Selective Memory & Selective Mercy: America’s Embrace of WHITE South African "Refugees"

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The recent resettlement of white South Africans in the United States, under the banner of racial persecution, raises troubling questions about historical amnesia and political hypocrisy. Framed by former President Donald Trump’s administration as a humanitarian response to “genocide” and “land theft,” the move not only distorts the facts on the ground—it ignores the bitter legacy of apartheid and the very real inequalities that still define South African life.

Apartheid, a system of institutionalized racial segregation, privileged white South Africans at the expense of the Black majority for nearly five decades. The echoes of that regime are still loud in South Africa’s economy, land ownership patterns, and social fabric. While Black communities continue to face the generational consequences of dispossession, white South Africans—just 7% of the population—still own the bulk of privately held land and command significant wealth. The 2024 Expropriation Act, which sparked this resettlement drama, is an attempt to confront that imbalance without compensation—not a campaign of persecution, but a flawed step toward restitution.

Yet here we are, watching dozens of Afrikaners flown into the U.S. as “refugees,” wrapped in narratives of victimhood and oppression. No similar concern is shown for displaced Congolese, Sudanese, or Ethiopians. The U.S. Episcopal Church has rightly denounced this selective benevolence and withdrawn from the refugee resettlement program. Their move is a rare institutional acknowledgment that the criteria for compassion appear to hinge more on skin color than circumstance.

Meanwhile, South African groups like AfriForum and Solidarity, who were not known for standing with the Black struggle during apartheid, are now invoking human rights in protest. Their newfound vocabulary is not lost on those who remember the silence that greeted decades of Black suffering.

This isn’t about justice. It’s about whose pain is prioritized, and whose history is conveniently forgotten.