This
past summer I had the incredible opportunity of taking a course in South Africa
on Nelson Mandela and the Anti-Apartheid movement. Throughout my experience there,
me and my fellow American classmates could not help but compare the striking
similarities between apartheid and Jim Crow. This led our professor, who was a
prominent activist in the Anti –Apartheid movement, to explain that just as
people of color throughout the world shared and adopted techniques and ideas to
combat colonialism and systematic racism, international proponents of white
supremacy shared strategies on how to maintain rigid systems of racial
oppression; and that the architects of apartheid in South Africa specifically
studied segregation in the Jim Crow South to learn the most ‘effective’
oppressive practices when they established government sanctioned racial
discrimination.
Amidst the Little Rock crisis in 1957, in
which nine black students were attempting to desegregate Central High School, the
U.S. government faced intense international scrutiny. With the Cold War waging,
and race and politics intimately intertwined, the Soviet government stated a
global war of words that connected capitalism and white supremacy hoping to
gain allies from the newly independent African and Asian nations. While many
nations condemned the United States, the South African government “watched on
nervously,” frantically sending memos to ambassadors in the U.S. afraid that integration in America would
delegitimize the apartheid system.[1]
As it became clear that Central High would indeed be desegregated South African officials embraced the stance of
Southern segregationists, with apartheid policymakers drawing lessons in effort
to prevent integration from happening in South Africa. When commenting on
Little Rock, South African ambassador to the U.S., Wentzel C. Du Plessis expressed
fears that white student’s education would be hampered by integration stating
that white children would “not be able to make up for the deficiencies [that
would occur] in their education,” and going on to argue that African American
student’s education “can be provided for quite easily” under the segregated
system, before concluding that school integration would produce “ a new
dimension to racial…discord” in America.[2]
The South African government's disappointment
in the desegregation of Little Rock high school illuminates how the structures
of white supremacy were formed through observation and exchange of racially
oppressive governments. While apartheid officials were afraid of the global reverberations
that would accompany desegregation in the U.S., they drew solace in the way Southern white Americans counteracted the Little Rock crisis by masking it as a
"constitutional issue" rather than a "race problem." In
fact, South African apartheid policy makers were so 'inspired' by American
segregationists, that they used a version of the states rights argument when
defending themselves against international scrutiny citing, "World opinion which has the power to criticize does not
have the responsibility to govern. We do.”[3] Adopting the ideology of
American white supremacist, South African officials long
argued that foreign interference to apartheid infringed on their right to
national self-government. As they were comparable systems of racial
control, the relationship between Jim Crow and Apartheid reveals how racism can
be entrenched through global interactions: even as Jim Crow was beginning to
fall white supremacists around the world remained resolute, with their staunch support to one
another transcending international borders.
WC: 529
[1] Nicholas
Grant, “Apartheid South Africa and the 1957 Little Rock Crisis,” UNC Press Blog, https://uncpressblog.com/2017/09/23/nicholas-grant-apartheid-south-africa-and-the-1957-little-rock-crisis/.
[2] Wentzel
C. Du Plessis to Secretary for External Affairs, “The Closing of the Schools,”
12 December 1958, South African National Archives, Pretoria. BTS, 1/33/10. Vol.
1 U.S.A. Racial Policy 1958-1959, 2.
[3]
Grant, “Apartheid.”
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