An Update on the Movement for White Slaveowners in the US
Photo by Gregory Fullard on Unsplash
The Trump Administration has brought in two planeloads of White South Africans known as Afrikaners to resettle in the US, flying into the South, where White colonizers — both slave owners and land owners — have historically settled.
Background Context
Afrikaners are a white South African ethnic group made up primarily of Dutch, French Huguenot, and German settlers who started arriving in South Africa in the 17th century.
In 1948, an Afrikaner ethnic nationalist party called the National Party rose to power in South Afrika and implemented a policy of racial segregation, which became known as apartheid (the Afrikaans term for "separateness”) [1].
Under apartheid, Afrikaners held significant political, military, and economic control. About 3.5 million Black South Africans were forced to relocate from urban areas, and some 70 percent of the population was squeezed into 13 percent of the country’s most unproductive land. Signs stating “Whites Only” and “Natives” were commonplace. White schools were the best resourced, Coloured and Indian schools in the middle, while Black Africans were intentionally given an inferior education, specifically meant to ready them for manual labour and more menial jobs. Marriage and intimate relationships between white people and all other groups was criminalized [2].
Apartheid ended in 1994 after decades of activism [3]. On April 27, 1994, the country elected Nelson Mandela, who by then led the ANC, in its first free presidential election [4].
In the first decade after apartheid, the African National Congress (ANC)-led South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) went from $153bn in 1994 to $458bn in 2011 [5].
In 2022, the World Bank classified South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, and listed race, the legacy of apartheid, a missing middle class and highly unequal land ownership, as the major drivers. About 10 percent of the population still controls 80 percent of the wealth [6].
A divide between older voters who witnessed the ANC’s struggle to end apartheid and younger people who do not have an attachment to the party has emerged and weakened the ANC’s standing nationally; the ANC's vote share plummeted to 40.2 percent of the national vote in South Africa's 2024 general election. Multiparty coalition governance has arrived in South Africa [7].
What’s Happening Today
On February 7, 2025, Executive Order 14204 was issued by the Trump Administration, titled “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa. In it, South Africa is accused of “hateful rhetoric and government actions fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners” and the Trump Administration announces the provision of humanitarian aid in the form of a United States Refugee Admissions Program to aid “Afrikaners in South Africa who are victims of unjust racial discrimination” [8].
The Trump administration has fast-tracked the resettlement of Afrikaners after indefinitely suspending other U.S. refugee programs. 59 white South Africans arrived at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on a chartered flight in May of this year. Nine more Afrikaners, including families, arrived late last week, said Jaco Kleynhans, head of international liaison at the Solidarity Movement, a group representing members of South Africa’s white Afrikaner minority. [9]
While U.S. officials have not said how many South Africans have applied to be relocated, Kleynhans said there have been around 8,000 applications. Another group helping white South Africans apply for refugee status has said tens of thousands have applied. [10]
So, what are we going to do about this?
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