I guess what I'm interested in is both how the average person on the street justified it to their neighbours but also how a politician or a news presenter justified it.
On a TV show when they did 'balance' between two interviewees what did the segregationist say?
It's something that seems obviously wrong now but perhaps at the time was more of dilemma? I'm hoping to use this to understand if we have some dilemmas now that will, one day, be obvious and others will struggle to understand what the conversation was even about.
Thanks in advance.
In the Southern US under Jim Crow, the official line was that African-Americans were not denied any rights, but that they had segregated facilities, which it was still maintained actually meant "separate but equal". They were generally denied the vote due to various inane testing procedures designed to keep blacks off and whites on the voting registers (i.e. either incredibly ambiguous questions, or impossibly hard questions but with whites being exempted through grandfather clauses), but Southern officials maintained the fiction that these were just standard tests of literacy and understanding.
In South Africa, initially the government pushed a fairly openly racist 'noble savage' view that Black South Africans were at a "lesser stage of development" and so were not yet mature enough for political responsibility. They also argued that segregation was, in part, really designed to protect the African indigenous cultures from European influence. Later, after the bantustans were set up, the argument changed; now that claim was that there were no "Black South Africans", they were all citizens of KwaZulu/Venda/Transkei/etc and so South Africa had no obligations to them, and that blacks in "South Africa proper" were actually foreign immigrants rather than normal residents.