Social apartheid

Social apartheid is de facto segregation on the basis of class or economic status, in which an underclass is forced to exist separated from the rest of the population.

The word "apartheid", an Afrikaans word meaning "separation", gained its current connotation during the years of South Africa's Apartheid system of government-imposed racial segregation, which took place between 1948 and early 1994.

As part of that system, the then-National Party-run government declared certain regions as being "for whites only", with populations of people of color being forcibly relocated to designated, remote areas, that were deemed less desirable to live in, under the Group Areas Act. The racial segregation and many other negative consequences that resulted from that Act remain in place today, despite South Africa now being a democracy.

This is especially obvious in Cape Town, where spatial planning under the Group Areas Act was so "successful" in terms of its intended outcomes, that many areas remain with very similar racial demographics to the way they were during Apartheid - generationally-transferred societal stratification.