Why It's Better to Be A Lighter Shade of South African ....
Even a minimal overview of ethnically driven violence — well within the capacity of the US State Department — would identify multiple crises warranting urgent concern. These include the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Uyghurs in China, the Tigrayans in Ethiopia, and the Hazara in Afghanistan. The suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is undeniable, however politically fraught. These are not obscure emergencies — they are widely recognised humanitarian and human rights catastrophes. Yet none triggered a comparable policy response to the promotion of white South Africans to the top of the visa queue. The question is: why not?
Back in 2018, the then-President Donald Trump referred to African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries." At the same time, his administration expressed its concern for a very particular group of Africans — the white farmers. Now, white South Africans are not, by any serious measure, an oppressed group. They remain disproportionately wealthy, well-educated, and overrepresented in property ownership and professional roles. They face South Africa’s post-apartheid challenges alongside their fellow citizens — including violent crime, land reform, and inequality. Their suffering does not support claims of ethnic persecution any more than burglary in affluent suburbs proves persecution against the wealthy.
It would seem then that the key variable isn’t suffering. Is it skin colour? White South Africans are the only African group this administration ever publicly “defended.” All others — Black and brown, Muslim and Indigenous — were met with disdain, indifference, or outright hostility. Stating that the Palestinians are a people, and not a terrorist group, still needs repeating. The people are suffering terribly.
This policy is not an anomaly. When “shithole countries” entered the diplomatic lexicon, the intention wasn’t to critique governance or violence — it was to signal which lives matter. This is grievance politics, dressed up as foreign policy. This move is also significant because it reflects a broader reframing of racial and gender anxieties in the West as global injustice. It casts the loss of political or social dominance as persecution. It seeks to validate a worldview in which whiteness is under threat, and deserves special protection — no matter the context, no matter the facts.
Why must we wait to see unfairness and sectarianism in plain sight before demanding that leadership promote universal values, not pursue personal agendas? Maybe the only good to come of this is the clarity it offers: the provocation of seeing grievance politics in action, and the hope that it will push more people to reject selective empathy and demand something better.
