Like many of us, I have experienced racism since I was a small boy growing up in Dobsonville. I remember how society disadvantaged my parents. I can recall the racist attitudes of police when they roamed our community for one thing or another.
To complicate matters, I am now in what the apartheid system termed a "mixed marriage". You get used to the strange looks in the supermarket, but you always known they are there.
So when I first saw Jessica Leandra's tweets last week Friday, my reaction was the same as most other black South Africans. I felt personally affronted, I felt angry, I was hungry for retribution. When I heard that a Human Rights Commission complaint had been laid, I hoped that another racist was going to get the punishment they deserve.
What puzzled me was that this young woman grew up after 1994. She never knew apartheid. And yet she was able to so casually drop a tweet containing the K-word.
What was going on here?
The more I thought about it, the more I started to think that simply condemning Jessica for her racist tweet was the wrong way to go. Yes, she had been racist. Yes, what she said was indefensible. But didn't Madiba teach us that to free ourselves we needed to forgive others?