Apartheid

62
s/he was Coloured. More often it was of course the physical lightness of skin color that
decided a person’s ethnicity and standing in the inflexible social, political, economic and
cultural hierarchy. On some of these criteria, Mandela reflects:
The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or
Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of
the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether
one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed
to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of
one’s hair or the size of one’s lips. 83
Not least due to the consequences of such policies and practices and their profound
political contexts, ethnicism reveals itself to be the most superficial judgement of a person’s
character and worth. In Israel, however, the religious confession of a given person (or of at
least one of his or her recent ancestors) establishes his or her ethnicity. This may seem like a
more humane distinction. It is obviously not as superficial as skin-color or hair-texture racism,
but it de-secularizes society and, moreover, oppressively divides it within itself just the same.
It must never be forgotten that the reason or excuse for cultural or purported racial difference
is above all a distinction which, whether it is skin-color, religion, mother language,
upbringing, or other accidents, decides whether a person will be a first-, second-, or even
third-class citizen in an apartheid society. Moreover, religious confession is not and can never
be a watertight criterion for dividing people into groups, either. In Israel, agnostic or atheist
Jews are counted among the privileged due to the religion of their parents or grandparents
and/or due to their mother language. Agnostic and atheist Arabs are being oppressed for the
very same perverse reasons. Moreover, the traditional definition of Jewishness, whether one’s
mother was a Jew, introduces a racial or at least biological criterion of ethnicity through the
back door, as it were. Today’s most utilized official definition of a Jew by the state of Israel is
that of a person who has at least one Jewish grandparent. The explicit argument for extending
the traditional definition here is that if someone was Jewish enough for the Nazis to murder,
then s/he is Jewish enough for state-granted privileges in Israel. The argument forgets,
however, firstly that the Nazis were neither Palestinian or Arab nor Muslim, and secondly that
the Jewish state was not erected on virgin soil. The implicit argument is that by thus extending
‘Jewishness’ by 200 per cent, along with other measures of demographic warfare, including a
host of racist immigration and naturalization laws and policies, the high Palestinian birth rate
can be neutralized in order to keep the Jewish state Jewish.
In the end, ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ criteria for ethnicism are equally unfair and
equally oppressive. At times, it might even turn out impossible to separate the two. For
instance, racism is often manifested by the victims being described and treated by the racists
as ‘underdeveloped’, ‘retarded’ or ‘child-like’. Essentially and unscientifically, this refers to
both organic and experiential immaturity, or to one of these only, or even more likely, to a
fuzzy mixture of both, whereby racists attempt to salvage their ‘arguments’ by means of
devious side-stepping and double standards.
I am not absolutely certain about which criteria were the crucial ones in Graeco-
Roman Egypt, but the body of evidence presented in Chapters II.6.1, II.7.1, II.8.1, and II.9.1,
below, suggests that they were mainly related to the mastery of the Greek language and other
Greek cultural peculiarities. The racist criteria there appear to have been more similar to
modern Israel than to South Africa, more cultural than biological, less based on visual criteria,
yet in effect no less oppressive. As we shall see, European (i.e. Greek or Roman) and to some
extent Jewish ethnicity in Graeco-Roman Egypt also had to be ‘proven’ by means of both
paternal and maternal ethnicity, in order to gain access, rights and privileges. In sum, the
criteria for ethnic distinctions are basically political, and they are fundamentally and
83 Mandela 1995 (1994): 121f.