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

THREE Climax and Retreat
sides in the struggle went to the bargaining table to resolve
a conflict in which neither could anticipate total victory. 64
The fact that the negotiations led to the one result that
white leaders had said for decades that they would never
accept—one person, one vote—was in the first instance an
achievement of Nelson Mandela’s adroit bargaining skills.
But the release of Mandela from prison, as well as the prestige
and moral stature that he brought to the negotiations,
resulted in large part from an aroused international public
opinion. The moral condemnation of the world and the
economic sanctions to which it eventually gave rise undermined
the willingness of white South Africans to defend
apartheid at all costs. By the late 1980s, it had apparently
become psychologically demoralizing and economically
costly to be the “polecat of the world.” The revulsion
against official racism that inspired the international campaign
to free Mandela and end apartheid can be traced ultimately
to the antiracist fallout from the Holocaust, activated
and reinforced in relation to people of color by the
success of decolonization and the civil rights movements
elsewhere in the world during the decades immediately
after the war. South Africa’s policies were too reminiscent
of Nazi Germany’s to escape the opprobrium that was now
associated with overtly racist regimes, and its harsh practice
of a peculiar internal form of colonialism put it at odds
with a world of independent nations that had replaced the
European colonial empires.
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