America’s emerging apartheid
Donald Trump is right about one thing. Racism is indeed still rampant in South Africa decades after the abolition of apartheid rule. He’s just got it backwards. Trump is now accusing the country’s government of “unjust racial discrimination” against white Afrikaners. That is simply not the case. White people in South Africa still enjoy privileges of wealth and power. Trump nevertheless announced sanctions against the country.
South Africa today is composed of 7% white Afrikaners, largely descended from 17th century Dutch and French Huguenot emigrés. Most of the wealth and the land is still concentrated in their hands. Poverty and unemployment among black South Africans, on the other hand, is staggering. In an effort to correct this imbalance, the South African government has passed several affirmative action laws over the years. Trump will have none of it.
It’s probably no coincidence that Trump’s de facto Vice President, Elon Musk, is from South Africa. Musk, who is a bigot, probably encouraged (ordered?) Trump to sanction the country. Trump is lazy and stupid and I doubt he noticed on his own that the white people of South Africa aren’t able to exercise the nearly unfettered racist dominance they once enjoyed in the days of apartheid, thanks to fair affirmative action legislation.
Trump’s executive order, signed on Friday, falsely claimed there were “countless government policies designed to dismantle equal opportunity in employment, education, and business, and hateful rhetoric and government actions fuelling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” Note the language here. “Racially disfavored landowners.” The poor little plantation masters have lost some of their elite advantages.
Of course, this is just a harbinger of things to come for the United States. The world is full of poverty and injustice, Trump focuses on the justly diminished excessive privileges of a few spoiled white people in a country far away. It is a dog whistle to white supremecists that Trump is on their side, and ONLY their side. Soon that dog whistle will become a klaxon call.
South Africa’s foreign ministry issued a dripping-with-irony statement criticising the move. “It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.” That’s right, Trump hates immigrants — unless they’re white. Welcome to the new emerging apartheid. This time it’s inside the United States of America.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.