Being a native of South Africa, this conversation around the white South Africans is interesting to me. It’s complex in a way most people don’t understand.

I was classified as white because it was illegal for my parents to be together under apartheid. My dad was a light enough brown that I was told to say I was just “really tan” and I was able to go to white schools and play with white children.

And kids would ask me all the time “Are you black?” and I would say “I don’t think so 🤷🏻‍♀️”

It was only after we left I found out about the atrocities that black South Africans lived with for a century. Beatings, torture & murder in the street during the day was commonplace with zero repercussions because much of the time it was the police.

No education. No support. No predictable source of income or food.

This creates a type of rage that very few other things would.

It is rarely talked about outside of South Africa, but Nelson Mandela killed a lot of innocent people to end apartheid. It was justified because they were white, and it was the whites that had done the atrocities to the blacks.

Apartheid had to end, but South Africa was messy. Black South Africans became superior. There was a genocide of white South Africans. The rage just caused everything to tip on its head. Revenge was the order of the day - understandably - but still messy and painful.

There were people running a country that were forbidden from getting a formal education, so they said things on the radio like “Having sex with a virgin cured AIDs” (that was said by a President, and it created a nightmare of repercussions for children).

I hear things have settled now, but everyone I knew there has left. The government makes it very hard to leave because you’re only allowed to take a fraction of your money & belongings with you. So many people just left them behind.

It makes sense to me that people would want to leave. It makes sense to me that they would be granted amnesty. Millions of South Africans of all races have moved to the US.

It DOESN’T make sense in the current climate, that their visas are being expedited. When millions of others are having theirs revoked, or completely ignored.

When some people are being supported and some are not, at this point it’s beyond JUST race (there are plenty of white Ukrainians, for example). It’s favoritism. And let’s not pretend it’s anything else.