God’s Waiting Room: Racial Reckoning at Life’s End is a beautifully written and intimate book about the characters in an old age home in South Africa. To write it, anthropologist Casey Golomski spent seven years travelling between South Africa and the US. Both countries are grappling with implementing universal healthcare, which, for older adults, is notoriously under-resourced.
He wanted to hear providers’ perspectives on these care plans, and if there were similar racial overtones in both places amid stereotypes that older (white) adults are more racist in general. Given South Africa’s turbulent history of apartheid, the book poses a pertinent question 30 years into the country’s democracy: do old racists change – or do their views continue to haunt society? We asked Golomski about his study.
