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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Apartheid by definition requires that the people in power represent a minority of the population. That was not the case (by a wide margin) in the United States at the time of segregation. Also important to note that the United States faced and continues to face huge global criticism for racial inequalities.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa. A big factor is the level to which the government enforced censorship. I was 14 when Nelson Mandela was released from prison and had no idea who the man was. I had no idea that we were living in a state of apartheid at all and the government was so brutally enforcing their policies that very few people were brave enough to stand up against it.
1.) America ran the sanction regime.
2.) America had equal but separate, South Africa had separate.
3.) 20 years is a long time in the 20th Century. Attitudes changed massively.
Mlk was once asked this question, specifically as it relates to the ANC’s policy on violence. IIRC His response iirc was that apartheid was worse to the effect that he could not condemn the ANC’s openness to violence.
Comparing South Africa segregation and American segregation is disrespectful to what people in SA endured.
There was no question that being black in the most segregated part of the US was better than being black in the least segregated part of SA.
There is no “greater evil” argument that makes American segregation better, but there is a massive difference between what was happening in the two countries.
This is like asking “why are Hitler’s concentration camps seen as worse than the USs concentration camps.” Because they were orders of magnitude worse. And that doesn’t create an argument where internment of Japanese, Italians and Germans wasnt bad.
It is a question of ignorance of how complete and brutal the seperation was in South Africa.
I think one of the biggest differences was the laws that were written and the percentage white people were of the entire population. In America they were racists but it was not as overt as in South Africa, were racism was literally written into law.
And in America you had a majority white population oppressing a few races which they considered inferior. In South Africa it was a minority white population oppressing a majority black native population, with minority Indian and Chinese population.
Since most people addressed the title question, I’ll address the second.
>Moreover, why wasn’t the United States blackballed on a global scale for segregation the way South Africa was for apartheid?
Simple; the US is a global superpower. Any sanctions you’d put on the US would have **far** more devastating impacts on your economy than the US’s.
A small part of it is the “separate but equal” legal fiction. Supposedly you could get just as good food/service/education/whatever in a location designated for black people as you could for whites.
We know that’s not true, but it’s the legal fiction that a lot of Jim crow laws were based on. That it was okay because nobody was being short changed.
I don’t know that apartheid ever made that idea up in court, they just said “you’re going to fucking do it or else.”
There are a few key differences:
1. The US in the 1950s was 89% white and 10% black. South Africa was 68% black and 19% white. So the US was dominated by whites both politically and demographically, while South Africa had a black supermajority but a minority white ruling class.
2. The US civil rights movement was nearly entirely internal. Pressure came from the black community and its white allies. Slaves had been freed in 1865 due to the Civil War and the Northern victory that imposed changes to the Constitution. A century later, people realized that Jim Crow had destroyed a lot of the gains, and pushed for real political change. The same was true of the women’s rights movement and the gay rights movement. Europeans or any other external force had little impact on the American Civil Rights movements for blacks, women, or gays. Change came predominantly from within. At the same, the UK and France were faced with devolving their colonial empires, so they weren’t in position to lecture the US about racial equality.
South Africa faced pressure externally from the global community. Not to downplay the work of native South Africans, but they had a lot of external allies that was isolating South Africa and costing them economically and in prestige, such as being banned from the Olympics.
3) The timing also mattered. By the 1980s, people had begun to realize that racial inequality was unjust. Most of Africa had cast off its European colonial rulers. While South Africa was independent, it was still governed by whites descended from Dutch and English colonial rulers. Whereas the US civil rights movement began in the 1950s, when racial equality was a relatively novel concept around the world.
So, South Africa was blacklisted because it was the 1980s and the world saw a small white ruling class imposing its will on a black majority. The US wasn’t blacklisted because it was the 1950s and the nation was predominantly white with a small black minority, so few other countries even noticed or cared about racial equality in the US.
I don”t know how significant it was compared to other things mentioned, but South Africa was much closer in time to foreign colonization, lots of European control, banks & trade. The US you have to go a long time to that (and also the black segregation in the US came a long time after the segregation of the local population).
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