Week 5 Media Item #2: Apartheid

This image is from Search.com's entry on Apartheid in South Africa. It depicts a beach in Durban, South Africa, but there is a sign. It says under law, only whites are allowed on the beach. It is meant to ban anyone who is not white to be able to access the beach. The sign is a a part of the overall system of apartheid that was a part of South Africa from 1948 to the 1990s.

The image is disturbing because it isn't old, in fact apartheid was a very recent system in South Africa that was done away with in the early 1990s. The system was a racist and inhumane system that targeted all non-whites in South Africa. The system was much like the Jim Crow system in the South as described by Richard Wright in his The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch. Jim Crow was a system in the South in the United States that segregated blacks and was inhumane and unjust towards blacks. It was meant to give whites superiority just as Apartheid was meant to in South Africa. Both, by law, said the groups of ethnic peoples could be separate as long as facilities were equal. However, for both, that was not the case. As Wright highlights on pp. 22-23 in the event of a fight, the whites has bottles to throw and trees to hide behind, while he and his black friends has only cinders and nothing to hide behind. He also talks about how the white side of town was prosperous, and that was where money could be made as stated on p. 23. However, throughout the document, he shows the inhumanity of Jim Crow and how it oppressed blacks. Similarly, Apartheid was an unjust system and facilities and services for blacks were in poorer quality as opposed for to the whites' facilities and services.

The image is an image that shows that racism and its incorporation into social systems is not relegated to the United States, it is a part of many other nations in the world including South Africa. Although Apartheid was done away with in the early 1990s, it still leaves a mark in the inhumanity it created in the lives of many non-whites in South Africa for nearly 50 years. I found it to be disturbing because in the overall system, this was merely a sign on a beach restricting access, I can't even imagine how harsh the rest of the system must have been. It certainly shows that racism is still a problem, as this was almost a decade ago.

Image citation:
"Petty apartheid": sign on Durban beach in English, Afrikaans and Zulu. History of South Africa in the apartheid era. Search.com. Online. Available: http://www.search.com/reference/History_of_South_Africa_in_the_apartheid_era (July 20, 2007).