Written by: Aleksandra
Bodnar, Natalia Potoczna, Mai Salomonsen & Helle Kristensen
RACISM AND APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA
Apartheid and racism in South
Africa is a consequence of Dutch colonization in the fifteenth century. People
who have been resettled into South Africa, mostly stayed there and started a
new life. As we can imagine, European people are white-skinned, while most
residents of Africans are dark-skinned. Racism in that part of the world is
easy to notice when we are looking for work. Edi Pyrek, a writer and traveller, who was in South Africa
in 2006, says that "A white man gets work at the very end. First, it is
given to a Negro, Negress and then to a Hindus and next to a white woman and
white man. A white-skinned man, who set up and ran his own company for several
years, has to give at least a half of it to a dark-skinned man so that he will
not have majority shares."
According to Employment Equity Act, the main task of affirmative
action was equality in a workplace and abolition of unjust
discrimination, but through the ages we could notice that the discrimination
didn't relate to the black-skinned, but to white-skinned people. Fryderyk
Willem de Klerk, the ex-president of South Africa and laureate of the Nobel
Peace Prize said that white men of South Africa feel like second-class citizens
in their own country because of the way the affirmative action is introduced.
Discrimination against the white-skinned was also easy to see at universities,
because a lot of them resigned from studying in African schools. There were
organized many actions which were supposed to show the situation in the
country. For example students of University in Pretoria tried to raise people’s
awareness of racism, so they organized an action which showed what exactly
affirmative action looked like.
Since the collapse of apartheid, white people have been running away
from South Africa, and also worrying about their lives. Why? For example in
Zimbabwe, many farmers were not only dispossessed of their landed estates, but
also killed. As a result, many farmlands aren't cultivated, because Africans
don't worry about the consequences of not having anything to eat. The most
drastic type of racism, apart from killing farmers by the black-skinned, was
raping their wives. The crime was committed mostly by AIDS patients.
Dariusz
Ratajczak, a Polish historian, describes the situation in South Africa as
"a fierce battle whose aim is to
break the backbone of all people who have a white color of skin."
The whole article about racism in South Africa has been based on an
article published in 2007.
SEGREGATION
IN USA
From
1896 began most of the southern states to split everything up between human
races, that are also called segregation. Segregation of white and colored in
public
buildings,
trains, schools and buses. There were Introduced laws that forbade contact
between white and colored, and the white also made rules that prevented
African- Americans to have voice or vote in elections and referendums.
In
the first half of the 20th century white and colored south citizens got born in
separate hospitals, educated in separate schools, married in separate churches,
and so on. Even every single bus, school, café, hospital, water fountain and
prison was either for white or for colored, but never for both.
After
a marriage between the Afro-American Jack Johnson and Lucille Cameron (a white
woman) proposed the representative from Georgia, Seaborn Roddenberry, in 1911 a
supplement to the American fundamental law, which should forbid marriage
between Negros or colored and white forever.
Roddenberry’s
proposal was not adopted, but already in 1913 had 42 out of 48 states enforced
similar laws.
In
1954 fought NAACP (The National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People) for justice between
white and colored. Supreme Court reviewed segregation in public schools, as a
breach on the fundamental law. Judge Earl Warren forbade further segregation in
public buildings.
On
December 1, 1955 Rosa Parks (black American woman) got arrested In Alabama for
not giving off her bus seat to a white man.
After
that, Martin Luther King, a local preacher, took lead in a boycott off the bus
company. The bus company changed their rules after some time with the boycott.
in
1962 followed 3000 soldiers from federal state with common government , James
Meredith, the first African-American student at the University of Mississippi ,
into the university building.
As
late as 1963 only 9% of the Confederate schools abolished segregation.
On April 29, 1992
gets an American taxi driver beaten by Los Angeles Police Department officers. A
local witness, George Holliday, videotaped much of it from his balcony, and
sent the footage to the police, but they just ignored him, then he sent it to
local a news station. The footage shows four officers surrounding King, several
of them striking him repeatedly, while other officers stood by. Four officers were charged with assault with a deadly
weapon and use of excessive force.
Then
after so much segregation in the US, they end up in 2009 getting their first
Afro-American president, Barack Obama. USA’s 44th president through time. When
it in 2012 again was time for a new presidential election Barack Obama decided
to run for re-election. He ended up winning again and he still is president now
in USA, until November, when there again is presidential election, and Obama
cannot run for president again since he already has been president for two
terms.
