Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, December 15, 2014

Here Are Some of the Ways U.S. Treatment of African-Americans Resembles Apartheid South Africa

From 1949 though the early 1990s, South Africa was ruled by an Afrikaner Apartheid regime that made race the basis for law and politics, and which systematically excluded black Africans from their civil and national rights, empowering white Afrikaners alone.  The social statistics produced by that regime, however, are not so different from those produced by ordinary every day legal and social practices in today’s United States.  Impunity for white policemen who kill Blacks is one commonality between the two societies.  I don’t have the clip to embed yet, but Jon Stewart made this point on his Daily Show on Comedy Central Thursday night.  Here are some numbers to flesh it out.

1. Rates of imprisonment:

  Incarceration rate per 100,000 population in South Africa under apartheid (1993): 368
  Incarceration rate per 100,000 Black males in South Africa under apartheid (1993): 851
  Incarceration rate per 100,000 African-American males in the United States under George W. Bush (2001): 4,848 ”
2.  Residential segregation, from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
“… Douglas Massey, professor of sociology and public affairs, Princeton University. . . . said composite measurements of geographic segregation on a zero-to-100 scale show that South Africa in 1991 measured in the low 90s, while many American cities today rank in the high 70s to low 80s.”
“Johannesburg has a murder rate of 30.5 per 100k and Cape Town has one of 46 per 100k, comparable to Chicago’s 1992 rate of 34 per 100k.
As in Chicago, its homicides are geographically concentrated. As in Chicago, South Africa’s cities are immersed in a country with a prevalent gun culture. And both places share a long history of segregation.”
4.  Black-White intermarriage rate:
In 2010 in the US, about 13% of the 2 million marriages were inter-racial, but only 11% of those (33,000) were white-black marriages– i.e. 1.6% of total marriages.

Interracial marriages were forbidden under Apartheid but in post-Apartheid South Africa they still only account for about 1% of such relationships– a heritage of Apartheid (“the proportion of whites married to other whites fell from 99.6 percent in 1996 to 99.2 percent in 2001, according to census data” according to NBC news. 

5.  Police violence
Draw your own conclusion about the comparison to today’s US.
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Related video:
Original Article
Source: truthdig.com/
Author: Juan Cole

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