THE JIM CROW ERA IS UPON US

THE test for the 2024 election will be the extent to which Black, Coloured and Asian liberation will front the agenda for the next government. Reading the manifestos, most of the plans allude to some kind of ongoing redress through economic growth, but nothing that’s completely radical from what has been attempted over the last 30 years.

Black, coloured and Asian voters are reminded that this election is their opportunity to reject their ongoing subjugation in a country whose Constitution has set them free but whose policies are strangling their freedoms and their futures. Only fools will deny that spatial, income, housing and employment data all show the ongoing oppression of the black, coloured and Asian South African voter.

On May 18, 1896, the US Supreme Court dealt the biggest blow to freed black people when they upheld the ruling of the Louisiana Supreme Court in the Plessy vs Ferguson matter. It led to the now famous “Jim Crow” laws, where the Supreme Court ruled that, while black people are free and equal to whites, social and economic discrimination cannot be seen as a crime, but rather as a function of everyday life.

At the time, Thomas Rice, a white, two-bit stage performer, painted his face black to entertain audiences inbetween stage transitions in theatres. He appeared on stage as “Jim Crow”, mimicking an exaggerated, stereotypical drunk, ragged, homeless and foolish black man.

Rice’s imitations of black people became famous and he travelled the USA and UK, performing for white audiences, his portrayals of black people as singing, dancing, drunk, grinning fools.

The name Jim Crow became synonymous with freed black people who were equal in law to white people but on every other level in society, were seen as drunk, homeless, grinning black fools.

The US Supreme Court, while upholding the 13th and 14th Amendments that abolished slavery, saw no problem with its silence on the social and economic discrimination against black people. It said in its ruling that “while the 14th Amendment guaranteed the legal equality of all races in the US, it was not intended to prevent social or other types of discrimination”.

The USA, from May 1896, entered a period of “equal but separate” policies for white and black people. These were known as the “Jim Crow” laws, where states could use local, economic, education and housing laws to still practise apartheid under the “equal but separate” doctrine. It was all based on the stereotypical image of black people as lazy, drunk, homeless criminals who did not fit into the neat, white Protestant classist view of the world.

South Africa, particularly in the Western Cape, is aggressively entering a Jim Crow period, where stereotypical views on black, coloured and Asian people are influencing policy and practice. White views of the world around us are used as the dominant (read: correct) views. Black, coloured and Asian people are made out to be “stupid, uninformed and foolish” and the opinions of white people are, in most cases, the “final word” on the matter.

With the proposed abolition of redress issues such as minimum wages and black economic advancement policies, and Western Cape independence proposals, we are sliding into an era of “equal but separate”. Because we have allowed others to define our freedom and liberation, we now face a Jim Crow period. Because we have been silent about ongoing black, coloured and Asian poverty and oppression and have our progress and prosperity decided by white political leaders and white commentators, the equal but separate doctrine now seems normal.

This election will be the test: do we put up and shut up? Do we continue to vote for the many obvious “equal but separate” systems that dominate our politics/economics, or do we demand, like Homer Plessy did, an end to this fake “equal rights” dispensation with its embedded and ongoing social discriminations everywhere? Vote wisely.