Why white South Africans are migrants the Trump administration can love

Brown or Black immigrants? Invaders. White ones? Refugees. It's no surprise from Musk and Trump.

By Shalise Manza Young

Among the many terrible, horrible, no-good things the Trump administration has done since re-taking office in January is firing as many Black federal employees who have risen up the management ladder as possible.

The firings are abrupt and without cause, and because media writ large are reporting on the firehose of scandals and stupid decisions coming daily, many of these firings have received little to no coverage.

But if those dismissals, along with the constant refrain of blaming DEI—nearly always code for Black—for pretty much everything are a wink to the racism that undergirds the MAGA base, last week the administration put its “white is right” values on display so obviously they might as well be written in neon lights worthy of the Vegas strip.

Earlier this week, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau welcomed 59 Afrikaner farmers to the United States, meeting with the group in a hangar at Dulles International Airport after they touched down in a government-chartered plane.

Afrikaners are white South Africans who some, including Elon Musk, a South African, claim are facing unfair treatment in their home country. With Musk’s encouragement, the administration termed them refugees and expedited their arrival.

Trump has shut off resettlement programs for refugees from other countries, but white South Africans got the green light. Not anyone trying to flee Sudan, where a second genocide has begun just 20 years after the last. Not Palestinians, who are being bombed and who are starving. Not those seeking to escape Nicolas Maduro’s violent regime in Venezuela.

White South Africans got red-carpet treatment as Trump’s administration ended the protected status for Afghan refugees living here—Afghans who risked their lives helping American troops—shamefully breaking the promise made to those who allied with the United States and who will be in grave danger if they are returned to Afghanistan.

White South Africans were treated like dignitaries arriving for a state visit while Hispanic and Muslim people who are here legally are kidnapped by mask-wearing thugs and sent to a gulag in El Salvador or a deplorable prison in Louisiana where they are deprived of crucial medicines.

White South Africans get special treatment while non-white immigrants and migrants are called “invaders” and “vermin.”

White South Africans were embraced months after Haitians who influenced the revitalization of a dying Ohio factory town dealt with bomb threats after the future vice president baselessly accused them of eating their neighbors’ pets.

Seeing a pattern?

Just as JD Vance’s stories about the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were lies, so, too, is Musk’s assertion that Afrikaner farmers are facing “white genocide.”

Afrikaners, the descendants of the Dutch colonizers who ran the South African government for hundreds of years and installed the apartheid system—the strict stratification of races that ensured all power rested in the white minority while Black Africans were stripped of all human rights—are a minority in South Africa.

Apartheid ended 30 years ago, and Black South Africans have had full civil rights restored, but inequality persists. It’s not much different from Black people in the United States: When you deprive a group of opportunities for generations and don’t actively try to make them whole, they’ll always be behind, particularly economically.

And just as many white Americans throw temper tantrums when anyone makes an attempt to level the playing field for Blacks, so, too, do many white South Africans.

Despite making up just 7% of the population, white farmers own 70% of the commercial farmland in the country. The South African government has approved seizing land without compensation, but that hasn’t happened yet.

That hasn’t stopped Musk, who has openly supported far-right racist groups and threw Nazi salutes from the dais at Trump’s Nuremburg rally (sorry, post-inaugural party), from claiming that it’s reverse racism to attempt to give Black South Africans ownership of their native land and some political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

There is no evidence that white farmers are being targeted. The South African government has firmly denied that intentional harm is being done to whites, and even Afrikaner-led groups say there’s no truth to either claim.

But when a rich boy raised in apartheid South Africa in a family so devoted to the cause that his maternal grandparents moved there from Canada to be part of it gets together with Trump, who has long shown racist tendencies, reality goes out the window and a solution without a problem is devised.

And thus, a deputy secretary of state went to Dulles to greet the Afrikaners with open arms. Asked by a reporter why this group of people had been granted refugee status and not others from war-torn lands facing oppression or famine, Landau said, “They [can] be assimilated easily into our country.”

As subtle as the neon lights on the Vegas strip.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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