Internalizing Second Class Citizenship

Throughout history, leaders have used different methods for holding onto their power and keeping others from challenging their rules.  For instance, leaders have used religious justification to maintain power.  Monarchs called upon the Divine Right of Kings to legitimize their absolute power. The Divine Right of Kings stated that the one deserved his or her power because he was chosen by god to lead.

The Caste System in India was a system of social hierarchy that separated the haves and have-nots.  The people in lower castes were promised rewards in the after life as long as they respected their positions in society.

The Apartheid government did not use religion as a means to keep the minority in power, but was still able to effectively subjugate the majority black population.  How was this possible? 

The movie that our class watched, Cry Freedom, suggested that suppression was possible because members of the black community ultimately internalized a sense of inferiority that was a byproduct of the government’s brutal treatment.  We watched scenes depicting deadly crackdowns on peaceful protests in the homelands.  We saw black leaders being arrested and tortured for speaking out against the government. This brutality served two purposes.  One was to physically subjugate, intimidate, and isolate the black population.  The second was to corrupt the psyche of the black population into accepting the notion that they were second-class citizens.  As a result, many members of the black community lost the motivation to rebel against the government because they started to believe that they did not deserve to be treated equally.

The racism and prejudice that the government of South Africa demonstrated against the blacks amounted to a strategic political plan.  The Apartheid leaders in South Africa wanted to keep their power and positions by subjugating the black population.  This included leading some to believe that they were indeed less deserving of equality.  This was a particularly effective strategy for the government to maintain its power.[1]

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[1] Here is a clip that shows how easy it is for people to lose their identity when they are repeatedly told that they are something which they are not, The Bear That Wasn’t (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq0a5JTSGvU).  In this video, a bear is told repeatedly that he is just a silly man wearing a fur coat and needs a shave, until he finds himself believing that he actually is man.  The bear internalizes the idea that he is not a bear but a human. The moral of the clip is to show how difficult it is to maintain an identity when one is repeatedly told that he or she is something else.