THE racial segregation consists of separation from a particular social group due to their physical characteristics, its phenotype. This practice is based on hygienist ideas, which classify humanity into races, linking cultural, intellectual and skills traits to biological and genetic factors. Eugenics has spawned many catastrophes throughout history — wars, colonization, slavery, genocide — like the Nazism, which exterminated more than eight million people, including Jews, Gypsies, blacks, homosexuals.
The effects of racial segregation were very severe in countries like the USA and South Africa, marked by segregationist laws. In Brazil, after the abolition of slavery, this phenomenon was strengthened in the social fabric and in cultural intricacies due to the state's inaction in relation to the black population.
Read more: Ethnocentrism - prejudiced worldview that underlies racial segregation
Origin of racial segregation
Racial segregation is a millenary phenomenon. Throughout human history, there are examples of certain ethnic groups subjugated by others with implications for geographical and social mobility. The three nations that will be specifically mentioned in this text share a colonial foundation anchored in a slave economic system as the historical origin of its experience of segregation, mainly in the 19th and XX.
In the 21st century, migratory movements around the world have awakened in some countries exacerbated nationalism and manifestations of xenophobia, which also leads to the segregation of foreigners in ghettos and ethnic-racial discrimination.
Forms of segregation
Racial segregation can take place formally and informally, through laws, violent repression or cultural rules of coexistence.
If we look at countries where it occurred institutional segregation, like South Africa, we will see that during the apartheid, there was one discriminatory legislation in the most diverse areas; forced removals; arrests without trial; state repression of free movement through pass laws, by which it would only be possible to go to certain regions with authorization that was deliberately not granted; and social and economic prohibitions such as performing interracial marriages, attending public places, and applying for industrial work.
At cultural forms of segregation they manifest themselves without necessarily resorting to legal provisions or repression in order for them to be complied with. Its strength lies in constraining segregated individuals to understand their exclusion as a consequence of personal mistakes or as a natural fate reserved for them. They are added to institutional mechanisms that block, for example, the economic, intellectual and political rise of certain ethnic groups.
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racial segregation in the United States
The territory currently belonging to the country U.S it was inhabited by indigenous people who were decimated, received French, Spanish, Dutch expeditions, but their colonization was undertaken by the English, who settled in it and formed the Thirteen Colonies. These joined together and declared the independence of the country in 1776 and, in 1788, they promulgated the Constitution.
vast territory, there was a different development in the south and north regions. The great agrarian properties of the south (plantations) had as the basis of the productive system the slavery of captive Africans and their descendants. The enslaved did not have the right to vote, therefore, they did not have the political strength to demand measures against slavery at the federal level. Northern states did not practice slavery, their economic model was based on small property and in free and paid work, but if they sheltered fugitive slaves, by law they were obliged to return them.
THE slavery practiced in the southern states was abolished through civil war, the call secession war, between 1861 and 1865, in which northern states, commanded by President Abraham Lincoln, faced southern confederated states that aimed to found a separatist confederation. Northern states won the war, slavery was immediately abolished, but southern whites sought ways to segregate newly freed blacks. In 1865, by an ex-combatant of the southern troops, the Ku Klux Klan, a supremacist group that practiced violent actions against blacks. Although repressed by the police, this sect gained thousands of adherents.
As a country with a strong federalist tradition, each US state has its own laws. The first Segregation laws after the abolition of slavery were enacted in Tennessee. In 1870 this state banned interracial marriage and in 1875 it adopted a legal principle calling it “separate but equal”, which underpinned dozens of laws and was adopted by other southern states.
Historian Leandro Karnal illustrates the breadth of this principle that became known as the Jim Crow Law|1|: “distance between blacks and whites on trains, train stations, wharves, hotels, barbershops, restaurants, theaters, among others. In 1885, most southern schools were also divided into institutions for whites and others for blacks”.
O racism promoted by discriminatory laws crystallized and normalized in the southern states, defining the sharing of public spaces and the geographic division, even from residential neighborhoods, by color. blacks had to use separate bathrooms, study in separate schools, swearing on separate bibles in court, buying clothes without being able to try on, buying food without being able to sit at tables exclusively for whites, they were not staying in hotels, and were supposed to sit in the back of buses and trains.
O episode that spurred movements against segregation took place in Montgomery and was starring Rosa Parks. She refused to give up her seat on a bus trip to a white passenger. This attitude triggered demonstrations and a 382-day boycott of public transport. In 1956, a year later, the US Supreme Court ruled the illegality of racial segregation in public places, a victory for the black movement.
This issue was tackled by movements demanding civil rights for blacks through marches, boycotts, lawsuits and even violent actions. there was the civil disobedience movement, whose main leader was Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. movement adept at armed struggle, formed by Muslim blacks and led by Malcolm X, called black Panthers. the activist Angela Davis participated in this movement.
The principle “separate but equal” was only abolished by the US Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s. in 1964Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pacifist fight against racism. Also in that year, the Civil Rights Law was enacted, banning all forms of racial segregation. In the following year, 1965, southern blacks won the right to vote.
See too: Social movements - collective actions aimed at fighting for a social cause
Racial segregation in South Africa
South Africa was formed by numerous peoples, both native and migrant, and racial segregation in that country was founded on the dual colonization process, Dutch and English, and into slavery. Part of its territory was, for a long time, a refueling point for expeditions from different parts of Europe towards India. In the 17th century, it was colonized by the Dutch from the Dutch East India Company, of religious orientation. Calvinist, what almost exterminated native ethnicities, like the Khoisan, and imported enslaved from elsewhere: Indonesia, Madagascar, India.
At the end of the 17th century, there was British occupation of South African territory, which generated the Anglo-Dutch War, which England won. In the 19th century, in 1835, slavery was abolished and settlers of Dutch origin, and to a lesser extent French or German (Boers), migrated to the interior, founding new republics. Throughout the colonization process, there were wars between settlers and natives, for example between the British and the Zulu people, and between settlers of different ancestry, such as the British and the Dutch.
Wars were motivated by territorial domination, enslavement and exploitation of gold and diamonds, discovered in the second half of the 19th century. In the Boer republics, an informal extension of the British Empire, there were already practices that would later be officially adopted in the apartheid, like the confinement of blacks. These were essential in sustaining the economic system through their work, but they were excluded from the political and social system.
The South African War, between the British and the Boers, broke out in 1899 and ended in 1902 with the Boer defeat. Thus, their republics also became British colonies and, in 1910, they formed the South African Union, a unitary state with English and Dutch as official languages and racist practices institutionalized in law. For example: a reservation of the best jobs for whites was stipulated, restriction of property rights and permanence in indigenous lands, laws that forced blacks to remain in suburbs, laws that restricted the flow of Africans from the countryside to the City.
Therefore, modernization, urbanization and industrialization were guided by segregationist policies. A white worker earned 50 times more than a black worker. In addition, there was a government policy aimed at keeping blacks in rural areas, away from the cities.
![Nelson Mandela was the first post-apartheid president and received a Nobel Peace Prize for his fight against racial segregation in his country.[1]](/f/9f2ece097ca4ec12ef4854c7f9944547.jpg)
In 1912, the South African National Congress (ANC) was founded, a nationalist party that tried to garner support in the public opinion to modify by legal means the injustices committed against blacks in that country, but without much success. Between 1939 and 1948, racial segregation was intensified. The government's inability to control migrations resulted in the slumming and proletarianization of black communities in large urban centers, which intensified racial tensions.
In addition, the National Party, which led the government, expanded segregationist legislation, limiting or even barring blacks' access "to work, housing, land use, education, health services and representation politics"|2|. That was the “little apartheid”, that is, specific measures of segregation that modified the daily life of the black population.
South African blacks were deprived of fundamental civil rights, such as freedom of expression and movement, and political rights. In 1949 interracial marriages were banned, and from 1950 onwards, the census categorized the population into three races: whites, mestizos (colored) and Africans, and the territory of the reserves was divided into eight areas called homelands, administered by Bantu under the tutelage of whites, where blacks should be confined. The aim is for them to be black states dominated by the central power, but geographically separated, thus they could exploit their labor in the agricultural and mining sector and at the same time have a South Africa White.
In addition to segregation, blacks were removed to these reserves, to the point where a black person was prohibited from being in an urban area for more than 72 hours, if he disobeyed, he could be arrested. In 1953, a specific educational system for blacks was created, with a background inferior to the educational system of whites (Afrikaners). Furthermore, blacks could not share the same public spaces as whites neither compete on the same teams in sporting activities nor share the same media.
The attempt to contain the flow of the black population did not work, even because the homelands they were unattended by the central power, had precarious economic and sanitary conditions, there was malnutrition and outbreaks of tuberculosis. Africans started to leave these areas and go to the cities.
From 1940, with the rise of the Youth League, led by Nelson Mandela, the ANC party began to mobilize black South Africans. Mandela and other leaders were influenced by the non-violence philosophy of Gandhi, which inspired your civil disobedience tactics and peaceful demonstrations in opposition to discriminatory laws. This group was violently repressed and the party was impeached.
The Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 culminated in the death of 69 activists and raised the anti-apartheid international knowledge and garnering support, including from the UK. In hiding and in the face of violent repression, the movement felt the need to resort to armed struggle.
Mandela made an international trip to support the anti-apartheid. Upon returning, it was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment. The movement's leaders who went into exile garnered international support, to the point that the South African government created a secret service outside the country to repress anti-corruption activities.apartheid.
Starting in 1966, to improve the country's international image, the regime began to gradually remove segregationist laws. Added to the international repercussion, the economic stagnation that occurred in the 1970s, the growth of the urban black population and the shortage of skilled labor for industry and even military for the army (since only whites could enlist) promoted the destabilization of the apartheid.
During this period, the black movement strengthened, to the point that, in 1976, the Soweto uprising, an unprecedented series of rebellions that started with black students, spread across the country and got the adhesion of several groups, such as unions, community associations, churches, organizations policies. The perception that the white domain was not unbeatable and the strengthening of black militancy in that context of economic instability led to numerous protests and strikes that multiplied in the 1980s. The country was considered an international pariah because of the regime of apartheid and began to suffer sanctions.
Finally, failing to contain anti-apartheid and being boycotted by several countries, from 1989 onwards, segregation laws and homelands were abolished, political prisoners were released and opposition parties were legalized. Nelson Mandela, in 1994, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and elected president of South Africal, initiating a government of national conciliation.
Read too: African culture – cultural diversity that reached the whole world
racial segregation in Brazil
The constitution of Brazil as a country had as one of its most striking features the enslavement of Africans and the decimation of indigenous peoples. Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, was the country in the Americas that received the most enslaved Africans, and when abolition took place, it was not accompanied by indemnities and compensatory public policies that integrate the black population into the economic system of the free and salaried. Therefore, as sociologist Octavio Ianni states, the basic premises for the transition from slave to citizen were not fulfilled.
Citizenship here it ranges from the right to vote to decent living conditions, housing, health, employment, income, education. After abolition, blacks were left to fend for themselves, their labor was replaced by European immigrants, and the ex-enslaved remained to be allocated on the outskirts of cities, without access to public services, and occupying subordinate and informal functions that required longer working hours and lower wages.
The legacy of slavery practices and mentalities remained and reflected in the segregation of the black population that took place in the spatial, economic, cultural and political spheres. Although there was formal freedom, mechanisms were operated to block access to opportunities for social mobility, driven by the ideals that linked progress to whitening.
Sociologist Danilo França points to segregation as a selective mechanism in accessing the labor market, public services, resources, consumption and culture. The very spatial configuration of occupying places far from centers of access to opportunities and leisure translates a segregationist policy, since it restricts the circulation of certain groups in certain points of the City.
Income concentration and socio-spatial inequality have a strong connection with the race factor, but unlike the examples from previous countries, in the Brazilian case there was no segregationist legislation after the abolition, which generated this result was The absence of public policies that effected formal equality.
The great intellectual Abdias do Nascimento defined Brazilian racism as such|3|: "not as obvious as the racism of the United States nor legalized which the apartheid of South Africa, but effectively institutionalized at the official levels of government as well as diffused into the social, psychological, economic, political and cultural fabric of the country's society”.
Also access: How was the life of ex-slaves after the Golden Law?
Consequences of racial segregation
One of the main consequences of racial segregation is the inequality Social. In South Africa, for example, whites were as prosperous as Europeans or North Americans, while blacks lived on reservations. natives without access to public services, without good education, without political rights and access to urban jobs, better paid.
This generated a profound social and economic inequality in that country and the same occurs in other historical experiences of segregation. Inequality materializes in several aspects, such as life expectancy, average income, access to services public such as health and education, safety, birth rate, among many other factors that make up the quality of life.
Another aspect in which racial segregation affects is the social mobility of the segregated population. Poor access to employment, quality education, public services and cultural activities restricts possibilities of social ascension and makes that, for generations, remain in the same material conditions of life.
Racial segregation generates violence and permanent tensions that, under certain conditions, turn into social upheavals and lead to deaths, damage to physical integrity, property damage, social instability and politics.
It is wrong to think that racial segregation only harms the segregated group. Society as a whole loses out by confining a particular group, as the consequences of inequality will eventually grow to the point of reaching those who benefit from this exclusion. In addition, the narrowing of educational, cultural and political access causes society to waste an immense potential human, intelligence, capabilities, ideas that, limited by external barriers, are not developed to their full potential.
Grades
|1| KARNAL, Leandro [et al.]. US history: from the origins to the 21st century. São Paulo: Context, 2007.
|2| Neto, 2010, p.49. The case of apartheid in South Africa. Available in: https://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/35269/35269_4.PDF
|3| BIRTH, Abdias do. The genocide of the Brazilian black: process of a masked racism. Rio de Janeiro: Peace and Land, 1978. P. 92.
Image credits
[1]Alessia Pierdomenico / Shutterstock
By Milka de Oliveira Rezende
Professor of Sociology
