Shades of South Africa! Minority Rule!
5th July 2022 · 0 Comments
Prominent media news analysts are finally getting it. White Republican males in the U.S. Congress, and so-called “red” state legislatures have implemented a pre-independence South African minority rule in the United States.
Case in point: The U.S. Supreme Court. Among the six Republican male justices (only one male is Black biologically), and white Republican males in the U.S. Senate and state legislatures are pushing a states’ rights agenda that is designed to retain the same white minority male domination that existed (under legal apartheid) in South Africa.
For those who may not know, the word apartheid was created by white “Afrikaans” (Africans) and meant “apartness.” According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it was first used in South Africa in 1947.
Merriam-Webster defines apartheid as a former policy of segregation and political, social, and economic discrimination against the nonwhite majority in the Republic of South Africa.
“The extreme racial segregation of apartheid lasted from 1948 to 1994 and included such restrictions as where people of certain races could live or own land, what jobs they could hold, and who could and couldn’t participate in government,” according to the dictionary.
The Republic of South Africa (RSA) is the southernmost country in Africa. As of 2021, South Africa’s population increased and counted approximately 60 million inhabitants, of which 82 percent were Black Africans.
When one considers that The Republic of South Africa has always been majority-Black and the evil and heinous extremes the Afrikaans (white Dutch settlers) went to in stealing the native’s land and killing and stripping them of all human rights, it is comparable to what happened to enslaved people in the South and, later, freedmen in Black Wall Street (Tulsa, OK).
It would take 46 years, after the start of legal apartheid in South Africa in 1948, before the vile system of white minority rule officially ended. Even before then, the colonization of the country by the Dutch in the early 19th Century, and the British, after the Second Boer War at the dawn of the 20th Century, codified white minority rule of the predominantly Black country.
In the early 1990s, negotiations between the white minority leadership, the African National Congress (ANC), and others led to the formation of a fully democratic government in 1994. Black South Africans’ election of anti-apartheid warrior Nelson Mandela as president ended legal apartheid in South Africa.
In the United States, after 89 years of legal apartheid (segregation) officially fell in 1954, the “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Unlike what transpired in South Africa, de facto segregation never ended in the U.S. Today, Black Americans are still fighting to escape an unfair, inequitable system of white minority rule and apartheid.
Republican political dominance and the disenfranchisement of Black voters escalated in the 1980s with a purposeful strategy to widen the country’s racial divide and create a massive white turnout at the polls.
Campaign managers stoked racial fears among whites to drive the white vote during the George H.W. Bush campaign. Willie Horton, an American convicted felon, was the beneficiary of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program. He did not return from his leave and ultimately committed assault, armed robbery, and rape before being captured.
The PAC ad for Bush about Horton has been widely characterized as a textbook example of dog-whistle politics.
Stoking racial fears is now a prominent feature of Republican politics. The dog whistles, aka “red meat,” point to escalating crime in significant cities – like Chicago – the “welfare state,” which invoke subliminal images of Black criminals capable of hurting whites and military-style weapons to protect whites.
Couple the stoking of racial fears with state legislatures drawing discriminatory electoral maps, and you get white-dominated state legislatures and congressional seats.
We live in a theoretical “United” States of America. However, our country is as deeply divided and steeped in apartheid as it has been post-Brown v. Board of Education. The proof is in the attacks of whites on Blacks, whether by law enforcement, school officials, and parents endeavoring to erase Blacks’ from history books, the feds’ lack of investments in affordable housing, SBA loans to small Black business owners, the cruel treatment of Black farmers, voter suppression by state legislatures, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings dismantling civil rights in favor of states’ rights.
But hope springs eternal. The U.S. Supreme Court giving the state the right to regulate women’s reproductive choice has shaken confidence in the high Court. The Court’s assault on women’s rights may mark a turning point in white minority rule and white separatism.
Will white women now understand that they are not partakers in power conceded to the white male Republicans they elected? Will they finally recognize that they are part and parcel of the ongoing apartheid afflicting Black and brown people and LGBTQ citizens?
And will Blacks finally understand that their only power is the vote? They must vote these cruel, vile, self-serving politicians out of office if there is any hope for emerging from the apartheid state and retaining the greatest democracy in the world?
Is it ignorance, stupidity, or are we all just one big, dumb society that can’t see the forest for the trees? White voters are being suckered into voting for people who don’t actually about them, and many Black Americans are not voting. Some of us think voting won’t change our situation. Now that’s really stupid.
To be sure, some traditionally conservative white male Republican officials are not down with Trumpism, which is just fascism by another name. How should we view them? Silence is violence, and the January 6 Insurrection in 2021 by white domestic terrorists should have prompted all white Americans to stand up for democracy.
Still, does the majority understand that we are all now living in an Apartheid state? Obviously, the recent rulings by the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) are designed to divide whites from Blacks, women from men, pro-life from pro-choice advocates, the haves from the have-nots, Second Amendment zealots from Americans who want sensible gun control laws.
And do we all understand that six people, among them five whites, are making decisions for 300 million Americans that are contrary to the majority’s wishes? Isn’t that a classic case of minority white rule?
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
This article originally published in the July 4, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
