The other day Johnny Leashore railed about a 15 percent minority of white folks controlling a city of black majority. He went on and on for about five minutes and I almost turned off the program and dismissed it as Leashore going on and on, but hesitated just a little because he began to define his position.

He called this “apartheid.”

Immediately, I felt sick to my stomach.

Apartheid is an Afrikaans word. It means, literally, “apartness.”

To use it to describe the political power struggle here in Selma is to denigrate the people who lived and survived in South Africa; those who lived in squalor in those camps and who had to show papers in the evening when they walked the street and then, even then, risked a beating just for breathing.

To use apartheid to describe Selma today is to take away from the work of Ernest Cole, who recorded a photographic history of black people in South Africa under apartheid, which is strikingly similar to life in the South of Jim Crow before the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

His work is spread out in a book published in 1966 called “House of Bondage.” He is little remembered in his country because his photographs were banned.

Cole took some of the photographs in the book by sneaking a camera into the gold mines where he worked. He put the camera under sandwiches and an apple in a plain lunch bag and went into the mines to work.

One of the images in the book is of naked mine recruits in a line, their arms outstretched over their heads and a sink on the wall at the end of the line — this is how those who ran the mines determined if the men were strong enough for the work.

Another is of well-dressed black men jumping railroad tracks onto a train. Trains for black people were unmarked and it took some guessing to discover which ones. Passengers jumped tracks, like in the Cole photograph, and some were killed when express trains rolled through.

Others are of children crowded in a makeshift classroom; hands raised to answer the instructor’s questions or squatted on a floor to scrawl something on a slate.

These stark images of apartheid have nothing to do with what is occurring in Selma today.

Such drama spouted by Leashore might pique emotions, but does nothing to lead to understanding or conversation. The day for “in your face” is over. It is time, as Isaiah said for us to come and reason together. Not talk one another down or hang up on those who disagree with us or shout over one another.