Living in my little bubble, I hadn't thought about
Apartheid for a long time, and for whatever odd reason, a very specific memory was
triggered for me tonight: I was a young boy, in maybe 5th or 6th grade (hard to
say exactly) when we learned about Apartheid in Social Studies class. I remember finding the practice so strange;
but what I find even more strange now, in retrospect, is the completely
matter-of-fact way in which the information was presented to us.
There it was, in our Social Studies textbook, right
alongside countless other then-current factoids about faraway places. Italy was shaped like a boot. The capital of Iceland was pronounced ‘Ray-VEEK’
(not even true.) Women of the Muslim
faith had to wear veils (of course, we knew no such women personally… they
lived in distant lands, which was why we learned such things within the context
of geography lessons.) The Dutch had
wooden shoes. And in South Africa, there
was a set of laws called Apartheid, which required Negroes (yes, that was the
word used – it was considered more respectful than the available alternatives
at the time) to be segregated from white people. Now turn to page 183 and do the exercise at
the bottom of the page. Just like that. Yep, people around the world do all kinds of
strange things, don’t they?
Perhaps even more strange, and this may just be a
function of selective memory coupled with old age, I don’t recall our teacher
ever connecting the dots between Apartheid in South Africa and the then-raging
Civil Rights movement in our own country.
Malcolm X was murdered in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. I would have been in fifth grade in 1969. The wounds were fresh, the connection clear;
yet I don’t recall any elementary school teacher of mine going near that Third
Rail. It just… wasn’t done; not in that
particular place, at that time. I suspect
that, had some brave teacher reached for the ‘teachable moment,’ they would have
invoked the wrath of a community of like-minded,
overwhelmingly white parents. Stirring
the pot, and all that.
If there’s any conclusion to be drawn here, it must be
that we have come a long way since those troubled times. That we have a black president would have
been unthinkable back then. And, though
we’ve heard his praises sung incessantly today, it is nonetheless true that we have leaders
like Nelson Mandela to thank for the progress we’ve made.Rest in peace, Mr. Mandela.
