APARTHEID AS PERFECT RACISM AND POLICE STATE

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2016) ("Apartheid was perfect racism. . . ."  "As the British Empire fell, the Afrikaner rose up to claim South Africa as his rightful inheritance. To maintain power in the face of the country's rising and restless black majority, the government realized they needed a newer and more robust set of tools. They set up a formal commission to go out and study institutionalized racism all over the world. They went to Australia. They went to the Netherlands. They went to America. They saw what worked, what didn't. Then they came back and published a report, and the government used that knowledge to build the most advanced system of racial oppression know to man." "Apartheid was a police state, a system of surveillance and laws designed to keep black people under total control. A full compendium of those laws would run more that three thousand pages and weigh approximately ten pounds, but the general thrust of it should be easy enough for any American to understand. In America you had the forced removal of the native onto reservations coupled with slavery followed by segregation. Imagine all three of those things happening to the same group of people at the same time. That was apartheid." Id. at 19-20.).