Sad Similarities Between Post-Apartheid South Africa and Post-Segregation United States

The New York Times had a fantastic article this week about the economic and residential segregation that persists in South Africa, End of Apartheid in South Africa? Not in Economic Terms. Sadly there are real similarities between the situation of blacks in South Africa and blacks in the United States. In both cases, large swathes of the population were barred from owning property or acquiring any wealth for generations. The net result is that now, even though they are technically free to engage in the economy, they don't have any capital to invest in businesses or property or any collateral to use to secure loans, let alone the social capital necessary to land the best jobs.

In  the article we learn about one family's attempts to start a business. They have ambition, but:

"when they applied for loans, the banks turned them away. They had no collateral.
They were in crowded company. Ten percent of all South Africans — the majority white — owns more than 90 percent of national wealth, according to a 2016 research paper by Anna Orthofer, a graduate student at Stellenbosch University. Some 80 percent of the population — overwhelmingly black — owns nothing at all."

In the U.S. we also find that capitalism works well, but it works best for those who already have sufficient capital, both financial and social (education, access to networks of wealth, speech and diction, exposure to elite culture). As a result, we continue to have shockingly high rates of poverty for many black Americans and great deal of racial segregation by residential neighborhood.

Government policies played a large role in the problem in both countries. In South Africa, these policies kept the vast majority of land in white hands, despite talk of freedom for South African blacks. In the U.S. the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) openly rated neighborhoods with non-whites as the highest risk for banks well into the 1960s, thereby making in almost impossible to get mortgage loans in such neighborhoods. This greatly contributed to the overwhelming whiteness of early sub-urbanization. If a black person moved to your suburb, it was going to instantly become almost impossible to sell your house. And this was because of a government-sanctioned policy!

To see how this plays out today, take a look at the amazing Racial Dot Map from the University of Virginia. Every single person counted in the U.S. by the 2010 census is on this map as a dot that is color-coded to race or ethnicity. As you scroll about the country and zoom in and out, you will see that we generally don't live near people who are racially or ethnically different than us, despite all of the political rhetoric to the contrary. It's particularly shocking to take a look at Los Angeles, one of the "most diverse" cities in the country. But it's primarily diverse only in aggregate. On the neighborhood level, there is a great deal of uniformity. Click on the map below to have a look.

https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html