.

I know how big your house is.

I know the kind of toys you have in your backyard, the holidays you take your children on, all of these things.

I would love to know what you spend on groceries.

It's probably three, four times what I spend on groceries.

What makes you think that I can feed my family of five on a quarter of what you can feed your family of five?

What makes you think that I don't need just as much as you need?

And it suddenly struck me, isn't that what we do in South Africa every single day?

As a domestic worker, all she needs is some pop, some vegetables and meat once every week, and she's happy, right?

She smiles.

She comes to work, she smiles, she's happy.

Africans sing a lot and have a kind of joyful way of being with one another.

They have a joyful sense of community.

Exactly.

Well, so that means they're happy.

They're obviously okay with just the pop.

And I suddenly thought, okay, I am now being dehumanized in the way that I have dehumanized people all my life with all the best intentions in the world.

I was always trying to look at people and rarely see them.

And yet I was failing to do that.

And we both lose in those scenarios.

We both lose part of who we really are because we're treating people as a means to an end instead of as an end within themselves.

And so any system that does this, whether it's a system in whatever country, any system that does that, leaves both of us worse off.

Words of wisdom from my long term friend Seth Randall, the keynote speaker, business development coach.

As I promised, we're going to have a part two in how we address these issues going forward and what we can do individually in our lives.

This has been as powerful as I thought it would be.

Thank you so much for bringing all the wisdom that you did today.

My absolute pleasure.

Would you like any of our listeners to reach out to you?

Do you have any socials or email you want to share?

Kind of very new on social media because I'm a bit of a recluse.

My handle on Instagram is Seth Myles Randall.

S-E-T-H-M-Y-L-E-S-R-A-N-D-A-L-L.

There's very little there.

It will be developed with time.

Okay, as long as they're able to message you and you can message back.

Absolutely.

Seth Myles Randall on Instagram.

Always a pleasure.

Look forward to part two of this conversation.

And thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking on Communicating Podcast once again.

Please log on to Apple and Spotify.

Leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on the show that will be of benefit to you.

We encourage you to continue to get communicating and let us know how communication skills continue to improve your life professionally and personally.

And stay tuned for more episodes to come.