Mr. Coates does a great job of using his celebrity to raise awareness in the US and the Ms. Wiltz doe s great job of bringing this issue to the forefront. It needs continual awareness and there are many sides to these deep issues that plague history of oppression. One critical one is the recognition that from the view of the oppressor, the similarities are tremendously great. For example, if stop seeing America as unified by law from the onset, then we can more easily see the issues. While states like Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780 and New York in 1799 by laws, South Carolina didn’t and in fact made laws granting life and death power of all whites over black enslaved people under certain conditions. The white legislative body made laws that allowed whites to kill black American men who had been accused of having an affair with a white woman (which was deemed a sexual violation by the black man in particular) with no trial. That law in the 1840s and 1850s was not only anti-democracy, white men in the elite class who made this law effectively made the first legal police state, a full authoritarian regime where the state gave power to whites to kill blacks under conditions they saw fit.This is actually worse than apartheid, which doesn’t give this horrific power of ordinary citizens to kill other humans under certain conditions.
While Massachusetts abolished slavery and gave voting to black Americans and all other rights by 1780 from it’s constitution, we put the draconian despotic police state in the same “united” states mentally in with states that recognized the full humanity of black Americans. While group adopted democracy, the other group below the Mason-Dixon Line went the opposite direction, away from it. Today Americans naively and wrongly think that blacks didn’t vote and that voting is democracy. There is clear evidence that free black landowners (freeholders) voted in 1701 and 1703 in South Carolina, according the historical archival records kept by the state. The both voted, owned land, showed that voting was done in British Southern Carolina, which like Britian was not a “full” democracy.
After President Grant (a poor-civil rights liberal) eliminated Southern laws of formal apartheid made starting in 1865 in Southern confederate states starting in 1868, those states started making new apartheid laws after 1870, the amount and frequency depending on the strength of white racism in each state. We don’t call these apartheid law states, which is wrong. States like Massachusetts and New York never had them after abolishing slavery and never legally segregated schools. South Carolina and Kentucky started segregating schools and marriage explicitly by race after 1870, over and over again. We use false and misleading “unity” language, like “Jim Crow”, believing this laws of anti-democracy were everywhere in America, while also using democracy to speak of states with these laws, which are anti-democracy. We should give credit were credit is due and call states by what they are what they do.
We need to blame those making and supporting those laws from their point of view to see what and why they are engaging in repressive laws that make “the world’s first police state” (not an exaggeration if you read the laws but an accurate assessment of the laws), states of apartheid, or states of Freedom. If the sharp line of law wasn’t there, Frederick Douglass would never had been free.
Israel is not different. Their government legally seized control of Gaza and the West Bank and has controlled it by military force and occupation since 1967. They make laws that have recognized full citizenship for Israelis but force Palestinians to be non-citizens living under the Israeli police state and military law. These laws hold no matter where a Palestinian is within the boarder of all of Israel—the West Bank, Gaza, or Tel Aviv. For the legal perspective of Israel, it is one country and will remain that way, making a two-state solution impossible, as it will never go “backwards” as it sees it by its own volition and the US will protect it. Both states, Israel (1967-2024), South Carolina (1776-1865, 1872-1968, or after), were apartheid states like South Africa (1950-1990). We knew that because we have the laws they wrote. We know that Massachusetts was NOT (1780- 1968 arguably later). These awkward phrases, like Jim Crow and martial law (though better) probably should be replaced by apartheid law states.