Sweetie, It's Probably a Preview of YOUR Future
It's not a completely insane thing to talk about, but rest assured BLACKS KNEW they were being excluded in the US.
There were WHITES who were like "Nooooo. It must not REALLY be their skin color! They just make less money on average and that's why they don't qualify for loans for that neighborhood."
I'm a naive, sheltered fool White woman who thought I didn't drink the racist Kool-aid of the Deep South until one day I was introduced to someone who was my husband's best friend that he NEVER shut up about to the point of getting on my nerves until I'm literally feeling like "Go have sex with HIM! And stop bothering me!"
And he turned out to be Black. And I learned that when I SAW him for the first time. Hubby NEVER mentioned it.
And two things showed on my face when I saw him that first time:
1. The surprise at his skin color.
2. And the HORROR at realizing "Oh. THAT'S racism. THAT'S how people get excluded in the Deep South. If you don't mention their skin color, they are obviously White and if they aren't White, as a courtesy you politely notify people about that detail ahead of time."
And he probably thought I was horrified he was Black rather than horrified at what I had just seen about myself that I thought wasn't there.
When I was probably in seventh or eighth or ninth grade, a Black teacher of mine talked once about the fact that lynchings weren't that long ago and to people still alive in the Black community, that wasn't history. That was a dead father or uncle or neighbor.
I was probably between twelve and fourteen years old when this remarkable conversation or commentary occured. The last time I tried to look this up, Wikipedia suggested the last lynchings were in 1968, the year I turned three.
I was White and to me, lynchings were something in fiction in movies. To Blacks, it had stopped maybe a decade earlier and some of my classmates may have remembered someone who died that way and my Black teachers almost certainly knew of such an incident within their memory, possibly even in their neighborhood or the neighborhood of someone they knew.
Wikipedia seems to no longer say "This ended in 1968." It now notes it became rare after the 1960s but still occured occasionally and was only made a federal crime in 2022.
The US is still a culture dominated by White people. That means White people tend to run the government, own the newspapers and social media and etc.
That means without trying to intentionally be racist and exclusionary, the information made readily available to the public trends towards being what matters to White people, what they care about or worry about and tends to err on the side of not mentioning what makes the mostly White gatekeepers uncomfortable.
WHITE people think it wasn't blatant. BLACK people don't necessarily see it that way. You're just not really hearing their side of it STILL.
The reality is that most likely what Trevor Noah sees in the US as worse than the racism in South Africa is what the future of South Africa looks like if it continues towards trying to reduce racism.
Because studies show that even after the blatant in-your-face discrimination ends and people state publicly they don't agree with blatant racism, sexism, etc., they still typically agree with the subtler secondary and tertiary forms of discrimination.
Like "The person in authority should be tall, broad shouldered and have a deep, commanding voice."
Or "It's not racism to not hire people who speak African American Vernacular English. I just need someone educated and articulate."
To which I used to reply "George W. Bush."
And that's probably one of the reasons I'm banned from or not really welcome in several "best of" or "oldest" online forums which are typically owned by and run by upper class White people who will "jokingly" tell you to your face that it's bad form to make those in power uncomfortable lest they uninvite you from society.
Footnote
Sweetie is Southern. I'm not trying to insult him. More like calling him a naive, innocent youth.