“…It was remarkable to me that a country could memorialize and reincorporate its oppressive past by building the foundation of its Constitutional Court and Constitutional Hall upon the bricks and walls of its old prisons.

Even though the Constitutional Court is the equivalent of the United States Supreme Court, its design and presentation could not be more different than our hallowed American building of marble and looming columns…

One of the most interesting things about studying in South Africa has been encountering how the state addresses the history and legacy of apartheid. This experience has been especially interesting in contrast to my perceptions of the United States and its treatment of indigenous and black populations, among other historically oppressed groups.

Watching South Africa – the most unequal country in the world – confront its social issues, I have grown interested in the notion of refounding a country…”

Read more at The Stanford Daily: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/02/17/a-luta-continua-refounding-a-nation/

Even though apartheid policies have ended, its effects are still in place. The regime that displaced and structurally underdeveloped these groups has been ousted, but the displacement and structural underdevelopment remain…

The same racist capitalism and “democracy” that utilized coerced slave labor for profit and murdered indigenous Americans for land then underdeveloped black life for the purposes of low-cost wage labor. Following civil rights legislation and the globalization that we’re used to today, the racist logic of profit acquisition shifted south, west and east, to utilize the third world labor (which is necessarily black and brown) to serve the same ends. So we wind up with underemployment and structural unemployment of poor and working-class blacks (who are no longer needed by the system), the use of migrant groups and the global south for cheap labor…

Read more at The Stanford Daily.

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/02/06/slavery-and-apartheid-by-another-name/