Apartheid’s ideology rested on God-ordained separate-but-equal racial development

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

Categorization

• SHARE: Theologically-driven ‘equal right to unequal resources’ framing offers a crisp case for someone studying ideology legitimation of hierarchy.
• XREF: connects to: 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 ‘separate development’ was framed as God-ordained equal access to unequal resources; Apartheid’s political doctrine was generalized from a theological principle of separate churches (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Apartheid’s ideology of separate development was grounded in theologically-ordained racial difference. #corroborates (0.98) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1507
• Apartheid’s ‘separate development’ was framed as God-ordained equal access to unequal resources #corroborates (0.92)
• Theological equality of souls was reconciled with racial developmental hierarchy. #expands (0.88) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1508
• Apartheid’s racial order rested on direct theological self-legitimation, not post-hoc rationalization. #expands (0.85) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1538
• Apartheid’s political doctrine was generalized from a theological principle of separate churches #expands (0.75)
• Apartheid originated as a church self-governance doctrine generalized across the whole polity #expands (0.73) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1515