Black Justice, White Fear

When Reparations Are Framed as Genocide

This month, in an unprecedented move in U.S. refugee policy, the United States granted refugee status to Afrikaners on the grounds that the white minority in South Africa is facing racial persecution—even genocide. American officials welcomed the first wave of at least 49—citing claims that they are, “being brutally killed,” and “their land confiscated.” This narrative is unsubstantiated, historically dishonest, and morally corrosive.

Let’s be clear:
There is no campaign of extermination against Afrikaners.
There are no mass land seizures.
There is no humanitarian crisis.

What exists is a shared vulnerability to crime that affects both Black and White rural South African farmers—driven by geography, poverty, and policing gaps, not race.

There is unfinished business of South Africa’s democratic transition that left land reform untouched. The South African government finally seeks to correct what colonial conquest and apartheid codified: the violent dispossession of land that engineered Black landlessness into a permanent system of poverty and racial capitalism.

There is a growing, global discomfort among formerly unassailable white communities whose inherited privileges are finally—symbolically more than materially—being named, questioned, and historicized.

And there is a symbolic shift among conscious African youth—moving the ideological center of gravity toward justice, repair, and Black political self-determination. That shift alone has proven intolerable to some.

A Reckoning Long Deferred

This debate casting South African land reforms as “white genocide” began to boil over after January 23, 2025, when President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act of 2024. The law creates a legal remedy for the state to reclaim land for public use, including, in rare cases, without compensation. Two weeks later, white anxieties erupted and materialized as an executive order from the White House, describing the new law as an attack enabling “the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners' agricultural property without compensation.” And now, just three months later—they’ve been flown to the U.S. to “escape.” But, they are not fleeing war. They are not fleeing state violence.

They are fleeing their own history—its truths, its reckonings, and its demands for repair.

The Legal Heart of the Matter: Unjust Enrichment

The unspoken, but critical legal principle that undergirds this entire debate: unjust enrichment. In law, this principle asserts that no person or institution should be allowed to retain wealth, land, or advantage gained through unjust means—including state-sanctioned racial domination, dispossession, and exploitation. It demands restitution not as punishment, but as correction. In both the U.S. and South Africa, it's a cornerstone of law—until it's used for racial or reparative justice. Then it becomes controversial.

Under apartheid and colonial rule, Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch settler colonialists—created a legal system that made whiteness a passport to wealth, safety, and upward mobility—while Black South Africans were forcibly evicted from their homes, dispossessed of their land, criminalized, and deliberately impoverished. Entire generational fortunes were built on land grabs, mining concessions, segregated housing, and coerced labor—all legalized by a white minority state. The result was a massive and racialized, unjust wealth transfer from Black South Africans and their descendants to Dutch settlers and their descendants.

That wealth didn’t vanish in 1994. It lives on—in financial portfolios, inherited farmland, and exclusive suburbs. It is passed down, just like trauma, and debt. As of 2025, according to Action for Southern Africa, White South Africans—only 7.3% of the population—own 72% of the country’s farms and agricultural holdings. In contrast, Black South Africans, who make up 81.4% of the population, hold just 4% of the land.

Legality under an unjust regime (including Jim Crow and apartheid) does not legitimize the enrichment of perpetrators, nor does it insulate them or their descendants from responsibility. Descendants of settler-colonialists inherit both the benefits and burdens of those actions. And for many, the idea that there might one day be structural redress—not just symbolic democracy—feels like persecution. But it is not. It is reckoning. It is repair.

White Victimhood as Strategy

This narrative of Afrikaners as "refugees" is part of a deliberate strategy designed to brand reparative justice as persecution. It attempts to coddle white discomfort and entitlement, not by inviting reckoning or reconciliation, but by offering refuge—literal and rhetorical—from the burden of history.

This is a backlash—not unlike what we’ve seen in the United States in response to support for reparations or DEI. White supremacy is adaptive. And here, it adapts by recasting Afrikaners—not as the beneficiaries of violent land theft and apartheid-enforced enrichment—but as its ultimate victims.

This move perverts reparations as revenge, and justice as genocide, criminalizing the internationally recognized legal right to reparations for crimes against humanity.

Reparations: Not Revenge, But Repair

Reparations are not a zero-sum vision that punishes one group to benefit another. Reparations are the equalizer—an act of justice that restores balance where systems of violence, theft, and exploitation have deliberately destabilized it. It is not charity, development aid, or guilt-driven giving, but a structural correction.
They return what was stolen.
They repair what was broken.
They rebuild what was destroyed.

This is how we recreate systems that reflect shared humanity, not inherited inequality. Reparations are rooted in acknowledgment and co-creation of a future no longer shackled to the sins of the past. They provide a chance to finally reconcile colonial debts, left unpaid for generations.

The Global Stakes

This matters, not just for South Africa, but for the continent and the world.

If the White House can label anticipated economic losses of Afrikaners as a humanitarian crisis, then every attempt to address historical injustice—whether in the U.S., Namibia, or the Caribbean—can be rebranded as persecution, and punishable by the West. It also sends a chilling message to African nations: if you attempt to reckon with your history, if you try to redistribute power or land, there will be consequences—not in defense of human rights, but in defense of white power.

If we are to move forward—anywhere that colonialism’s debts remain unpaid—we must protect the language of justice from being co-opted by those who fear its arrival.

To twist reparative land reform into a narrative of white victimhood is to mock the real suffering of displaced peoples, genocide survivors, and those for whom "refugee" is not a legal loophole but a last hope. We must resist this distortion and protect the integrity of terms like "refugee" and "genocide," which have real, grave meaning—especially on a continent that has endured both crises. And we must be brave enough to say what must be said:

Discomfort is not violence.
Equity is not persecution.
History cannot be healed by erasure.