Another Apartheid Legacy
Apartheid did something uniquely weird to South African culture.
Ultimately, xenophobia goes beyond the hatred of foreigners, beyond the scarcity of resources, and beyond the identity of the current or future president. But nothing about xenophobia in South Africa is, as a Time headline claimed, «beyond racism.» Rather, xenophobia is racism, wrought from the messy apartheid past and post-colonial present.
Focusing as it does on foreigners, the poor, and the president, the U.S. coverage rarely mentions the old colonial state apparatus that the ANC inhabits. This apparatus includes the police and bureaucrats, some of whom occupy the very same positions they held under apartheid.
The recent legal classification of South Africans of Chinese descent as «Blacks» (while those of Japanese descent are considered «Whites») bears this out.
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