American South <=> Nazi Germany?

“To paint the picture of how we live on the tobacco, cane, rice, and cotton plantations is to compete with mighty artists: the movies, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the Church. They have painted one picture: charming, idyllic, romantic; but we live another: full of the fear of the Lords of the Land, bowing and grinning when we meet white faces, toiling from sun to sun, living in unpainted wooden shacks that sit casually and insecurely upon the red clay” (35).

            As I read this quote, I immediately thought of Nazi propaganda in Germany in the 1930s. When Hitler first began using internment camps, they were made out to be not unlike a normal prison, complete with fields for playing sports. The truth about the brutality of Himmler’s KZ camps was masked from the public as far as propaganda went. Of course, we now know that these camps were the Nazi regime’s way of removing “undesirables,” as any non-Aryan or disabled person was known.

            However, despite the attempts to conceal what was happening, Germans knew about the intense persecution, and even had an idea of the violence of the camps. This quote leads me to draw a comparison between the treatment of African Americans in the South and Jews in Nazi Germany. Despite the picture that was painted of slavery in the South, Americans knew the way the slaves were treated, and yet nothing significant was done about it for a long time. This was because, much like the Jews in Germany, African Americans were viewed as “undesirable” in American society, lower forms of life that didn’t deserve rights or even a place among the more superior race (Aryanization). The only difference is the Nazis final solution to this problem was genocide, while America’s solution was slavery.

            In light of the similarities between the two situations, in addition to the commonplace of lynching in the South, how many degrees away from genocide was American slavery?