 afforded their white counterparts.
- Forms of identification emerged that designated the person as a member of a segregated class. ( consular cards, discussion about the implementation of a national ID card).
- Movement within the country was restricted. (try getting on an airplane today without a valid ID).
- Permits authorizing one to labor in certain occupations and/or certain geographic areas emerged. Oftentimes, these permits did not include the spouse or other members of one’s own family.
- The legal ownership of land was tightly regulated, precluding segregated persons from participation.
The parallels are clear: A disenfranchised class of people, numbering in the millions, was formed and sustained in South Africa. Of course, in the case of U.S. slaves and non-whites in South Africa, the creation and maintenance of this social structure of legalized oppression was intentional. Allow me to politely characterize the genesis of the situation of resident, undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today as inadvertent. Yet, the reality of the situation we find ourselves in here in the U.S. is clearly a mutant form of apartheid. We’ve contracted immipartheid; a condition that possesses a distinctly similar syndrome of outcomes for the afflicted as apartheid.
You may contract disease either inadvertently or intentionally. The intentionality of willingly, or deliberately infecting another person with an infectious disease, shocks the global human conscience (take for example, knowingly transferring an HIV infection to another person). In fact, in some cultures, this act is criminal. No matter how one contracts an infection, you must desire to return to a state of health. It requires treatment. The unwillingness to admit that one is ill, or agree upon the proper course of treatment, serves only to advance the seriousness of one’s condition. This is the state of the patient today in U.S. society: unwilling to admit we are soul-sick, and loath to muster the courage to immerse ourselves in the essential therapeutic milieu, we maintain the immipartheid infection, spreading it to others, allowing it to grow in complexity, advance in seriousness, posing an ever greater threat to the present health and welfare of our entire nation, our prospects for a full recovery, and a healthy, vibrant future.
This is not the first time in U.S. history we have succumbed to the insufferable angst of determining what to do with ourselves in a predicament like this. In the collected essays of America’s revered James Baldwin, Baldwin recorded and characterized the plight the American Negro (to use his words), as he wrestled with the issues of democracy, race and the American identity. The parallels to our current quandary are obvious:
“This is why his history and his progress, his relationship to all other Americans, has been kept in the social arena. He is a social and not a personal or a human problem; to think of him is to think of statistics, slums, rapes, injustices, remote violence; it is to be confronted with an endless cataloguing of losses, gains, skirmishes; it is to feel virtuous, outraged, helpless, as though his continuing status among us were somehow analogous to disease – cancer, perhaps, or even tuberculosis – which must be checked even though it cannot be cured. In this arena, the black man acquires quite another aspect from that which he has in life. We do not know what to do with him in life….Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for the annulment of his.”[v]
The immunity we thought we had developed to being susceptible to this form of societal malady appears to have broken through again – or did we ever really have immunity?
Triggering the Immune Response
Most diseases are contracted inadvertently. When you become ill, you don’t go around looking for the source of the bug do you? Yet, in the case of immipartheid, we, once again, focus our attention on identifying a scapegoat; someone to blame. No issue (other than abortion) seems to 