White South Africans – the Only Refugees Being Allowed into the U.S.
The Continuing & Conscious Malevolence of the Tr*mp Administration on Race
Bottom Line Upfront
Embrace Afrikaners, Leave Everyone Else Out: While rejecting refugees fleeing war and persecution from Black and Brown nations, the Trump administration welcomed White South African Afrikaners—descendants of apartheid architects—under the pretense of escaping racial discrimination, exposing its racially selective refugee policy.
Anti-Black, Pro-White Policy Agenda: This embrace of White South Africans exemplifies a broader pattern—an administration that not only centers Whiteness in its moral universe but also systematically undermines Black progress through calculated policies and cultural messaging.
Systemic Dismantling of Civil Rights Protections: With executive orders banning DEI programs and canceling billions in federal equity-focused grants, the administration is eliminating legal mechanisms like “disparate impact” that have long protected Black communities from structural discrimination.
Manufactured White Grievance: Propelled by right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, White Americans are increasingly convinced that they—not Black Americans—are the true victims of discrimination, reinforcing a deeply distorted racial narrative.
Historical Inertia of White Racial Advantage: From slavery to Jim Crow to exclusionary New Deal policies, White America’s dominance has been safeguarded by law. The backlash against civil rights gains illustrates the perceived loss of this historical racial privilege.
Decades of White Resistance to Racial Equity: Since the 1960s, surveys consistently show White Americans’ discomfort with school desegregation, fair employment laws, and affirmative action—revealing a persistent refusal to confront or remedy systemic anti-Black injustice.
Resentment Repackaged as “Colorblindness”: Many Whites now assert that equity efforts are unnecessary because the playing field is supposedly level. In truth, this colorblind rhetoric disguises an enduring opposition to racial repair and inclusion.
The MAGA Ethos as White Racial Panic: At its core, “Make America Great Again” taps into a fear that demographic change and racial equity threaten White cultural and economic dominance, fueling a modern-day Whitelash disguised as patriotism.
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Welcome Afrikaners?
President Trump campaigned on an ‘America First’ platform: isolationist, anti-immigrant, xenophobic.
He’s surrounded himself with true believers that America is in peril within its borders, while being invaded from without.
To many of his administration’s sycophants, America must thwart the ‘Great Replacement,’ the wild-eyed conspiracy theory that illegal Brown and Black immigrants have supposedly been taking over our country over the past 20 years. If it is not stopped, they believe, we Whites will not have a nation in which to live that is ‘ours.’
The latest poster child for this treacherous belief system centers on the few refugees welcomed by the Trump Administration to the U.S. and the multitudes it now refuses.
When I first saw this news story, I thought it was a joke. While the administration rejects allowing civil war refugees from nations like South Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan, and Burma, it has rolled out the red carpet for only one group … wait for it … White Afrikaners from South Africa.
It is of no concern to the administration that tens of thousands of refugees (many who are vulnerable due to medical issues or women at risk, etc.) have had their travel here for legal entry from around the world ‘indefinitely paused,’[1] while South Africans are abruptly and unjustly bumped to the front of the line.[2]
Up to 1,000 Afrikaners will be resettled this year; the first wave will arrive this week. The administration will mobilize “immediate support … including housing, health services, and resettlement support upon their arrival.”
In case we forget, Afrikaners established South Africa’s national apartheid system in 1948, subjecting Black South Africans to severe forms of segregation and discrimination for nearly 50 years. Even thirty years after apartheid was dismantled, White South Africans (7% of the country) still possess more than 85% of the country's household wealth, while Black South Africans (81%) own only 5% of the wealth held by a typical White household. The unemployment rate for Black South Africans exceeds 46%, while the White unemployment rate is 5 times lower.
In other words, the racial wealth and unemployment disparities in South Africa are significantly greater than those here.
What is the justification for this resettlement? Afrikaners “were escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination.”[3]
We can safely say this is a pro-White administration. It is also, perhaps a bit more subtly, an anti-Black administration.
Skeptical?
Ending Diversity, Equity, and Disparate Impact Liability
On President Tr*mp’s first day in office in January he signed an executive order, "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity." It was designed to stop federal agencies and contractors from promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and signaled to private-sector employers that they should reconsider any type of voluntary DEI programs of their own.[4]
The order contradicted what leaders in his first administration (2017-2020) promoted, including arch-conservative Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who wrote a departmental memo just five years ago that stated, “Diversity and Inclusion are the cornerstones of high organizational performance.” The D and I terms are now verboten across the federal government in 2025.
All federal grants supporting notions of diversity, equity, and inclusion have been canceled. This includes not only education grants but also those for public health, housing, and transportation. These cancellations amount to billions of dollars in grants, many occurring even when the grant-funded work is already underway.
How are these cancellations justified? Through an obscure regulation that allows agency heads to claim, “this award no longer effectuates agency priorities.” This has led to the termination of many hundreds of federal employees who had even a hint of D E I.
Now the administration is looking to limit disparate treatment liability (intentional discrimination against an employee due to race, religion, color, sex, or national origin)[5] and eliminate altogether disparate impact liability (actions that lead to discriminatory outcomes even if there's no evidence of intentional bias).
The latter has been the law since the early 1970s to protect primarily African Americans and women. The U.S. Justice Department has pursued these types of cases for decades on issues that include police misconduct, school discipline, local public sector hiring, and other discrimination in communities of color that have never fully receded.
By removing any use of disparate impact liability from the books, the administration could, according to a senior leader from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law,
“destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color.”[6]How We Came to This Moment
How could we, as a nation, reverse so suddenly and completely on race in this day and age?
I explored this in depth in Chapter 7 of my book by highlighting Whites’ views on race since the 1960s and the growing racial backlash in the U.S. from the early days of Rush Limbaugh to the Tea Party of the 2010s, followed by the White fragility movement against critical race theory and now DEI in the 2020s.
Here are some excerpts.
Tucker Carlson, a prominent media figure, regularly asserted on his Fox News show for a decade that the “ruling class’s” fanatical focus on race, equality, and equity “creates a world that favors the rights of people of color and discriminates against you.”[7] You, here, means his almost entirely White viewership. In Carlson’s telling, the playing field is now utterly skewed toward Black people. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.
In over 600 episodes, Carlson discusses alleged discrimination against White people while downplaying the real racism that Black people face.[8] During the national protests following George Floyd’s murder, Carlson regularly spoke ominously that “they are coming for you,” with they referring to Black citizens—and others sympathizing with their plight—and you referring to White, patriotic Americans.[9]
Really? Blacks and their allies are coming for Whites?
Thus, a significant segment of White Americans has come to feel genuinely troubled, if not threatened, by Black progress, increasingly believing that it is not Black people who face discrimination, but White people. Even for White people who have not fallen for that fiction, too many believe that Blacks have no significant obstacles to overcome if they just “work at it.”
Tucker Carlson was merely the successor to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck before him, exemplifying this type of ultra-right-wing, yet still mainstream media, race-mongering.
Threats to White Advantage
For well into the second century of our nation’s history (1776 to the 1960s), Whiteness, or White identity, conferred tangible advantages, both economically and otherwise, only to those who were White.
For many Whites, surrendering these exclusive benefits has been difficult.
Initially, these benefits allowed White individuals to own other human beings who were not White and deny them any rights or freedoms.
During Jim Crow, these benefits meant you could confer second-class status—or worse—to people who were not White.
A commitment by Whites to White as the preferred race meant that federal, state, and local laws could be crafted in ways that privileged, advantaged, or included only White citizens, to the exclusion of Black citizens. Whenever Blacks were considered for inclusion in law or policy during the century after the Civil War, influential White leaders, supported by significant segments of the White population, inevitably and forcefully resisted.
Even when Black people were at least nominally included in policies (e.g., some parts of the New Deal), White leaders found ways to exclude them from their implementation.
It follows, then, that after a couple of hundred years, when advantage, privilege, or exclusion is taken away or must be shared, many Whites might perceive it as a direct and, at times, immediate threat to their status and well-being.
Undermining such seemingly perpetual advantages is a central, but by no means the only, reason why the 1960s and early 1970s remain some of the most tumultuous times in American history.
For many White people, the civil rights movement’s successes uprooted their historical sense of national identity. Those successes raised questions about the following:
Who deserves rights? The law now acknowledged a much wider range of people, but were many Whites comfortable with that?
Who deserves differential treatment based on access to those new rights? Starting in the 1960s, that meant those who had been universally excluded (Blacks and Native Americans). National surveys over time showed that many Whites have always been uncomfortable with this.
How would society become more racially integrated—in our schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces? The genuine answer: as slowly and incompletely as possible.
These questions were—and remain—fundamental, still causing an undercurrent of angst, resentment, and resistance in our local and national body politic.
These questions led many Whites to adopt a newfound stance of “colorblindness,” in which we Whites hinder progress or resist addressing aspects of a longstanding, historical commitment to discriminate against and exclude Black people from every part of American life. Instead, many Whites assert that we just need to “treat everybody equally” because we have “already” made the playing field equal.
White Perspectives on Race Over the Past Half Century
To better understand the instinct to curb Blacks’ progress, we must look at how much—or how little—Whites’ views, collectively, have changed since the 1960s.
We find a unique lens into Whites’ perceptions of race in how they perceived Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was alive.
Throughout his rise to public prominence from the mid-1950s, he never gained approval from most White people. In fact, in 1966, his disapproval rate among Whites was 63 percent; upon his death in 1968, it was even higher, at about 75 percent. Now revered by tens of millions of Whites, he was never held in the same regard during his lifetime.
These sentiments help us understand the steady and ongoing White backlash as our nation enacted civil rights laws to provide Black people with new passageways to economic and social progress.
Even before affirmative action gained significant traction in the American workplace or higher education, Whites sought to deny the privileges and advantages they, as a race, had retained for nearly two centuries, immediately and for decades afterward.
Although never labeled as such, affirmative action for White people thrived from our nation’s earliest days. As soon as formal affirmative action for minorities (and women) became law, the backlash commenced, then spread.
Here’s how Whites’ views changed on some significant policy issues over time:
Segregated Schools. By 1976, support among Whites for federal desegregation had fallen from over 50% just 8 years earlier to only 21 percent. This significantly explains why school desegregation failed so profoundly in the U.S.
Unequal Access to Jobs. Whites’ support for federal intervention on behalf of Blacks and fair treatment in jobs remained at 40 percent from 1965 to 1975, declined to 30 percent throughout the 1990s and fell below that in the 2000s.[10]
Never did a majority of Whites support it.
Just Try Harder to Become Well-Off. In a 1970 national survey, 70% of Whites said “Blacks just needed to try harder” to become as well off as them, a level of support that stayed steady (ranging from 65% to 75%) until as recently as 2015.[11] In other words, discrimination, injustice, and inequity didn’t fit into the way that many Whites calculated the equation at all.
Reverse Discrimination. By the 1970s, many Whites already believed that affirmative action, designed to address over a century of gross discrimination in education and employment, had instead evolved into reverse discrimination against Whites.[12] In national surveys from 1985 to 2015, Whites’ support for affirmative action never reached even 20 percent for racial preferences in hiring and promotion due to historical discrimination patterns.[13]
Where Blacks and Whites Should Live. Believe it or not, in the early 1980s, “a third of whites nationally still believed ‘white people have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods if they want to and blacks should respect that right.’ ”[14]
A majority that year also believed home sellers should have the right to refuse to sell to Blacks. In a 2000 study, twenty years later, 20% of White people still viewed an ideal neighborhood as being all-White.[15]
That speaks volumes about why we have had so little residential integration.
White Racial Resentment. Since 1977, the General Social Survey has asked about four potential causes of racial inequality to measure racial resentment. Scholars examine how White people respond to questions regarding whether discrimination against Black people persists and whether Blacks receive undeserved advantages and need to work.
From 1977 to 1989, 63 percent of Whites attributed that inequality to a lack of motivation or willpower; later, from 2000 to 2008, 50 percent still believed so.[16]
One of the survey’s questions asked about the level of agreement among Whites with the statement that “Irish, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors.”[17] From 1994 to 2008, approximately 75 percent of White people agreed with this.
In other words, Whites say, “Blacks need to work harder, as we did, and stop complaining or looking for handouts.”
Whites Grossly Underestimate Racial Bias Against Blacks. Unsurprisingly, in recent decades, the average White person has had little to no understanding of the extent of discrimination or unfairness that Black people experience in everyday life. The results of a 2016 Pew Research Center survey reveal enormous gaps in perception between Whites and Blacks about how fairly or unfairly different systems treat Blacks. Read more HERE to delve into the results.
Discrimination Against White People. A 2017 national poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and National Public Radio found that 55 percent of Whites surveyed believed there is discrimination against White people in America. However, revealingly, only 20 percent of Whites thought they had experienced discrimination.[18]
Due in part to increasing White racial resentment, the Reagan and Bush administrations implemented policies from 1981 to 1992 known as New Federalism, which furthered disinvestment in neighborhoods primarily inhabited by Black people by sharply cutting spending on direct aid to cities.
The cuts included general revenue sharing, urban mass transit, public service jobs and job training, compensatory education, social service block grants, local public works, economic development assistance, and urban development action grants.
The effects of this disinvestment continue to ripple through urban America today.
The Legacy of White Resentment Today
By studying how and where racial attitudes have shifted since the 1960s, we gain insight into why the more transformative change in racial equality that may have seemed possible decades ago remains a steep uphill climb and follows a very incremental trajectory.
The fact remains that White people still prominently control the levers of power in the U.S.—from federal, state, and county governments to finance, manufacturing, fossil fuels, and real estate development in the private sector. And Whites still comprised 60 percent of the U.S. population in the 2020 Census.None of that constitutes a recipe leading to widespread discrimination against Whites.
The bottom line is that an important segment of Whites still feels threatened by—or at least resentful of—Black (and other communities of color) progress and power. Thus, every decade or so, we see a cycle of backlash from a powerful minority of Whites, each with its own unique permutation when Black progress rears its head.
Each part of the cycle is triggered by a steady and powerful drumbeat of misinformation and disinformation that enhances feelings of resentment and antipathy toward Blacks, and increasingly toward Latinos and other immigrant communities of color.
Not sure whether to believe that?
A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 50% of White people fear that when we become a majority-minority nation (likely to occur in the 2040s), it will “weaken American customs and values.”[19]This is why “Make America Great Again” became such a powerful message to many Whites over the past nine years. That’s why when Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, claims that we have ‘been invaded’ by immigrants, this fear-mongering is effective.
To paraphrase what MAGA believers won’t necessarily say out loud: Black people have come for our wealth and our privilege of a good education since the 1960s; now, the flood of new Brown and Black people threatens the nation itself.
Thoughts? Let me know!
Footnotes
[1] “Realigning The United States Refugee Admissions Program,” The White House, January 20, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/realigning-the-united-states-refugee-admissions-program/.
[2] Katya Schwenk, “Trump Taps Refugee Fund to Welcome White South Africans Within Days,” The Lever News, May 7, 2025, https://www.levernews.com/trump-taps-refugee-fund-to-welcome-white-south-africans-within-days/.
[3] “Addressing Egregious Actions of The Republic of South Africa,” The White House, February 7, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/addressing-egregious-actions-of-the-republic-of-south-africa/.
[4] Jana Borklund, “Compliance Conundrum: Trump’s Executive Orders Rolling Back Federal DEI and their Impact on Private Employers,” GovDocs, February 11, 2025, https://www.govdocs.com/trumps-executive-orders-rolling-back-federal-dei/.
[5] “Disparate Treatment,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_treatment#.
[6] Erica L. Green, “Trump Seeks to Strip Away Legal Tool Key to Civil Rights Enforcement,” The New York Times, May 9, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/us/politics/trump-civil-rights.html.
[7]. Nicholas Confessore, “How Tucker Carlson Reshaped Fox News — and Became Trump’s Heir,” The New York Times, April 30, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/us/tucker-carlson-fox-news.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article.
[8]. Karen Yourish, Larry Buchanan, and Weiyi Cai, “Inside the apocalyptic worldview of ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight,’ ” The New York Times (reprinted in Seattle Times), May 1, 2022, https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/inside-the-apocalyptic-worldview-of-tucker-carlson-tonight/.
[9]. Confessore.
[10]. M. Krysan and S. Moberg, “Trends in racial attitudes,” University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs, August 25, 2016, Figure 8B, http://igpa.uillinois.edu/programs/racial-attitudes.
[11]. Ibid.
[12]. “The 1960s–2000s: The era of Affirmative Action,” American Anthropological Association, May 27, 2008, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24714239.
[13]. Ibid.
[14]. Peter V. Mardsen, ed., “Notes from Social Trends in American Life Findings from the General Social Survey Since 1972,” Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2012, p. 47.
[15]. Ibid, pp. 50–51.
[16]. Racial Resentment and Whites’ Feelings toward Black Lives Matter: A Q&A with Dr. Emmitt Y. Riley, III, University of California Press, January 15, 2021, https://www.ucpress.edu/blog/54246/racial-resentment-and-whites-feelings-toward-black-lives-matter-a-qa-with-dr-emmitt-y-riley-iii/.
[17]. Mardsen, pp. 67–68.
[18]. Don Gonyea, “Majority of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination,” National Public Radio, October 24, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/10/24/559604836/majority-of-white-americans-think-theyre-discriminated-against.
[19]. Ryan W. Miller, “46% of whites worry becoming a majority-minority nation will 'weaken American culture,' survey says,” USA Today, March 21, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/21/pew-survey-whites-fearful-minority-country-will-weaken-american-culture/3217218002/.