• Tyre Nichols’s killing has sparked a conversation about racism and police brutality in America.
• Kgadi, a South African soldier, grew up under apartheid and was inspired to join the military partly because he wanted to be like the white-led police force that had killed his brother.
• South Africa has gone from strict segregation to a place where people of color fill the president’s cabinet, dominate Parliament, set school curricula, run universities, and write the news.
• Post-apartheid South African police officers kill more civilians per capita than the American police do.
• Under South Africa’s first Black president, Nelson Mandela, Black-liberation leaders had expected great change, but Mandela asserted his commitment to the status quo.
• Black South Africans felt a pressure to perform and do the job in a way that their predecessors would approve of or recognize.
• Malaika, a “born free”, observed that some Black people in her formerly white neighborhood went overboard building ostentatious security walls and refused to answer when Black handymen rang their doorbell.
• A life coach wrote a blog post advising Black women to act like white madams for their maids to respect them.
• South African Black people often felt they were treated worse by Black authorities than by white people.
• Black service providers were sometimes accused of having a double standard when it came to treating wealthier Black customers.
• The Black-liberation movement’s goal was to dismantle the world white South Africans created, or just to move more freely within it.
• Kuseni Dlamini, the second Black CEO of Anglo American South Africa, chose to join the top ranks of an institution from which he had long been barred.
• Some Black leaders developed the same kind of loathing for poorer Black people that apartheid-era white leaders had evinced.
• Police brutality and racism are intimately linked in South Africa, as in America.
• Black South African police officers often look back at apartheid with nostalgia, as a time when police had more absolute power to use force.
• Complex, inherited ideas about power and internalized racism can lead Black cops to kill a Black man.
• Traditions we have attempted to discard after discerning their injustice will likely be heritable and persistent.
Published February 7, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Eve Fairbanks’s original post The Persistent Racism of Policing