Moreover, why wasn’t the United States blackballed on a global scale for segregation the way South Africa was for apartheid?
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> blackballed on a global scale for segregation the way South Africa was for apartheid
I’m not sure that’s an entirely accurate description of what happened to South Africa. South Africa was censured by various international organisations in which African nations had significant influence (e.g. the UN General Assembly, the IOC and the Commonwealth of Nations), but Western governments were strongly opposed to doing anything beyond a few token gestures.
Anyway, de jure segregation ended in the US a couple of decades before South Africa, and the US was more powerful and influential than South Africa.
The biggest answer is probably that Jim Crow ended almost a half century before apartheid. Racism was an acceptable moral view in the first half of the twentieth century, and was common in many (if not nearly all) countries. Jim Crow was concurrent with Britain’s brutal occupation of India, the Dutch in Indonesia, etc. The treatment of blacks under Jim Crow was bad, but it certainly was better than the treatment of Asian and African colonies under European powers. By the late twentieth century, the moral standards had changed quite a bit in a short amount of time and South Africa found itself out of step with the times.
Another reason is probably that South Africa was a small enough country to effectively boycott. Right now what China is doing to its minorities rises to the level of genocide, but there have been no real sanctions against it because, quite frankly, it’s too big for any smaller economy to effectively sanction.
South Africa had a huge majority population of ethic black people going back centuries. They weren’t imported as slaves, they were the original inhabitants. They were conquered and as good as enslaved by European settlers, first the Dutch (Boer) and then the British. Their tribal lands were stolen. It was literally a small white ruling class dominating a majority black working class. American segregation comes more subtly. Poor whites, encouraged by rich whites and churches, held black minorities in disdain instead of seeing them as fellow sufferers. A divide and conquer scenario.
The major difference was that apartheid was the *national* policy of the South African government, and it was codified into law in a way that American segregation wasn’t. This doesn’t mean that Jim Crow laws didn’t exist, they did, but those were state laws, not federal. A black man living in the South had the same constitutional rights as a white man, at least on paper. In South Africa, there was an entire racial hierarchy, with multiple levels, coded into the law. And this went well beyond separate bathrooms and schools. Non-whites had different IDs, had travel restrictions that whites didn’t and on and on.
tl;dr: The totality of apartheid went way beyond anything seen in the U.S.
Something that is important to understand in this context is that the US is about 75% white while South Africa is about 20% white. This means that enforcing white ethnic power in South Africa was going to be far more challenging. The solution that was found was that certain areas were to be declared “black homelands”. These areas were supposed to be made independent (though South Africa never allowed them real independence) and black people were to be citizens of these “black homelands” and not of South Africa, leaving South Africa a white state. As such black people were not citizens of South Africa and were not legally able to live outside of these “homelands” (although those restrictions were more in paper than in reality).
To summarize: South Africa had a black majority while the US had a white one. As such enforcing white power in South Africa required much more extreme measures.
The US isn’t criticized on a global scale for segregation? Lol good one OP.
A lot of it is just due to timing. By the time global attitudes towards racism and civil rights began to shift in the 1960s and 1970s, the US was pretty much done with legal segregation. The 1954 brown v board of education, 1964 civil rights act, the 1965 voting rights, and the 1968 civil rights act marked the end of Jim crow laws in the US whereas South Africa continued apartheid long after. That’s not to say there wasn’t criticism after 1968, there certainly was (especially by the USSR), but it’s a lot easier to blackball a country in 1980 that has national laws enforcing separation of races and establishing a racial hierarchy than it is one who abolished those laws more than a decade prior.
And keep in mind, European colonization in Africa was just ending around the time of the civil rights movement in the US too. So, aside from the Soviet bloc, who was going to critique the US? European powers, who still owned entire countries in Africa and acted barbarically towards the local populace? Were they going to piss off the US while the US was administering the lend-lease act, Marshall plan, etc? Probably not
I think being a superpower at this time period and currently still vs just another country probably played a big role. Just as today, the US gets away with a lot of crap because of their strength.
Because the US is a highly federated nation, while South Africa was more unitary.
What was par for the course over in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, was increasingly unpopular in New England and California. And to the lesser extent, the Midwest.
If you wanted to escape the brunt of Jim Crow, you just headed up north or out west.
So I haven’t seen anyone point this out, but much of late American segregation was not explicitly written into law. Practices of Red Lining and Block Busting were done by the real estate industry and white home-owners, and were both practices of ensuring that black people could not rent or purchase property in white neighbourhoods, hence the establishment of racially homogenous areas still seen today, compared to South Africa at the time which had it written in law what areas indigenous South Africans were allowed to live in.
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