Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

eighteenth centuries—were substantially Afrikaans in language
and culture. But during the apartheid era they were
increasingly segregated and discriminated against. By the
1960s they found themselves reduced from a status intermediate
between whites and Africans to one that was closer
to the latter than to the former. The Immorality, Group
Marriage, and Urban Areas Acts, which were among the
earliest apartheid laws, made it for the first time illegal for
Coloreds to have sex, intermarry, or live in the same neighborhoods
with whites. Only an explicit and straightforward
racism could justify these policies, as some of the more
principled advocates of “ideal apartheid” recognized. But
the official culturalist rationale can also be considered racist
if we accept the notion that the essence of racism is not
biological determinism per se but the positing, on whatever
basis, of unbridgeable differences between ethnic or descent
groups—distinctions that are then used to justify their
differential treatment. Even if Coloreds had been admitted,
as some consistent cultural nationalists advocated, into the
bosom of the Afrikaner Volk, South Africa would still have
had an overtly racist regime as far as Africans were concerned.
The division of blacks into pseudonations did not
reflect a genuine cultural pluralism but was rather the divide-and-conquer
strategy of a ruling minority. 63
If the demise of Jim Crow can be attributed partially to
strategic considerations arising from the Cold War, the end
of that conflict contributed significantly to the death of
apartheid. When the South African regime could no longer
expect aid or even toleration from the West for its role in
the defense of capitalism, and the disintegrating Soviet
Union cut off aid to the African National Congress, the two
137