The white minority government in South Africa imposed a system of racial segregation and discrimination against non-white citizens from 1948 to the early 1990s.
The legacy of that barbaric system, known as apartheid, continues to this day as white South Africans (about 7% of the population) largely remain a privileged subgroup. They continue to own about over half of the farmland, and the typical Black family owns about 5% of the wealth held by the typical white family there.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration recently created a rapid pathway to refugee status and resettlement in the U.S. for Afrikaners, the white ethnic minority that created the apartheid system in the first place.
Data does not support the claim that Afrikaners have been persecuted or suffer from accelerated levels of violence that amount in any way to a genocide. Killings on farms are statistically rare events and victims are mostly non-white. By contrast, millions of Black Africans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan have been internally displaced by violent conflicts but remain ineligible for refugee processing.
Why the disparate treatment?
Ellen Sward
Vancouver
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