In May, a charter flight from Johannesburg landed at Dulles International Airport. About 50 white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, were on board, claiming that their livelihoods were jeopardized by a climate of “anti-white racism.”
This depiction of South Africa has resonated among American right-wing commentators since at least the first Trump Administration. In the view of folks such as Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Stephen Miller, efforts to redress inequalities and injustices borne of the Apartheid era constitute, in Miller’s words, “race-based persecution.” The Afrikaners’ whiteness, they claim, opens them up to discrimination, threatens the seizure of their farms, and makes them targets of violence.
In response, the Trump Administration has granted some Afrikaners refugee status, a glaring exception to the general halt it has put on the entry of people fleeing persecution from around the world. President Donald Trump has rationalized this exceptional treatment by gesturing to unsubstantiated and debunked reports of racialized attacks. “It’s a genocide that’s taking place,” he told reporters. Trump recently used the same terms in an attempt to browbeat South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in the oval office. Now, the Afrikaners are on a fast-track to citizenship.
The characterization of “Black” government as existentially threatening has a long history in the United States. Slaveholders first developed the trope in the 1790s in their representations of the emergent nation of Haiti, framing it as a dangerous site of social experimentation and savagery where Black freedom would inexorably lead to white death. This depiction was reductive, and purposeful. Haiti’s “horrors” served as a rallying cry and a cautionary tale; they justified a certain understanding of the nature (and future) of racial pluralism in the United States. Today, spurious depictions of South Africa as an anti-white hellscape swim in the same waters. The…
