Racial Policy in the United States and South Africa Compared

Introduction: Colonial Origins of Racial Division

There are many points of comparison between the United States of America and the Republic of South Africa. Both countries were settled by European colonists who established control over a native population, and both nations today contain a large Black population. In the case of the United States, it was the European colonists who imported large numbers of slaves from Africa. In the instance of South Africa, it was the Europeans who came to dominate a population that consisted overwhelmingly of native Black Africans. The original inhabitants of the United States — the Native Americans — were either exterminated or marginalized, while White Europeans and their Black slaves came to constitute almost the entire population of the new country. The South African process was different, but the original populations were similarly marginalized.

The two countries share a long history of racial division and exploitation. Following the end of slavery in the nineteenth century, Black Americans were subjected to the indignities of Jim Crow, a system of "separate but equal" in which Blacks were relegated to the status of second-class citizens. Twentieth-century South Africa went even further with this concept, creating the detested apartheid — a system of virtually total racial separation in which Whites ensured their complete dominance over all other races. South Africa's former slaves and native Black peoples, together with Asian immigrants and those of mixed race, were forced to suffer the assaults of a system that was both similar to, and yet more extreme than, that which prevailed in the United States. In each country, movements for equal rights eventually ended formal racial segregation and discrimination, but the legacy of such policies remains.

White Europeans began to settle in significant numbers in what became the United States and South Africa in the seventeenth century. The earliest European colonists of South Africa were Dutch, though interestingly, a Dutch colony was also founded in North America — New Amsterdam, later New York — before eventually coming under English rule. In contrast, South Africa's Dutch colonies would fall under full English control only by the early twentieth century. It was a Dutch warship that, in 1619, landed the first cargo of Black African slaves at Jamestown in exchange for food supplies.

Slavery and Race Law in Colonial America

Black slaves from Africa soon became a common sight in Virginia and throughout the colonies along the Eastern Seaboard. More prevalent in the South than in the North, they became essential to the region's expanding plantation economy. Slave labor worked plantations of tobacco and rice and, after the widespread adoption of Eli Whitney's cotton gin in the early nineteenth century, the cotton plantations that became the mainstay of the Southern economy. By the 1660s, colonial law was already beginning to distinguish between indentured servitude and slavery, with Black Africans alone being consigned to perpetual servitude — the outright property of their masters.

Race-based slavery would form the basis of social distinctions over the next three centuries, laying the groundwork for further discriminatory and restrictive legislation aimed at Blacks. The new United States, a land that prided itself on being the world's first modern democracy, officially recognized slavery in its constitution. Slaves enjoyed virtually no legal status as human beings, counting as three-fifths of a person for purposes of electoral apportionment. On the whole, it was the individual states that continued to regulate the slaves' legal status. By the early nineteenth century, slavery had ceased to exist except in the South and in a few isolated enclaves in the North, where it was dying out. The international slave trade had also been ended by 1808 by constitutional provision. Nevertheless, slavery was an entrenched institution throughout the South and was considered an essential part of the economy.

Works Cited

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Luse, Christopher A. "Slavery's Champions Stood at Odds: Polygenesis and the Defense of Slavery." Civil War History 53.4 (2007): 379+.

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Zimmermann, Reinhard, and Daniel Visser. Southern Cross: Civil Law and Common Law in South Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.