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Notes -
Yes, I’d definitely gotten the impression of apartheid being a corrupt mess running off of cheap labor and limited central control of the state apparatus, which didn’t work as well as it’s thought to have. It’s nice to have that confirmed.
What I’d never heard was the description of it as being fundamentally bureaucratically arbitrary; most people who described living under the system- including one who was half Lebanese and I would have expected to suffer from bureaucratic probes into his racial classification- described the oppressive aspects as being aimed at other people- either blacks or dissident whites who couldn’t keep their heads down. I’m totally willing to believe it could be a problem for some people, though.
And BTW ‘Japanese are white but Chinese are colored’ and ‘Muslims are colored unless they’re Turks’ just seem like common sense to me, although I suppose that’s not the extent of racial arbitrariness.
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