Guno צְבִי
We fight, We win, Am Yisrael Chai
parallels between the United States in 2020 and South Africa in the dying days of white rule
All this speaks to another, broader historical alignment between the United States and South Africa: the collapse of white rule. To be sure, the end of apartheid in South Africa was preceded by decades (if not centuries) of institutionalized white minority rule, while in the United States, white Christians have only recently become a minority. But the threat of losing power to people of color is a striking common thread.
exploiting ostensibly democratic institutions to preserve minority rule could have been a page taken from the South African National Party’s playbook. The latter used a series of blunt legislative instruments to effectively disenfranchise black voters by law. Trump and the Republicans have an Electoral College and U.S. Senate that overrepresent predominantly white rural states, gerrymandered election districts that dilute urban and minority votes, and a wide range of other measures to suppress minority voting. Other similarities include rallying conservative church networks, promoting ethnonationalist narratives and iconography (Manifest Destiny promising the land to white people here, the armed Afrikaaner frontiersman there), co-opting financial elites and the white middle class with artificially high returns on capital, and fomenting racial discord in highly visible institutions like sports.
just as South Africa’s economic and political elites split over the government’s attempts to suppress the anti-apartheid movement, the past 10 days have seen fractures among the U.S. ruling class. Prominent figures in the U.S. military have defied and condemned Trump’s efforts to crack down on protesters; Republican leaders have taken postures of defection from his reelection campaign; and a growing collection of U.S. corporate and financial institutions have voiced support for the protesters despite the looting and economic damage. Strikingly, even the National Football League has reversed course in its opposition to players protesting anti-black police brutality, defying Trump and echoing the infighting in South Africa’s white-supremacist rugby culture around 30 years ago (known in the United States primarily via the hit movie Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman memorably plays Nelson Mandela).
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/10/race-apartheid-united-states-george-floyd-protests/
All this speaks to another, broader historical alignment between the United States and South Africa: the collapse of white rule. To be sure, the end of apartheid in South Africa was preceded by decades (if not centuries) of institutionalized white minority rule, while in the United States, white Christians have only recently become a minority. But the threat of losing power to people of color is a striking common thread.
exploiting ostensibly democratic institutions to preserve minority rule could have been a page taken from the South African National Party’s playbook. The latter used a series of blunt legislative instruments to effectively disenfranchise black voters by law. Trump and the Republicans have an Electoral College and U.S. Senate that overrepresent predominantly white rural states, gerrymandered election districts that dilute urban and minority votes, and a wide range of other measures to suppress minority voting. Other similarities include rallying conservative church networks, promoting ethnonationalist narratives and iconography (Manifest Destiny promising the land to white people here, the armed Afrikaaner frontiersman there), co-opting financial elites and the white middle class with artificially high returns on capital, and fomenting racial discord in highly visible institutions like sports.
just as South Africa’s economic and political elites split over the government’s attempts to suppress the anti-apartheid movement, the past 10 days have seen fractures among the U.S. ruling class. Prominent figures in the U.S. military have defied and condemned Trump’s efforts to crack down on protesters; Republican leaders have taken postures of defection from his reelection campaign; and a growing collection of U.S. corporate and financial institutions have voiced support for the protesters despite the looting and economic damage. Strikingly, even the National Football League has reversed course in its opposition to players protesting anti-black police brutality, defying Trump and echoing the infighting in South Africa’s white-supremacist rugby culture around 30 years ago (known in the United States primarily via the hit movie Invictus, in which Morgan Freeman memorably plays Nelson Mandela).
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/10/race-apartheid-united-states-george-floyd-protests/
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