Apartheid’s ‘separate development’ was framed as God-ordained equal access to unequal resources

Evidence

“Apartheid” was coined – the vision conceived – almost 20 years before the Nationalist Party took power more or less on its platform in 1948. At a Dutch Reformed Church conference on missionary work in 1929, Giliomee points out in his voluminous work on The Afrikaners, the Rev. C. J. du Plessis made the case for missionary work in “the spirit of apartheid that has always characterized [the Church’s] conduct.” He understood this “spirit of apartheid” as driving the separate development of a nation’s unique spirit, its “own” (eie) sensibility. That of blacks differed from whites’, and apartheid sought not only to recognize this but to center it as the grounds for national development. If there was equality in this, it was the sort of equality articulated in the US Supreme Court’s majority decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), namely, the equal right of access to unequal resources, possibilities, accommodations. At the heart of apartheid, black people had a right equal to that of white people: to their own language(s), sensibilities, cultural expression, places of habitation, schooling, recreation, even places or pews of worship, no matter the radical inequalities, supposed and produced, of those resources relative to whites’. Because those differences were seen as God-ordained, the divine command of the deity. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1507 (#expands, via linked claim)

The Church – in particular the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk) – played a defining role in apartheid’s articulation, elaboration, and rationalization in the century’s first half. The skeletal sociolegal structure of the state that would become apartheid, as I have suggested, was already stitched in place by the British and various administrations from 1910 to 1948: restrictive and increasingly eroded Native reserves set apart, Pass Laws, job color bars, segregated schools and delimited educational opportunities for those not white, divided recreational facilities and racially restrictive public accommodations, discrete voters rolls and differentiated political representation. That said, however, apartheid – as a term and as an idea, as a structure and as a set of practices, as an ideal and aspiration, as dream and nightmare, in short, as political theology – was projected as coherent conception from the Church, from God’s projected word, down. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1506 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507; Apartheid’s ideology of separate development was grounded in theologically-ordained racial difference. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1507; Apartheid’s political doctrine was generalized from a theological principle of separate churches (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Apartheid’s ideology of separate development was grounded in theologically-ordained racial difference. #expands (0.92) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1507
• Apartheid’s legal structure predates its theological rationale, which the Church supplied #complicates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1506