What Is Apartheid?

Apartheid

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

(Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 2)

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What is apartheid?

Apartheid is segregation, the legal and political endorsement and institutionalization of discrimination. The term derives from the Afrikaans word for separateness. It involves the assigning of an Individual at birth into one or another class of citizen. In the case, for example. of the apartheid regime in South Africa, this classification depended on skin color, and four classes existed - white, colored, Asian, and black. Indeed, in the South African case, this distinction was made before birth, in so far as pregnant women could only he treated by doctors of their Own skin color.

In this chapter, we will, of course, discuss the literature on apartheid in South Africa, as well as its most obvious contemporary, racial segregation in the American South. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that these are the only examples of apartheid which might be mentioned, nor that apartheid only targets black populations in countries with white majorities. Discrimination and prejudice are characteristics of many countries, and it is only the extent of the institutionalization of that discrimination which results in some countries being labeled as segregationist. Here, we will seek to expand our definition to include the anthropological and sociological literature which seeks to relate these forms of racial discrimination with such cultural Systems as caste. Thus, we will be entering a heated debate between those who seek to differentiate between the two systems, and those who view them both as forms of social stratification based on status. While it will become apparent that there are obvious differences between the two forms of social differentiation — a point made abundantly clear by Oliver Cromwell Cox and Louis Dumont— we will ask not whether segregation can he understood as a form of caste (as some neo-Wcberians have suggested) but whether caste constitutes a form of apartheid. This neo Weberian pre-occupation with status actually takes us into another debate, concerning the role of women in the political sphere. In this chapter we will argue that it is not stretching the definition of apartheid too far to include situations where access to full citizenship is denied to certain members of a society on the basis of their gender. Finally, by way of a conclusion, we will consider the idea of equality as a human rights concern, and ask’ what relationship it might have with the idea of the state.

A brief history of apartheid

We could find any number of instances of apartheid, using the term in the broader sense advocated here, to make reference to in this history section. History is rife with examples of social exclusion, of the political o spatial separateness of certain groups in society. I will concentrate, though, on the two most famous examples of segregation: the Jim Crow laws in post-Civil War America, and apartheid in South Africa.

Segregation in the United States

In 1865, after the conclusion of the American civil war, slavery was officially abolished in the United States b the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. This was quickly followed by the j4t) Amendment of 1868, which guaranteed equal protection for all people under the Jaw, and by the 15th Amendment of 1870, which guaranteed voting rig1ts for all people. However, during the postwar reconstruction, many former slave-owning states experienced difficulties in adjusting to the different legal circumstances now allotted to those who had so recently been denied not only citizenship but basic freedom. Indeed, in many states, these former slaves made up the majority of the population. Agriculture and industry were also troubled by the sudden denial of their labor force. This matrix of uncertainties resulted in the passing of various laws in some of these states — called �Jim Crow’ Jaws — designed to segregate the white and non-white populations. Initially, these laws — named after a derogatory term used by whites to refer to blacks — applied to rail transport, but in a short time they had been extended to most areas of economic, political, and social life. In 1896, a challenge to these laws — the case of Plessey v. Ferguson, in which the