 have vocabulary. Artists are dangerous people because they are called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul.”[ii]
On June 24, 1901 a boy was born in a town in eastern Poland. He arrived in the United States on April 18, 1941 as a Jewish, immigrant-refugee. Raphael Lemkin has been characterized as one who belonged to a virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses.[iii]
Lemkin’s distress was attributable to the evil he observed evolving in Europe. He focused on developing a readily recognizable term that captured the essence of the malady. He studied semantic theory and linguistics. He discarded terms like barbarism and mass murder. In November 1944, Columbia University Press released his book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The word that he created to populate the discourse about the reality of Hitler’s horrors was unleashed. ‘Genocide,‘ the crime without a name had been born. Shortly after his death on August 28, 1959, approximately 70 countries had ratified a treaty criminalizing genocide. His funeral was attended by seven people.
Daniel Malaan became Prime Minister of South Africa in May 1948. He mis-diagnosed the ills of South Africa and was a central architect in the deployment of the prescribed treatment: apartheid. According to the dictionary, apartheid is defined as, the policy or practice of political, legal, economic, or social discrimination, as against the members of a minority group. The apartheid prescription developed by South Africa included the molecular components for the preservation of white supremacy, separation of the races and a retribalization of Africans. By 1991, a period of forty-three years, the final vestiges of apartheid legislation were repealed and free elections were held in 1994. Making a poor diagnosis and prescribing the wrong treatment can eviscerate the soul of a nation.
Today in the United States, we are not immune to the insidious maladies that come to infect the souls of our people and the heart of our nation. The symptoms are evident, the malady is pervasive, and the integrity of our country is at stake. There are a myriad of diagnostic opinions, yet no congressional consensus and federal approval for the components of the cure. This disease has no name.
There will be no magic pill we can swallow, no miraculous antibiotic we can inject, no patch we can affix to our epidermis, no secret lotion we can apply. When the heart of a nation becomes afflicted with cardiovascular infarction, we’ve all come down with the malady, whether we recognize it individually or not. Today, the U.S. has become infected with the disease of immipartheid. To prepare yourself to ingest what I’m about to say, gird yourself with the counter-intuitive curiosity of Salk, the compassionate persistence of Lemkin, and the distinct potential for living the consequences from disastrous errors in judgment embraced by the nation of South Africa. Let me explain.
Apartheid has been diagnosed as possessing the following elements:
- A policy of racial segregation involving political, legal, and economic discrimination against nonwhites.
- A principle or practice of separating or setting apart groups of people.
- The legal circumstance of being separated from others; segregation.
According to the U.S. census[iv] in 1860, the population of the U.S. was 31,443,321. Of that total, 3,953,760 were identified as non-white slaves. In 2007, the estimates range from 10 to 30 million undocumented, resident immigrants living in the U.S., the vast majority of which are non-white and of Hispanic descent. The percentages of non-white slaves in this nation 150 years ago and undocumented immigrant residing among us today are comparable. The parallels continue.
The non-white South Africans subjected to apartheid, former non-white slaves in the U.S. and present day undocumented immigrants residing in the U.S., have the following in common:
- Voting rights were restricted or non-existent.
- Access to public services such as education and medical care were restricted and often of inferior quality vs. those