President Donald Trump has issued an executive order to cut U.S. aid to South Africa, while extending refugee status to white South Africans, a maneuver some are calling a calculated exercise in race-baiting and historical revisionism.
Trump claims that Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch and French settlers who own the vast majority of South Africa’s farmland, are victims of persecution under President Cyril Ramaphosa’s land reform efforts. Yet, the reality of land ownership in South Africa tells a different story, and Trump’s feigned concern for land rights is made even more absurd when compared to the systematic land dispossession endured by Black Americans in the United States.
South Africa’s land reform efforts aim to redress the racial inequities created by apartheid, a regime that systematically transferred land from the Black majority to the white minority.
Despite the official end of apartheid three decades ago, white South Africans still control between 70% to 80% of the country’s arable land. Ramaphosa’s African National Congress (ANC) government has introduced expropriation policies to correct this historic injustice, ensuring that land reform is in the public interest and within the constitutional framework.
Yet, Trump has chosen to distort the issue, parroting the narrative pushed by AfriForum, an Afrikaner lobby group that claims white South Africans face racial discrimination.
Even AfriForum, however, does not accept Trump’s offer of refugee status.
“Emigration only offers an opportunity for Afrikaners who are willing to risk potentially sacrificing their descendants’ cultural identity as Afrikaners. The price for that is simply too high,” said AfriForum CEO Kallie Kriel.
Land Rights and Systemic Theft of Black Land in the U.S.
Trump’s sudden interest in land rights, juxtaposed against the backdrop of America’s own history of racialized land theft, paints an interesting picture. While Trump amplifies the supposed plight of white South Africans, his own country has a long and well-documented history of dispossessing Black Americans of their land through legal and extralegal means.
According to Inequality.org, at the beginning of the 20th century, Black Americans owned at least 14 million acres of land. By the 21st century, 90% of that land had been taken through fraudulent legal schemes, intimidation, and outright theft. Today, African Americans own only 1.1 million acres of farmland and part-own another 1.07 million acres, a staggering loss of generational wealth that has never been addressed.
Land theft from Black people in the United States was carried out through methods such as heirs’ property laws, tax sales, and the Torrens Act, which allowed white developers to seize Black-owned land under the guise of legal loopholes.
Heirs’ property laws divided land among multiple descendants, making it difficult for families to retain ownership. Tax sales preyed on Black families with fixed incomes, forcing them to auction off land they had no intention of selling.
The Torrens Act allowed land to be sold without notifying all co-owners, stripping Black families of their property without legal recourse.
The impact of this systematic theft is immeasurable.
In Mississippi alone, between 1950 and 1964, nearly 800,000 acres of Black-owned land were stolen, amounting to a present-day valuation of up to $6.6 billion.
The wealth lost through land dispossession remains one of the most enduring factors in the racial wealth gap, where the typical white family still has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family.
Trump’s selective outrage over land redistribution in South Africa stands in direct contrast to his administration’s complete disregard for the historical theft of Black land in the U.S. His policies consistently benefited white landowners while neglecting the Black farmers and families who had been systematically robbed of their property for generations.
The administration dismantled the civil rights division of the USDA, an agency long accused of discriminating against Black farmers and ignored efforts to provide restitution to those who had suffered under racist policies.
Trump and Immigration, Foreign Relations
The irony of the president’s willingness to extend refugee status to white South Africans deepens when one considers Trump’s well-documented hostility toward refugees.
His administration slashed refugee admissions to record lows, imposed immigration bans, and separated children from their families at the border. But now, white South Africans—who remain the most economically privileged demographic in their country—are suddenly deemed worthy of asylum.
Black and brown refugees fleeing war, famine, and persecution were demonized as threats under Trump’s watch, yet white Afrikaners are welcomed with open arms.
Ziyad Motala, writing in the Middle East Monitor, noted that Trump’s claim of white South African persecution “would be an amusing episode of alternate history if it were not so transparently false.”
White South Africans continue to dominate the country’s economy, with the top earners and corporate executives overwhelmingly white.
Motala further pointed out that Trump’s narrative is being bolstered by figures like Elon Musk, whose family directly benefited from apartheid’s racially engineered economic system. Musk’s political pivot toward white grievance politics aligns seamlessly with Trump’s latest efforts to manufacture a racial crisis where none exists.
Moreover, South Africa’s judiciary, bound by constitutional supremacy, has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to legality and justice, something that Trump’s presidency consistently undermined. Unlike Trump, South Africa’s Constitutional Court has held former leaders accountable who openly flouted the rule of law and sought unchecked power.
When former South African President Jacob Zuma ignored court orders, he was held in contempt and sentenced to prison. By contrast, Trump’s abuse of presidential pardons saw convicted war criminals and insurrectionists absolved simply for their loyalty.
Some experts familiar with the subject note that Trump’s real motivation in targeting South Africa likely has little to do with land reform and everything to do with the country’s stance on international justice. South Africa’s decision to bring Israel before the International Court of Justice over its actions in Gaza has drawn Washington’s ire, and some say the president has now concocted a race-based distraction to shield Israel.
Trump, who has criminalized Black and brown asylum seekers, now fashions himself a humanitarian for white South Africans.
“For all the talk of ‘America First,’ Trump’s policies have never been about national interest but rather about the consolidation of power through fearmongering and race-baiting,” Motala observed. “South Africa, in its commitment to legal accountability, human rights, and constitutional integrity, exposes precisely what Trump and his enablers despise: a legal order where power is constrained, the rule of law prevails, and privilege is not an eternal birthright.”