Pieter Kriel, the 21-year-old South African TikTok figure whose rise has been built on rapid-fire ChatGPT slogans about whiteness and Black pain, now saunters around the edges of Palestine, a land of grief, siege, and survival, setting the scene for his latest TikTok performance. 

From a cushioned chair in a Bethlehem hotel, he posted to his followers:

“Bethlehem is a sacred cage where the world comes to worship a baby born under empire, yet ignores the children growing up under occupation.”

This is not OK.

That is why, Pieter, I am writing to you directly. As a prominent race justice activist, I know the terrain you are striding through, though you do not yet understand the weight of it. I know the ego that grows from the eros, the praise, poured onto those whites who appear to “get it”. I know how easy it is to mistake applause for wisdom, to let your platform slip from truth into arrogance or paternalism. But when I came into the public eye, I was not twenty-one.

By then I was already married to my life partner, Sipho Singiswa, raising a biracial child, learning to grapple with whiteness not as abstract theory but as intimate daily reality inside a Black family. Before those years, in the 1980s, when I was your age, I was a cultural activist. I was signing leases for suburban communes where Black musicians and artists could live, places where they could step into the economy of town performances under the nose of apartheid law. When we were evicted, we found another lease and carried on. I gravitated to the jazz and political underground, where people of all skin shades gathered, defying the disgusted gaze of the white state.

Later, I trudged through township streets and squatter camps, walked through communities ravaged by mines and extractive industries, documenting harm, holding a camera for those whose voices were buried under power. I spent years doing video advocacy in places that were ignored and erased. I had this access because I was working alongside Sipho. It was Sipho who sat for hours, listening to the stories of Marikana widows, miners, and children who had lost their fathers in the massacre, listening in their own language, with no interpreter, no posture, no spectacle.

It was then that I realised I was far more useful behind the scenes, as the film editor, shaping the testimony we gathered, rather than imposing my whiteness onto a landscape where my presence was just white skin — interruptive, uncomfortable, a distortion. There is a violence in forcing people to speak the pain caused by white power in the presence of whiteness. Learn when to step out, Pieter.

Bethlehem is a sacred cage, where the world comes to worship a baby born under empire, yet ignores the children growing up under occupation. pic.twitter.com/vVOMxp3qVt

— Pieter Kriel (@pieterkrielorg) July 21, 2025

After I took race justice and critical race theory to newspapers, I quickly ended up with two files fat with death threats and smear campaigns, now retired into archives at the SAHRC. I have been followed, stalked, recorded, threatened, and destabilised by the far right. I have been no-platformed by the liberal gatekeeping class, rendered ungovernable and untouchable by the very institutions that claim to champion freedom. But I never centred that. I did not have the energy to, and I did not have the resources to fight this. Our work was never monetised.

I am only naming it now because we lost our son to suicide, a tragedy shaped in part by the deluge of false media narratives, by public calls to have me tried and arrested by a culture of punishment that played out in the full glare of a public hungry for blood. I want to heal my complex PTSD. I want justice for my brown boy child who, as a teenager, watched the world close in on his parents.

Pieter, I tell you this so you understand that I am not speaking to you from theory. I am speaking to you from survival. You are simply not experienced enough to understand the depth of wounding whiteness can inflict on people not protected by white skin, even from the most well-meaning of us.

Your post, sent from Bethlehem, from inside the cage of empire that you occupy through your white privilege, your passport, your ability to move freely, is the height of white arrogance.

Bethlehem is not the Bethlehem of your Sunday school books or European art. It is the Bethlehem of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, Jesus son of Mary, born of Maryam, held by Yūsuf, names still carried on the tongues of Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike. It is the birthplace of a brown-skinned child under Roman rule, a child marked by poverty, empire, and resistance.

Before 1948, Bethlehem was a city where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived alongside one another, sharing land, work, weddings, funerals, and memory. That world was torn apart by the Nakba, when Zionist militias stormed Palestinian homes, drove families into exile, and began the long, choking suffocation that today hems Bethlehem in. The apartheid wall cuts through its landscape. Illegal settlements spread across its hills. Military checkpoints sever its roads. Soldiers watch its streets.

At its heart stands the Church of the Nativity, built in the fourth century by Helena, mother of Constantine, over the cave where Maryam is believed to have given birth to ʿĪsā. It is the oldest Christian church still in use, its walls darkened by candle smoke, its stones shaped by the knees and hands of centuries of worshippers. It bears the scars of the 2002 siege, when Israeli soldiers surrounded it, leaving bullet holes still visible. For the few Palestinian Christians left, the church is not a monument. It is survival. It is breath. It is a memory of belonging in a land that has never been allowed peace.

And yet you sit there, Pieter, in your hotel chair, composing your post. You centre yourself. You wrap Bethlehem around your performance of atheism, as if your personal rejection of faith is relevant here, as if the mothers whispering Maryam’s name over their dead, or the children holding onto the memory of ʿĪsā as a face like theirs, need your existential rebellion.

I too fell into the trap, Pieter. I too mocked organised religion in my early years, imagining this was a mark of free thinking, not fully grasping that for those oppressed by whiteness, God is not always the white-bearded adversarial patriarch of European lore. God is the name called upon in the dark. God is the effigy that carries brown or black skin. God is sometimes the emancipatory presence when the state and the oligarchs have taken everything else.

I’m not Jewish. Never was. I was raised Christian. I left religion completely. Yes, I visited synagogues, also mosques, temples, churches. It was curiosity, not conversion. Stop rewriting my life to fit your lazy narrative. pic.twitter.com/w6wJuwZelW

— Pieter Kriel (@pieterkrielorg) May 13, 2025

You do realise that sitting centre stage and telling people what to think or believe is just another form of toxic white patriarchy.

It is hard not to see you. Even though I do not follow you every time I open my social media, there you are. But we have not yet seen you in Gaza, Pieter. We have not seen you at the places of danger, at the rubble heaps where families are clawing through debris to find their children, at the refugee camps where hunger hangs in the air. We have hardly seen Nkosi Zulu, the fellow podcaster you travel with, because you have, it seems, centred yourself. You have placed yourself in the frame, made this about your musings, your performance, your moment.

So here is my advice to you.

If you want to step into the crisis of meaning among Black youth, enter it with care. Understand that this crisis is not abstract. It is the crisis of growing up in a world that markets Blackness as cool but locks Black people out of power. It is the crisis of living with betrayals — by families, by leaders, by movements that promised transformation but handed down exhaustion. It is the ache of inherited trauma, the daily dissonance of being told to survive with dignity in a world built to break you. It is the pain of watching White people like you monetise their pain, presenting as hashtag revolutionaries while the poorest Black lives remain ungrievable.

Do not mouth back at Black people what they already know or should think or believe just because you imagine your mind is so advanced. If you are going to enter this terrain, acknowledge the voices from whom you borrow your theory. Reference them. Honour them. We veterans know that not one original idea has come out of your strident, confident, know-it-all posture. To step into this fragile and painful space and position yourself as philosopher, as guide, as mouthpiece, begins to feel like decoy politics.

Your white presence on the safe edges of Gaza, your curated benevolence, carries the stale scent of white settler colonialism, of benevolence politics we have long outgrown.

We have long passed the stage where white boys in crisp shirts and borrowed slogans get to stand on occupied terrain and tell people how to feel about their ancient cultural and spiritual beliefs, as if their personal crisis of faith carries more weight than centuries of survival, as if their intellectual swagger counts for more than ancestral memory.

If you truly care, take your seat at the back. Read. Listen. Name your sources. Understand the responsibility that comes with speaking in public. Understand that solidarity is not built on your centre stage. It is built where you are unseen, where others lead, where you stop feeding on spectacle and start dismantling the need for it.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.

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