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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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
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