The Impact of Apartheid on Black South Africans
The academic discussed apartheid in the episode, including how those who experienced it were impacted by it and how the white South African population perceived and expected black South Africans to behave. Because they were viewed as lower class and beneath white residents, they were expected to perform menial tasks for them. They were deprived of their most fundamental human rights and forced into cheap labor before being transported across the ocean like livestock. From the perspective of the black South African people, the podcast mentioned that it was seen as something similar to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States when people were discriminated because of the skin color. They were also segregated due to the color of their skin, and it was so institutionalized and integrated into the South African society that it created this obvious social divide within the country.
Stricter and More Systematic than the Civil Rights Movement
The apartheid, much like the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, created an overall central aspect of white supremacy and racial discrimination, however, the South African apartheid was stricter and more systematic. It enforced territorial separation and police repression; the overall goal of the apartheid was to ensure that the white race was dominant and it had legal backing in order to do so. In some ways, the apartheid laws were a lot like Jim Crow laws, but for the most part they were worse and had worse consequences. The outcomes of breaking one of the apartheid laws were very harsh: fines; imprisonment, and whippings were among the few more lenient consequences. More than 21,000 people died during the apartheid due to the unjust punishment and violence that racked the country.
Institutionalized Racial Discrimination
The podcast argues that the apartheid was created as a system of institutionalized racial discrimination. An agreeable argument in that in Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, he states, "...a white man in his sixties, approached Paul and asked him to go inside to buy him some postage stamps. It was quite common for any white person to call on any black person to perform a chore." (Mandela,42) Racial discrimination was incorporated into the South African society so that it was expected of a black person to perform a chore for a white person without prior thought or consideration. It was the "social norm" that black citizens were to serve the white citizens.
Enforced Racial and Unequal Development
One of the points made in the podcast was that racial integration that was seen as "sacrilege" or blasphemy in the eyes of God. God wanted the races enforce racial and unequal development and to ensure that there would be a dominant race so that no race would be "tainted" by the other. It was another point made by those who wished to keep the black citizens in their place to ensure that the white citizens were not tainted or mixed with those who were perceived as beneath them.
Ties to the Lectures
The reading ties into the lectures in that the reading provides more details and more insight into what was going on during the apartheid and how it was seen and experienced through the eyes of the South African people who lived through and experienced it. The lectures explain the apartheid and the reading in a way that is easily understandable and detailed.
Works Cited
Mandela, Nelson. (1995) Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela. New York: Little, Brown and Company.
Stanford. The History of Apartheid in South Africa. (2011) http://www-cs-
students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html
