January 2nd was like a full day’s history lesson of all the details of Apartheid that I never had in formal schooling. Though the TripAdvisor reviews mostly said you could spend about 2-3 hours in the museum, we spent 3.5 hours in the museum and had to rush through the last part of it because we were due to meet with a guide to take us to Soweto at 12:30pm. If you really wanted to read everything and watch every film and hear every recording, I think you’d probably need at least 4-5.5 hours at this museum.

The museum is a brutally honest depiction of everything that happened in South Africa, from the beginning of the colonization through the fall of Apartheid to the end of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. While the District 6 museum was a close examination of what happened in that specific area of Cape Town, the Apartheid Museum exposes everything that went wrong throughout the country, even during Mandela’s presidency.

I wandered through the museum reviewing the different parts of the exhibition and wondered why the U.S. has to be in such denial about all the atrocities that we have committed. We still can’t even fully discuss slavery and its impact on African Americans today. The concepts of institutionalized racism and sexism seem to be nonexistent to our country’s right wing base; it is all about how people on the left supposedly view everything through some racial/gender-based “filter,” and we just don’t know how to escape it because we’re constantly and wrongly thinking we’re being oppressed. Even with the Roy Moore scandals, people defended him, saying that women were being paid to lie and accuse him of assault and sexual harassment that never actually happened. President Dipshit basically insinuated that anyone would be better as Alabama senator than any Democrat…. even a sex predator, which isn’t hard to understand given Dipshit is a sex predator himself. We still can’t believe women or people of color today in the U.S. It’s always the white man’s voice that reigns.

Somehow, despite Apartheid having ended just over 20 years ago, I feel more hopeful about South Africa’s progression than I do about the U.S.’s. There’s something about the energy I’ve felt here, the honesty about the past, that makes me hopeful.