American president Donald Trump has issued an executive order to withdraw support from South Africa. He was reacting to what he has referred to as the South African authorities’s plan to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property with out compensation”. Afrikaners are an ethnic and linguistic neighborhood of white South Africans whose house language is Afrikaans.
Trump’s outrage relies on a misinterpretation of a brand new legislation – the Expropriation Act which got here into impact in January 2025.
Trump’s motion, amplified by provocative comments from billionaire Elon Musk, has reignited debate concerning the idea of “white victimhood”. We requested Nicky Falkof, who has researched the idea of white victimhood, for her insights.
What does ‘white victimhood’ imply?
White victimhood refers to a strong set of beliefs that treats white individuals as particular and completely different, but additionally as uniquely in danger. Inside this narrative white individuals see themselves, and are generally seen by others, as extraordinary victims, whose publicity to violence or vulnerability is extra regarding and necessary than anybody else’s.
White victimhood is normally speculative. It relates to not precise occasions which have occurred, however to white individuals’s emotions of being threatened or unsafe. Total political agendas develop round the concept white individuals have to be protected as a result of they face distinctive threats, which aren’t being taken significantly by a recent world order that fails to worth whiteness.
That is on no account explicit to South Africa; we see it wherever whiteness is predominant. Certainly, concepts about white victimhood play a major position within the recognition of Trump, whose name to “make America great again” harks again to an idealised previous the place white individuals (notably males) may simply dominate the nation, the office and the house.
Learn extra:
Donald Trump, white victimhood and the South African far-right
The South African case is necessary as a result of it performs a central role in international white supremacist claims. These mythologies declare that white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners, are the canary within the coalmine: that the alleged oppression they’re dealing with is a blueprint for what is going to occur to all white individuals in the event that they don’t “battle again”.
What’s its historical past?
We will hint this concept again to the beginning of the colonial challenge. In 1660 Dutch East India Firm administrator Jan van Riebeeck planted a hedge of bitter almond shrubs to separate his buying and selling station from the remainder of South Africa’s Cape. This hedge was a part of a defensive barrier supposed to maintain indigenous individuals out of the Dutch buying and selling submit, which had been constructed on prime of historic Khoikhoi grazing routes.
On a sensible degree, van Riebeeck’s hedge was meant to protect Dutch settlers and livestock from Khoikhoi raiders. On a philosophical degree, the hedge located the invaders because the “actual” victims, who desperately wanted safety from the violence and wildness of Africa. The bitter almond hedge continues to be seen as a permanent symbol of white supremacy within the nation.
Learn extra:
Racism in South Africa: why the ANC has failed to dismantle patterns of white privilege
This early paranoia and securitisation has had a major impact on white South African tradition and nervousness. White individuals who can afford to take action barricade themselves in gated communities and boomed-off suburban streets, behind excessive partitions topped with razor wire, on the belief that they’re the primary victims of South Africa’s crime fee.
In what methods has victimhood been used over the centuries or many years?
Concepts about white victimhood have performed a task in lots of South Africa’s most influential social formations.
The Thirties noticed a significant panic round “poor whites”, which led to commissions of inquiry, upliftment programmes and different makes an attempt at social engineering. The individuals and establishments behind these initiatives weren’t involved about poverty in South Africa typically, regardless that it was changing into extra of an issue because the inhabitants urbanised. Their solely curiosity was in poverty amongst white individuals, drawing on the belief that it’s improper or irregular for white individuals to be poor, and that this wanted to be urgently remedied.
Learn extra:
Afrikaner identity in post-apartheid South Africa remains stuck in whiteness
These strikes weren’t merely about philanthropy and providing higher life probabilities to poor individuals; they had been about defending the boundaries of whiteness. Poor whites had been seen as a menace to the institution as a result of they proved that whiteness wasn’t inherently superior.
Extra not too long ago, the victimhood narrative has been a central a part of the panic round farm murders and claims of “white genocide”, an previous concept that has been popularised and spread online.
Jacques Stander/Gallo Pictures by way of Getty Pictures
Rural violence is a large drawback in South Africa that deserves a robust response. However white persons are removed from its solely casualties. Certainly, violent crime impacts just about everybody in South Africa. When the deaths of white persons are defined as a part of a focused genocide undertaken on the idea of race, the message is that they matter greater than the deaths of everybody else.
Learn extra:
Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning novel probes white South Africa and the land issue
Once more, this implies a form of naturalisation of violence and hurt. When horrible issues occur to different individuals they merely occur and should not remarked on. It’s solely when white persons are affected that they change into a urgent challenge.
Has it helped white South Africans? Has it been efficient as a mobilising software?
White victimhood, just like the racial anxiety it’s a part of, isn’t good for white individuals. It doesn’t maintain them safer or assist them to stay higher lives.
That stated, it’s been fairly efficient as a mobilising software. The apartheid-era National Party was expert at utilizing white worry for political acquire. Its communications consistently performed on white fears of the swart gevaar, the “black hazard”, which encapsulated the highly effective perception that whites had been extra in danger from black individuals than vice versa, regardless of all proof on the contrary.
Learn extra:
Violent crime in South Africa happens mostly in a few hotspots: police resources should focus there – criminologist
Equally, up to date organisations just like the Afrikaner “minority rights” strain group AfriForum and the Afrikaans commerce union Solidarity activate and manipulate white individuals’s senses of extraordinary victimhood. This drives them additional right into a defensive place, the place the whole lot from farm murders and street identify modifications to the National Health Insurance bill is designed to assault them personally.
White help for these sorts of organisations and the political positions they espouse, whether or not overtly or covertly, is at the very least partly pushed by the efficient manipulation of white victimhood.
How efficient is it nonetheless?
It stays disturbingly highly effective. The structure of white supremacy is dependent upon the concept white persons are extraordinary victims. That is the driving notion beneath the great replacement theory, a far-right conspiracy idea claiming that Jews and non-white foreigners are plotting to “change” whites. It additionally underpins violent reactions to the worldwide migration disaster and the rise of populism within the north.
Learn extra:
What’s behind violence in South Africa: a sociologist’s perspective
I don’t assume it’s going too far to say that whiteness as a social building is intrinsically tied to victimhood. The concept whiteness truly makes individuals extra fairly than much less weak is prone to stay a central a part of white individuals’s collective psychic imaginary for a while.
