21 - Religion and racism: struggles around segregation, ‘Jim Crow’ and apartheid

Summary

Alongside the rise and fall of Nazism, the twentieth century bears witness to two other significant settings in which the Christian faith responded to racist policies and practices in both honourable and dishonourable fashion: the Republic of South Africa and the United States of America. In terms of the sheer scope of events, each of these settings deserves, and has certainly received, its own attention. Furthermore, there are some key differences between them which make comparisons difficult and which would suggest they be treated separately; differences to do with the experience of plantation slavery, the diversity of tribal languages, the white-to-black demographic ratio, traditional land settlement patterns, and constitutional circumstances and provisions. Yet there are two very important themes that link these histories together.

First we must acknowledge that the economic forces behind the system of slavery, which provided the foundation for racism and segregation in the USA, namely European capitalist expansion, are the same forces that drove the European colonisation of southern Africa and laid the foundation for the system of apartheid (separateness). In both cases Africa was dehumanised and destroyed on the altar of Christian Europe. Whilst much of this background falls outside the time frame of this volume, we would do well to recognise this as providing for the fundamental coherence between the black experience in Africa and the black experience in America.