Population Registration Act Quotes

Why classify by skin color at all, unless you plan to invoke it in some way. If one group oppresses another, inadvertently or on purpose, you’d want good data on who’s oppressing whom so that you can redress the problem. With the same data, however, nefarious people in power might want to magnify inequality, which is just what happened in apartheid South Africa. The 1950 Population Registration Act codified skin color into White and Black, with multiple subcategories of Coloured, which included mixed race and Asian, enabling the White minority in power to establish laws that prescribed and stratified the social, political, educational, and economic freedoms of each population differently.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act greatly extended federal power in the United States. A frankly regional measure, it took aim at Deep South states by stipulating that the Justice Department could intervene to suspend discriminatory registration tests in counties where 50 percent or fewer of the county's voting-age population had been able to register.