Welcome bags for white South African "refugees" shine light on blatant racism of Trump's revamped asylum policy
The Trump administration plans to provide bespoke gift bags to Afrikaners, including materials that encourage an embrace of white supremacy as the ideal way to assimilate into American society
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
The Trump regime’s advocacy of white supremacism is arguably its premier offense against the U.S. government and the American people. With its racist obsessions, our MAGA leaders have put much of the population on notice that second-class citizenship is their destiny, should this right-wing rule endure and deepen. Banished is the basic democratic premise that all Americans are equal, regardless of race, skin color, or national origin. Trump and his allies seek to roll back not only the gains of the civil rights movement, but the reconceived nation born in the wake of the Civil War. It is as if Jefferson Davis and his minions had, through some grotesque sci-fi time travel maneuver, managed to take over the 21st century presidency.
But this is no bizarro sci-fi plot we’re caught in, but a bitter reality — though one, crucially, in which not only the Trump regime but also much of the media, and even elements of the Democratic opposition, have maintained a pretense that this presidency’s unvarnished racism is something other than what it so clearly is. Among opponents of MAGA, there has too often been a studied disregard for how crucial racist appeals have been to both unifying and energizing the MAGA base; likewise, there has been a blinkered approach to how central racism is to this regime’s governance and priorities. Even if the aggrandizement of personal power and the corrupt use of the White House to rake in billions for himself and his family are the goals nearest and dearest to Donald Trump’s heart, the effort to re-impose strict hierarchies of race across America is a dream held by millions of his supporters — a goal important enough that they are willing to look the other way while the president loots the Treasury, bulldozes the White House, and conducts insider stock trades based on government policies he himself sets.
Nowhere else has this thin line between grotesque racism and the charade of deniability been more dangerously upheld than in the realm of immigration. The entire immigration “debate” has been framed by the GOP, the media, and, absurdly, even many Democrats as an effort to keep generic “immigrants” out of the country. Yet the White House has deployed all manner of racial rhetoric and imagery in depicting these immigrants, particularly the primarily Latino migrants who have crossed or seek to cross the southern border. And beyond this, ICE and CBP efforts have been directed against other non-white immigrant groups in the most ostentatious ways — for instance, with a massive federal dragnet descending on the Twin Cities to target Somalis.
And when we take into account the explosive infusion of ICE funding over the coming years, and the construction of a nationwide gulag to house those arrested, the outlandish goal of ethnically cleansing the nation of millions of non-whites seems like an increasingly realistic goal. Moreover, such deportation efforts are increasingly leading to the harassment of non-white citizens — a not-accidental byproduct of an effort to reinstate white people as the “true” citizens of the U.S., and to signal to all others that their citizenship is second-tier.
Recently, though, the Trump regime has moved to even more openly escalate and advertise its white supremacist vision of immigration, and of America. A few months ago, the administration made changes to U.S. asylum policies that would all but choke off the flow of refugees to the United States, while privileging one unique group: white Afrikaners from South Africa. This means that of all the people in the world in desperate need of relocation — from war, natural disaster, and persecution — only the former beneficiaries of a notorious white supremacist regime have been deemed to qualify.
Notably, the supposed persecution of white South Africans in their homeland, and their need for rescue by the United States, is based on racist fantasies and lies that draw not only on modern-day international white supremacist ideology like the “Great Replacement Theory,” but also invoke deep-rooted white American fears of Black people. And so the administration and its supporters claim that black South Africans are committing genocide against white South Africans, as well as dispossessing them of their material wealth. And it is not coincidental that these stories evoke Redemptionist lies about the post-Civil War Reconstruction period in the U.S., which held that African-Americans drunk with their new freedoms raped, pillaged, and oppressed Southern whites until the latter, through the terrorism of the Klu Klux Klan and the withdrawal of Northern protection, established the racial hierarchies of Jim Crow for the next century. The underlying story is clear: black people cannot be trusted with freedom and democracy, and will only use their power to seek revenge on their white oppressors.
Lest this seem like exaggeration, here’s White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly speaking about the need to open American doors to white South Africans: “President Trump has provided a lifeline for Afrikaners, who are being raped, maimed, killed and driven off their property across South Africa. While the South African government and many in the media have brushed off the horrific lived experiences of this community, the Trump administration continues to process applications for refugee status because the president has a humanitarian heart.”
There has been no direct explanation by the Trump administration to justify limiting access to Afrikaners out of all the people on Earth. However, the administration has claimed its changes to the asylum program aim to “prioritize refugees who can better assimilate into the United States.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio picked up on this theme in remarks to Congress earlier in June, when he noted that “it is in our national interest” to allow in people who can “quickly assimilate into society and be successful.””
The choice of Afrikaners as just such an assimilable group helps answer what exactly is deemed by MAGA as necessary to fit into American society: white skin. And it’s not just white skin these particular immigrants bring, but also a story of oppression at the hands of non-whites that dovetails with the most fundamental narrative of the Trump administration: that the United States is being invaded by non-white hordes who, like those fearsome black South Africans, seek to take Americans’ jobs, steal their wealth, rape their women, and murder at will. From the perspective of the Trump administration, white South Africans are likely to have a fundamental sense of racial displacement and grievance that deeply resonates with the obsessions of MAGA — making them ideally suited to assimilate, if not into actual modern America, then into MAGA’s twisted fantasy of the United States, where white Americans must fight to retain a nation under assault by the brown hordes. Moreover, Trump and his propagandists may well see the supposed oppression of Afrikaners as another way to remind their MAGA base that the depravity of blacks and non-whites is a basic fact of life, knowing neither the limitation of borders nor nationality. It also points to a dismaying implication of the MAGA mindset: that white South Africans are actually more American than actual citizens who happen not to be white.
Recent reporting from The New York Times drives home the degree to which the Trump regime views white South Africans as pawns in a war to impose white supremacy within the U.S. In a departure from usual practice, the administration is creating “welcome bags” to give Afrikaner immigrants in coming weeks — but the otherwise pleasant notion of a gift bag obscures the packet’s rancid contents and intent. Alongside an Android tablet, a U.S. flag, and a copy of the Constitution, the bag will also include literature that “criticizes racial equity and civil rights laws and promotes claims of discrimination against white people.” It will also contain a “story about a Black South African who must protect a white rugby teammate from a Black mob” and that “cites the accusation from the billionaire Trump ally Elon Musk that a genocide of white people is occurring.” (The story also refers to Nobel Prize-winner Nelson Mandela as a “South African lawyer and activist who sought to end apartheid with acts of sabotage.”) The welcome bag will include as well “a report by Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission [. . . ] [which] likens progressivism to fascism, and says Americans were being indoctrinated with a false critique of the nation’s founding and identity, including the role of slavery.” The 1776 report also claims that the civil rights movement “almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders.”
The administration contends that these materials are intended to help the newcomers “assimilate into the American way of life and preserve our borders, language, culture, traditions and ideals,” and “to support [their] day-to-day life and expand [their] knowledge of American history and values.” But it is a peculiar view of America that the White House has chosen to emphasize, in which the civil rights movement is supposedly antithetical to basic American principles and slavery has nothing to do with our founding. It is also odd that materials promoting the U.S. would include tendentious representations of South African history — representations that happen to assert the perfidy of blacks and the victimization of whites.
It appears that the Trump administration has chosen to present Afrikaner newcomers with a vision of the U.S. as a white supremacist nation that has faced similar “challenges” from restive minorities as South African whites. These “welcome bag” materials aim to arouse in these Afrikaners a dislike or worse for black people, whether they be South Africans or African Americans. We might even speculate that these materials aim to validate and encourage whatever white supremacist inclinations the newcomers possess, and to let them know that such attitudes are essential to integrating fully into American society — that the superiority of white people is what the United States is most fundamentally about. To fit into the United States, the Afrikaners are being told, they simply have to strive be as racist as they can be.
When an American president curtails the admission of nearly all refugees to our country, save for a single group of whites renowned for a system of racial apartheid that lasted until late into the 20th century, he is not just making some sort of perverse “culture war” point. Rather, he is openly declaring the United States to be a country for white people, that America’s role in the world is to be a haven and protector of white identity, and by extension that non-whites are not worthy or capable of U.S. citizenship. In the realm of domestic politics, this has been advanced by a multi-pronged effort to reassert the power of white supremacy upon both citizens and resident immigrants, whether it’s through Republicans gerrymandering Black Americans out of political representation, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or the refusal to promote well-qualified Black generals and an accompanying effort to erase the valiant history of non-white soldiers and sailors.
But the embrace of white Afrikaners is especially grotesque, as it’s meant not only as a message to the American people but to the world regarding the centrality of white supremacism to MAGA’s vision of America. And when the administration chooses to present these fake refugees with “welcome bags” that openly stress white supremacism as the purported route to acceptance into American society, Trump and his allies are reveling in their own disgusting racism, celebrating it in full view of the nation without shame or apparent fear of backlash. Its resonances and implications are no less dangerous to the union than if the president were to raise the Confederate flag over the White House, or add Jefferson Davis to the list of President’s Day honorees (and this is to say nothing of the tens of thousands of non-white refugees cruelly now considered personae non gratae based on the color of their skin). It is open advocacy of an ideology that is the enemy of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy.
Faced with the elevation of undeserving white Afrikaners as the only refugees to be allowed into the country, it would be incredible for Democrats not to take a stand, pick a fight, and work to engage and enrage substantial swaths of the public against this abomination of an asylum policy — and against the white supremacist fever dream it so starkly reveals. With this policy initiative — topped off by literally giving white Afrikaners welcome materials inciting them to embrace their worst racist inclinations — the Trump White House has removed any lingering pretense that the war on immigrants isn’t simply a cover for a war against all non-whites in America, and in favor of a nation that purges and disempowers supposedly undeserving lesser races. Democrats are deluded if they think they can beat MAGA and the retrograde forces driving it without taking square aim at the dynamo of white supremacism that energizes and guides so many in this movement. With their celebration of white Afrikaners as ideal Americans, Trump and MAGA have inadvertently opened the door to a renewed public reckoning over the war on immigrants, and an underlying white supremacist project that only grows stronger as opponents of MAGA fail to name and directly confront it.