Why Don't White Refugees Count?
Back in February, President Donald Trump halted all foreign aid to South Africa and called for the "resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation."
"South Africa is confiscating land, and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY," the president wrote on Truth Social. "It is a bad situation that the Radical Left Media doesn't want to so much as mention."
"A massive Human Rights VIOLATION, at a minimum, is happening for all to see," Trump wrote of South Africa's Expropriation Act, which confirms long-lasting authority for the government to expropriate land — sometimes without compensation — in the supposed interest of the public.
And this week, the first group of South Africans — 59 Afrikaners — arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport.
Because our culture is still infected with a brain rot-level obsession with skin color, the arrival of a few agricultural families caused widespread outcry. Even the Episcopal Church terminated its refugee resettlement relationship with the federal government in moral opposition to these "white Afrikaners from South Africa."
"In light of our church's steadfast commitment to racial justice and reconciliation and our historic ties with the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, we are not able to take this step," the Church's presiding bishop wrote. "Accordingly, we have determined that, by the end of the federal fiscal year, we will conclude our refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. federal government."
Let's not ignore that, at its core, the issue here is that these Afrikaners are — gasp — white.
Good refugees are not white, you see. And because these refugees — and, yes, they are refugees — are white, they're bad. Not only are they white; they are members of the ethnic group that once controlled South Africa during apartheid and are therefore — by nature of the absurd generational guilt applied to white people alone — responsible for the abhorrent racism of South Africa's past and cannot possibly become victims today.
But let's set aside the frankly insane reaction to the arrival of refugees based on skin color and focus on something far more important. And no, it's not that South Africans would give the American rugby team a much-needed upgrade.
It's that when these South Africans arrived — men, women and children — they waved American flags. Not South African flags, not even the Vryheidsvlag, the Afrikaner flag made up of a combination of the Dutch Republic and South African Republic flags. They waved the American flag, embracing — at a foundational level — the country that is embracing them.
We live in a time where so many refugees — whether legitimate or illegitimate — are happy to be embraced by the country and consume all that it has to offer, while refusing to embrace the country in return. In many neighborhoods, we see only the flags of other nations raised over American territory, sometimes as a good-natured nod to culture, but often as an act of cultural defiance.
We could waste our time arguing over whether these South African refugees deserve refugee status because of the undeniably racialized policies of the current South African government, and doom ourselves to continue our relentless and shallow logic that relies solely on skin color.
Instead, why don't we look at whether those we are welcoming onto our shores want to assimilate into the nation or help disintegrate it?