In February of 2018, I visited South Africa for a week. I went as part of a church group to play at various locations in Johannesburg and Capetown. I had no idea it was also a trip that would include visiting historical sites and learning the country’s history.
I didn’t make much money from the gig, but the knowledge I gained was priceless.
I listened to the audiobook Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela before I arrived. I learned so much about him and the country I was about to visit. Absorbing this information also helped to verify the information our tour guide was feeding us. I saw so many sites, met many people who live there, and had some deep conversations. One of those talks stood out and popped back into my memory banks this morning.
On a flight from Johannesburg to Capetown, I sat next to one of the trip organizers. A native of South Africa explained the difference between people classified as White, Coloured, and Black. I picked her brain to understand how they ranked people, their status in connection with that color, and her experience being a White person in a post-apartheid country.
She explained how she was proud to be South African because “it’s her country too!” I was taken aback by that at first, but I later understood what she was saying.
Since then, I’ve done more research into South Africa and its history. There is still more to learn. What I took away from that week was the reality of forced segregation and its residual effects. It has many parallels to the post Civil War era here in the United States. From reconstruction through Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, enslaved Africans’ descendants have lived as second-class citizens. Things have progressed since the mid-1960s, and the walls of segregation have slowly crumbled in the United States.
Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial segregation introduced in South Africa in 1948. The Population Registration Act of 1950 demanded South Africans be registered and segregated according to their racial group: White, Black or Coloured. Asians and those of Indian ancestry were considered Coloured.
According to this social stratification system, White citizens had the highest status, followed by Coloureds, then Black Africans. People would then be treated differently according to their population group, which formed the basis of apartheid.
The criteria used to determine each category’s qualification were based on appearance, social acceptance, and descent. The Act described a White person as one whose parents were both White. The other things that categorized a person as White were his habits, speech, education, deportment, and demeanor. Blacks belonged to an African race or tribe, and Coloureds could not be classified as Black or White.
Apartheid severely disadvantaged most of the population simply because they did not share the rulers’ skin color. Many of the non-Whites were kept just above poverty or relegated to shantytowns.
‘Colored People,’ in the United States, was a synonym for people who were descendants of enslaved Africans in the early twentieth century. Since the late ’80s, we’ve heard the phrase ‘people of color.’ It’s an alternative to the term ‘non-white’ and was eventually popularized as a more mannerly—modern-day substitute for ‘minority.’
Today, it seems as if the phrase ‘people of color’ is used by those uncomfortable with saying ‘Black.’ The term ‘people of color’ tends to group all Whites at the top of the food chain and everyone else in another category. Lumping all people who aren’t considered White into a separate category has a way of overlooking certain people’s unique cultures and contributions. It also ignores the unique struggles of many ethnic groups.
For instance, bias against Chinese Americans looks utterly different from discrimination against Mexican Americans. Why should we connect them under the umbrella of people of color (POC)?
Read the rest on my Think Things Through Newsletter HERE.