A Tale of Two Apartheids

In a recent discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent book on apartheid Israel Breaking Points commentator Krystal Ball's examples of the persistence of racial horror in the U.S. were pretty under-whelming. Trump falsely blaming Haitian immigrants for eating American pets? That stands out to her as compelling evidence of the persistence of Jim Crow in the United States?  Realistically, that has to be FAR down the list of priorities for black people in the U.S., who STILL don't have capital four hundred plus years after being wrested from their homelands and brought to the U.S. as slaves. 

 

Forty acres and a mule for all former slaves? It never happened, and that failure has obvious repercussions down to the present day. Pretending it isn't so solves nothing. 

 

On the other hand, it's easy to give up on Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially after he preposterously claimed that Barack Obama was the only legitimate heir of Malcolm X. Malcolm was a revolutionary, the greatest black revolutionary of the 20th Century, in fact; Obama was what Malcolm called a "House Negro," the Great Half-White Hope of corporate America. Advertising Age gave him an award for the slickness of his 2008 election campaign. When did Malcolm ever win acclaim from corporate America?  Never. (But if Coates is now correctly claiming that Israel is an apartheid state, bully for him! That's impossible for any sane person to deny.)

 

Ball's co-presenter Saagar Enjeti is incensed at Coates for (Saagar claims) painting the U.S. as as much of an apartheid state as Israel is, which thesis he cannot accept. That comparison can be entertained by reasonable people, though Enjeti vehemently denies it. While one would not want to dismiss the immense civilizing influence of the civil rights movement on American society, at the same time we remain deeply segregated fifty-six years after MLK was gunned down for correctly connecting racism in U.S. foreign policy with racism at home, an analysis that has never been allowed to remove the deep racial divisions that continue to scar American society. In other words, it's far from a simple matter to assess the gains and losses of that era, which James Baldwin called American's latest "slave rebellion."

 

As educator Jonathan Kozol has pointed out repeatedly over many years photographs of students in American public schools today look remarkably similar to photos taken during the Jim Crow era. Nowhere do large numbers of white children go to school with their black counter-parts. So, while it is illegal to codify apartheid in U.S. law, it has proven equally impossible to eliminate it in practice. The custom of the country makes it persist.

 

Why? Black-white relations were founded on sexual violence, and property relations faithfully reproduce economic segregation for the greater glory of light-skinned descendants. That is a force stronger than law.