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.

Dutch Settlement and Racial Hierarchy in South Africa

A similarly race-divided society took shape in South Africa under Dutch auspices. The Dutch established their first colony at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 and, five years later, began importing slaves from along the Indian Ocean as a means of supplementing the labor pool of yeoman farmers.

As the early Dutch settlers pushed further into the interior of the continent, they came into direct contact with peoples such as the Khoikhoi, the Xhosa, and others. By the eighteenth century, contact and intermarriage with these groups — and between slaves or emancipated slaves and these groups, the so-called Bastaards — were producing mixed-race populations that were already beginning to occupy an intermediate position between Whites and Blacks. Many of these groups, in fact, settled at the literal frontiers of Dutch settlement, establishing chiefdoms whose de facto independence was recognized by the Dutch administration at the Cape.

Colonial South Africa, like colonial America, was beginning to cleave along racial lines, with Whites in a clearly dominant position politically, socially, and economically. An ocean away, slavery would also be abolished during the early years of British control in South Africa. While slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire, this did little to ameliorate the position of people of color in the African colonies. The South African society that advanced toward the twentieth century and national independence was one built on racism and sharp social, economic, and political divisions founded on race.

The struggle against increased British control made the Afrikaners — those of Dutch ancestry — more nationalistic and conservative than ever. The Great Trek into the interior, the foundation of new territories, and ultimately their position in an independent South Africa were all colored by their reading of their own history, a history which they saw as a struggle against the "uncivilized" native peoples of Africa and the British alike. Staunch Calvinists, the Boers, like many of their counterparts in the Southern United States, held to staunchly fundamentalist religious beliefs through which they sought to give meaning and definition to their society and its goals.

Religious and Ideological Justifications for Racial Oppression

The status of slaves in the American South was defended on a variety of grounds. Many cited religious arguments as a means of justifying Blacks' inferior status. Slavery was bound up with a fundamentally conservative view of society derived from Biblical authority. The scientific, extra-Biblical ideas that were increasingly used to challenge the institution were themselves vigorously attacked as assaults upon a God-given way of life. A Presbyterian clergyman, James Henley Thornwell, denounced what he called a grave threat to slavery. The target of his wrath was not only the "fanatical ravings of abolitionists" but also an internal danger. He assaulted the "science, falsely so-called" that defended slavery by making "the slave a different kind of being from his master." Thornwell denounced those "who defend slavery upon the plea that the African is not of the same stock with ourselves" for threatening the legitimacy of slavery "by bringing it into conflict with the dearest doctrines of the Gospel."

In other words, the doctrine of scientific racism that was increasingly advanced in favor of keeping Black people in submission was being attacked for being at variance with Biblical precepts of human equality. In the aftermath of the Civil War, such eugenic doctrines became more common as defenders of the old order sought ways to keep African Americans in what many saw as their rightful place at the very bottom rung of society. The religious dimension enabled slavery, and afterward Black inferiority, to be placed within the context of a divine plan for human society. While the Civil War might have abolished slavery in America, it had not wiped away the inferior status occupied by African Americans, nor had it altered their economic circumstances, education levels, or cultural identities.

The Boer War, like the American Civil War, was followed by a period of reconstruction. In both countries, this reconstruction inculcated a fierce resentment among the local population. In the American South, that resentment was directed against the carpetbaggers and toward a federal government that appeared intent on overturning Southern traditions and making the South subordinate to the North. In South Africa, a surface unity was troubled by a seething undercurrent of Afrikaner indignation — described as "the fruit of years of second-class citizenship for the Afrikaner in his own country."

Their identity premised on these life-and-death struggles, the Afrikaners would become the major force behind the legal institutionalized racism of apartheid. As in the American South, conservatism came to be identified with the preservation of a way of life seen as being under continual assault by external forces — a battle between an idealized, unchanging past and a threatening, chaotic present; of white versus black. Nico Diederichs, in his Nationalism as a Worldview and Its Relationship to Internationalism, argued that the question of Afrikaner success in the modern world was one of one ethnic group versus another, and that these ethnic groups, whether Afrikaner or African, were created by God — a view shared by traditional Dutch Calvinist theologians such as Abraham Kuyper. The need to preserve one culture over another, and to guarantee its prerogatives, represented an Afrikaner response to the dislocating effects of modernity. An essentially agrarian people, they had not only been dominated by the British but had also been forced into unfamiliar cities where they had been compelled to compete against Black workers who were paid lower wages.

Works Cited

Boskin, Joseph. Into Slavery: Racial Decisions in the Virginia Colony. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1976.

Louw, Eric P. The Rise, Fall, and Legacy of Apartheid. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

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

Mitchell, Laura J. "'This Is the Mark of the Widow': Domesticity and Frontier Conquest in Colonial South Africa." Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 28.1–2 (2007): 47+.

Pollak, Richard. Up against Apartheid: The Role and the Plight of the Press in South Africa. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981.

Postma, Johannes. "The Dispersal of African Slaves in the West by Dutch Slave Traders, 1630–1803." In The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe, edited by Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, 283–297. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992.

Thomas, Karen Kruse. "Dr. Jim Crow: The Regional Medical School for Negroes and the Desegregation of Southern Medical Education, 1945–1960." The Journal of African-American History 88.3 (2003): 223+.

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