California as the next South Africa
When people think of South Africa – at least, people over fifty – they tend to think of its apartheid history. But in the decades since apartheid ended, South Africa’s efforts to undo those wrongs have caused extremely serious problems of their own [emphasis mine]:
It is hard to overstate the hope that followed the fall of apartheid in South Africa in 1994. The newly elected African National Congress was well positioned to move the country into a new era of equality and prosperity for all citizens. …
After nearly a half-century of apartheid, however, South African leaders argued that formal equality wasn’t enough. Instead, as the argument went, a transitional period of redress for nonwhites was required. These efforts included affirmative action, land reform, and “black economic empowerment,” among others. For example, the government bought white-owned farms and distributed them to black South Africans, many of whom lacked the skills and knowledge to run them successfully. As a result, once-profitable farming operations fell into disrepair and underuse, weakening both economic productivity and food security.
South Africa created a dense system of race-based policies across employment, procurement, land rights, and licensing. The country embedded racialism throughout the political, educational, and economic systems, making identity central to how the government, schools, and businesses hired employees, enrolled students, prioritized benefits, bid on contracts, and assessed the success of initiatives.
Today, the hope that followed the fall of apartheid has all but evaporated. …
Predictably, the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath of apartheid have become permanent. For many of the country’s leaders, the question is no longer whether racial redistribution is permissible; instead, the question is how extreme the racial redistribution will be. Race has been reinforced as a continual site of social conflict, instead of fading into the background of a multiethnic society.
I don’t pretend it’s not a dilemma to figure out how to proceed when one portion of a country has been severely discriminated against for that long and some sort of corrective is necessary. But I’m convinced that reverse racial preferences are not the answer.
The authors of that piece, Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe, claim that California is in danger of following in South Africa’s footsteps (without South Africa’s apartheid history):
[California’s] leaders have increasingly embraced a radical, race-based vision of politics that echoes South Africa’s post-apartheid experiment in racialized government.
For much of the twentieth century, California was a refuge for those fleeing the racism and discrimination of the Deep South. …
This City Journal investigation—based on an extensive review of government records, reports, and legislation, as well as interviews with leading legal scholars—reveals that during the past 15 years of one-party rule, California Democrats have worked tirelessly to import South Africa’s post-apartheid playbook to the Golden State.
During the administration of Governor Gavin Newsom, California’s racialist project has kicked into high gear. Race is becoming an organizing principle of public policy, shaping everything from education and data collection to bureaucratic decision-making and wealth redistribution. South Africa sorted its citizens by race to deny rights, and now California does the same to distribute benefits.
The rest of the article goes into the particulars.
I grew up in California – lived there until I was 22 and went off to the military. I was only aware of the various civil rights campaigns of the 1960s because of newspaper coverage of the various freedom marches. Mom and Dad had a handful of black friends – most of them academics, middle-class of some kind or other. There were a couple of black students at my high school, which was situated in what a co-blogger called a working-class to no-class distant suburb of Los Angels. (It was so far out on the edge that there were still a lot of small properties where people kept a cow or a couple of horses, donkeys and chickens. Watts – famed because of the racial riot later on — was just another suburb closer to the center of the city, an older suburb, of mostly well-kept houses and pretty gardens. I never saw segregated drinking fountains or bathrooms, or really anything else set aside on a racial basis. That there would be protests with firehoses turned on black protestors – just seemed totally bizarre, like something from another planet.
I believe I heard more open social bigotry regarding so-called “Okies” – the poor transients coming in from Texas and Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl years – than I ever heard regarding blacks.
Democrats would like to do to the entire country what they’ve done to California.
Grounds for Trump to take over CA by military force and hang governor greaseball.
“While California doesn’t require school districts to adopt the state’s model curriculum, the very existence of an ethnic-studies requirement allows school districts to import racialism to the classroom. ”
Like the Cultural Marxist Seminaries need someone to twist their arms behind their back and cry Uncle.
Hard to see how this won’t cause people to go to court, but with Leftists Judges it might be mute anyway.
Yes Kate, that’s the plan.
(As well as what the EU plans to do with Europe, what Carney et al. plan for Canada, etc.)
The Supreme Court has worked diligently to stop racial discrimination, but it hasn’t worked. DOJ could work overtime in CA and probably not fix the problem.
There’s a case on file going after an elite private high school in HI that doesn’t let whites in.
I had a law school classmate from South Africa. I recently messaged him about the current situation in his old home country. He expected what has happened – the attacks on whites – but he was just surprised that it took so long.
Cornhead illustrates the complexity of the problem; “DOJ could work overtime in CA and probably not fix the problem.”
Chases Eagles has a solution; “Grounds for Trump to take over CA by military force and hang governor greaseball.”
If the Left continues to destroy the areas under their control, military force may be the only remaining remedy. When abiding by the rule of law becomes suicidal, our unalienable right to life justifies “the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
I wouldn’t worry too much. Hispanics hate blacks, and Hispanics are the ones gaining ground in California politics. Asians also aren’t too keen on them, so this is sort of a last gasp as blacks make up only 9% and quickly falling of the CA population, and are clustered in only a few areas.
That’s not to say whites are loved by Hispanics, and particularly not by AsIans, but blacks are going to get the shorter end of the stick in the long run. This is why race based referendums keep losing in California, not because of the whites saying no, but of other races saying no, we won’t sign up to that race-guilt blacks try. So this is a lot of noise that won’t go anywhere.
Sensibles have lost the high ground (if they ever held it). I know a bit about South Africa’s story, since I spent a summer there as a medical student in mission hospitals in the days before the DeClerck/ Mandela era, and have followed it closely since.
The oppo to Apartheid arose in the USA, not in SA. It is viewed thru a US civil-rights lens, totally unrealistically. South Africa is hugely majority-black, and the blacks are not from one tribe (Bantus is the generic), but from several, e.g. Xhosa. And the tribes hate one another; each has its own homeland in SA.
White Afrikaaners and Brits governed, the mostly ignored Bantus were the labor force. When the local whites lost political power, thanks mostly to pro-Bantu Western forces, the country rapidly fell into cultural disarray and has never recovered. The current prime minister, Cecil Ramaphosa, began as a miners’ labor organizer and is now an exceedingly wealthy man. Corruption is rampant. White farmers (Africans since the 1600s) are being displaced and their lands are redistributed to Bantus, who lack the savvy of managing the high costs and industry of industrial agriculture.
It is a sad story. A rich land 2/3the size of the continental USA which can no longer feed itself, awash in tribalism and corruption.
I dunno. One can find parallels, but California has an extremely different history from South Africa.
I don’t think comparisons explain much beyond leftist grifters use race to grift.
Both regions have great surf and surfers, though.
huxley:
Yes, completely different history.
The analogy is to the years after apartheid in SA and the attempt to favor those who had been discriminated against, and then the downward spiral.
California was probably one of the least discriminatory states in the US earlier. But now it uses racial categories for way too many things.
Interesting discussion on the history of South Africa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhPc7o7Jig
It has always been the case that former slaves do not desire equality; they desire to become the new master. If ever there was a real world proof of this axiom, it is South Africa. Closer to home we see it in every measure of support for DEI, affirmative action and all the rest. What is curious is the support for these clearly unconstitutional and abjectly racist policies (in the sense that they are constructed entirely on the basis of “race” and designed to promote one “race” over others) coming from whites. However, when one examines the situation, one sees that white support for these reverse racist policies has two disparite, but interelated bases. First, there are those deluded saps who have been taken over by the mind virus of anti-racism and pathological empathy, but the larger problem is the segment of white self-promoters who have used the phenomenon to advance their personal status, as best exemplified in electoral politics by the governess of New York and the governor of California, but elsewhere in union bosses like the execrable Randi Weingarten as well as in nouveau riche like the “merry widows” Mackenzie Scott and Lorene Jobs. (In this category one also sees rank America-haters like Singham and other self-styled “democratic socialists”.) They seek power by pandering to those to whom they promise free stuff, whom they identify as “victims” while simultaneously appealing to the the saps’ pathological empathy. This is a toxic brew that is guaranteed to eventually destroy the society over which they seek to govern. Whether that is their express desire or merely ignorance is an open question.
From the previous thread:
Richard Cook on July 17, 2026 at 7:31 pm said:
“I don’t pretend it’s not a dilemma to figure out how to proceed when one portion of a country has been severely discriminated against for that long and some sort of corrective is necessary.” Neo
The corrective is to stop the discrimination. You can’t ever “make up” for it without damaging someone else. [see related to below]
And
Steve (Retired/recovering lawyer) on July 17, 2026 at 8:34 am said:
“It has always been the case that former slaves do not desire equality; they desire to become the new master.”
Somewhere in the updated history about slavery I learned that there were examples of freed slaves who in turn were “enterprising” enough to buy and use slaves themselves.
I recall something similar in regard to the La Amistad incident in 1839, where the leading slave went back to Africa and enslaved others there.
But the real problem with moves to provide reparations to modern day blacks for the sins committed against their antecedents is [assuming you can correctly identify the right group; and arrive at an eqitable repayment amount] that once the reparation is paid, then the racist sin is “erased” and no further discussion or attention to past racism by the racialist industry can be allowed [perhaps upon penalty of returning the reparation amount if such continued discussion occurs.] But that industry cannot and would not let the issue rest or die that way as they have too much invested in status and money to give it all up.