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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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.
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