Out of Africa: Apartheid, Wealth, and Trump’s Immigration Policy

The red carpet laid out for white South African immigrants is a blatant display of the Trump administration’s overt racism.

ICYMI, at the same time that Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of the pitiless sadists that comprise this administration are sending heavily militarized ICE operators to raid restaurants and conduct mass arrests of immigrant laborers, and dispatching masked agents in plainclothes to kidnap international graduate students right off the street (or from their homes) and disappear them into foreign gulags, they also did this:

They rolled out the red carpet for 54 white South Africans who were given preferential, expedited treatment and welcomed into the United States on the specious grounds that they are being persecuted in their home country.

ICYalsoMI, these people are Afrikaners, members of the privileged white minority that for close to a hundred years were central to the oppression of their country’s Black majority under apartheid, one of the most egregious crimes against humanity in the 20th century.

Does that mean each of them is culpable for their ancestors’ sins, or participated in that travesty themselves? Not in and of itself. (Though many are old enough to have grown up under apartheid, which only ended in 1990.) But…