Reddit reviews Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa

Well, if you actually do have an open mind, you should look into these resources:

• The Mismeasure of Man. This book touches on the specifics of understanding how race is a social construct that doesn't contain biological imperatives. It also touches in incredible detail about how people distort scientific evidence when it concerns race.
  
• Slavery by Another Name (book), paired documentary. These touch on the systems of laws and practices followed after civil war that literally kept slavery alive for black people after the "victory" of the U.S. Civil War and the 13th Amendment. Reading these histories is like enduring one of those movies where the evil sheriff cruelly enforces the law, enslaving the hero (e.g., First Blood: Rambo I). Except unlike the movies, there is no second act, no one ever gets rid of the sheriff, and the hero is worked to death in a mine or a sawmill for no pay. And this went on for decade after decade.
  
• Blood in the Face (1995 book), paired documentary from 1991. These touch on the modern racist and skinhead movements.
  
• Any history of the civil rights might work. I would suggest Eyes on the Prize (link is just to part 1), with the matching (thin) book written by Juan Williams, now with Fox News. A much longer historical treatment of this period is Parting the Waters
  
• Down these Mean Streets is a personal memoir by a Puerto Rican who lived in Spanish Harlem. Piri Thomas, the author of the memoir, was the darkest-skinned son in a large Puerto Rican family. The book covers many things, but there is a special horror when the author realizes how much his own family has rejected him because he is so much darker than they are.
  
• It's not directly related to this discussion of American racism, but I found Country of My Skull powerful and moving, the story of a white (boer) journalist who is covering the Truth And Reconciliation Commission, which carefully went over the history of apartheid in South Africa.
  
• In addition, you might consider reading a biography of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.
  
  
  You write:
  
  > Asians are better scholars, and blacks are better athletes than whites, and yet you blithely say that "nothing in the physical makeup" of these people makes them more or less anything. I guess only the good things count.
  
  No and no. It is you who are asserting false things without evidence on your side. You need to read more, and you need to experience more.
  
  For me, the coin really dropped when I was tutoring a Chinese girl in Calculus when I was finally in a big college in a major city. Every Asian I had known until then in my provincial upbringing had been smart and engaging. I fully believed the stereotype of scholarly asians. Even there in college, my girlfriend at the time was Chinese and wicked smart. So I had "evidence" for my belief, but it was being contradicted by her stubborn inability to understand the math in front of her. It finally just hit me right then that this lady I was tutoring was kind of stupid as far as math went. Nothing wrong with that, but that was the moment that it hit me that the positive stereotype I had had was blinding me to the reality of the situation, and what she could literally understand.
  
  I hope you'll consider what I've written, and read one or more of the books I've suggested. They've all been important to me.
  

These are the books we read in my Africa in Popular Media and African History classes in college. I highly recommend all of them:

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky

God Grew Tired of Us

A Long Way Gone

A Continent for the Taking

Black Hawk Down

Country of My Skull

Kaffir Boy

Machete Season: the Killers in Rwanda Speak

The Graves Are Not Yet Full

An Ordinary Man

> Wanting to achieve something without opposition knowing that the thing you want to achieve will naturally be opposed by many people makes no sense.

So to help explain, the engineers of apartheid did foresee opposition, and there were already long standing laws (Pass Laws) that they could use to enforce the system.

This link is about the Pass Laws. These enabled the control and movement of people:
http://autocww.colorado.edu/~toldy3/E64ContentFiles/AfricanHistory/PassLaws.html

This link talks about the policing of groups of people:
http://www.csvr.org.za/index.php/publications/1483-the-policing-of-public-gatherings-and-demonstrations-in-south-africa-1960-1994.html

This was a minority government that knew it would have to be strict in enforcing it's unpopular and opposed system of government to prevent any kind of organised dissent or opposition. It put in place legislation in hopes of maintaining rule. That it failed, doesn't mean they didn't try.

Apartheid, and the reasons for it, are complicated. It wasn't an idea that just popped out of nowhere. To have a good understanding of it I'd look at the history of South Africa from when the first Europeans arrived. Some of them developed quite bizarre notions.

This is a good book to help understand the complexity of apartheid, how it operated, and it's aftermath: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Country-My-Skull-Sorrow-Forgiveness/dp/0812931297

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