ABSTRACT
Thank you Kim for a rich and interesting paper that has helped me, and I hope you as the audience listening to Kim's presentation, to engage more deeply with questions that are both challenging and difficult to reflect on because they take us to places where power has been brutally exploited and where these differences have such a traumatic history. Our own personal stories are also activated in this discussion as was mine and thus so often we can become frozen, paralysed and drenched with shame and avoid the encounter. In my case I bring a history of growing up in South Africa in the early years of my life and then coming to the UK at secondary school age. The resonances of the conference theme are both deeply personal and also political as I face my own raciaiized thinking and behaviour and try to stay open in the conversation without "running for cover" (Straker, 2004a). I remember vividly as a child as well as now, when owning my South African roots and seeing the questioning look on peoples' faces (which I read as "well which side were you on?"), wanting to add very quickly—"and of course we had to leave because of the apartheid politics"—full of fear that I would be seen as a racist like the Nationalist Party Afrikaners. But also perhaps feeling 91satisfied that I was from a good "liberal thinking—anti apartheid family".
