How Do You React When Someone Robs You? Apologize For Your 'White Supremacy,' Of Course!

Tracey Lomax, an attorney from South Africa, and her family were held hostage by a gang of armed men, who robbed them, threatened to rape Tracey, tied up her daughter, and shot at her husband at point-blank range. Now, Tracy has come out and said that she is grateful for her attackers because they helped her to "confront her white privilege" and apologized for her behavior which stemmed from said privilege.

"I was held at gunpoint by a gang of armed men who took my family and I hostage for around two hours, while ransacking my house, repeatedly threatening me with rape, shooting at my husband at point-blank range, and tying up my daughter who was eight at the time,” wrote Lomax.

Lomax explains the devastating attack from the oddest viewpoint imaginable: as a sympathizer for the violent criminals putting her family through extensive danger and trauma—especially for her 8-year-old daughter—and as an apologist for her guilty actions during the attack supposedly deriving from her inherent "white privilege."

Lomax is most distraught that she behaved inappropriately during the attack—especially how she responded when she was repeatedly threatened with rape in front of her family.

"When one of them tried to throw me down on my bed, and told me that, if I didn’t give him gold, he would 'stick me,' I calmly removed his hand from me, and said: 'No, we don’t behave like that. We are not savages and we are not doing this,'" recalled Lomax.

"I spoke to him much like I imagine Catholic nuns do to errant schoolchildren; the way I would have told my gardener to plant the lemon tree there not here," she added incriminating herself for espousing her "white privilege."

The attorney also disturbingly addressed the "intimacy" she felt with her attackers which she claims is "difficult to describe." She claimed she had "touched" each of them, even rubbed their backs, and tried to "calm" them down during the attack.

"I think about the perverse humanity they demonstrated that night," she wrote. "I think about how what drew us together that night was a shared humanity; a spark of something we recognized and respected in one another despite the fact that we were meant to be adversaries."

Lomax explains that during the attack, "we reverted to what Apartheid made us: I was the white madam with all the answers, they were the black staff, bound by society’s dictates, to let me lead. This was a script I knew how to follow and so I led."

The attorney went on the say that she was playing an "understood" "role" as the "white boss"—a role in which she "desperately wanted to strip herself of."

"As much as I loathe what it says about me and what it revealed about my own ability to interact with black people in this way reflexively, it offered me a powerful insight into how our society works," she added. "It showed me that white privilege had its hooks in me no matter how much I would like to deny it. It also demonstrated how powerfully that privilege shapes the interactions between black and white South Africans. Even when a robber had the power to physically harm me, I had white privilege on my side."

The piece by Lomax asserts that the two gangs, including the one who attacked her and her family, went on to attack at least another 50 homes in her area. Her neighbors were beaten and raped, she was "told" that one couple was even murdered and a women was "raped right next to her four-year-old son."

Despite their brutal actions, Lomax writes that she felt a "sense of sadness" when she learned that the gang members who attacked her and her family were locked up for life and not "given a second chance."

After all, in Lomax’s mind, it was the white-man’s fault that these men tormented many families, raped, robbed, and killed.

"But mainly – and I have the luck to be able to say this because our family got off lightly – I am grateful to them for holding up a mirror to my soul and showing me the person I no longer wanted to be," concluded Lomax.