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Transcript:
When I was 18, I was finishing up my freshman year of college and was hoping to stay in Boston by getting an apartment, which would require a roommate. A girl who worked in the cosmetics store next door to my magic shop said she needed a place, so we went out to lunch to see if we clicked. And we did! She was this beautiful girl named Sasha who told me she was from South Africa. She was taking a few years to travel the world but now was ready to go to college, where she hoped to study animal welfare because she loved animals so much. She was sweet and kind and seemed so worldly to me, who had never crossed an ocean before. So we found a two-bedroom apartment and moved in together, and that’s when everything went to absolute hell.
Sasha, it turns out, was not planning to go to school, nor did she care very much for animals, considering the kitten she got and then ignored, leaving me to take care of him and then pouting whenever she walked through the living room and saw him cuddling with me. She didn’t clean up after herself, except for the time I came back from a weekend away to find my floor length mirror was gone. When questioned, she said the kitten had run into my closed bedroom and knocked the mirror over, so she cleaned up the shards of glass and glued them to the living room ceiling as an art project.
The final nail in the coffin came when her boyfriend visited. He was also from South Africa, and within hours of meeting him he was explaining apartheid to me. Did I mention they were both White Afrikaaners? Anyway, he explained to me that apartheid was great, because the land was split evenly between White and Black people and the White people turned their half into a utopia and the Black people chose to live in disgusting squalor. Now, I didn’t know much about the situation back then, but I did know enough to say, “I thought the White minority got something like 70% of the land” and he just said “No, that’s not what happened.” He and Sasha literally thought that Black people were subhuman animals. Which, to be clear, neither of them cared about, because I also saw the boyfriend angrily throw the cat across a room.
Within a month or so, the way I treated them made Sasha cry so often that (according to her) she was forced to break the lease and abandon the cat to me, which worked out for the best for both me and Sparky. (She named him Spartacus.)
Anyway, that whole ordeal was an important life lesson for me, because I learned firsthand that it’s not enough to just stop oppressing people. The bigotry remains, because White kids were still growing up thinking they were better than others, that they deserved to colonize. Which, as an American I understood–Civil Rights didn’t magically fix things. But seeing someone so confidently express open, outright bigotry was a real wake up call for me.
I’m thinking of that story now because in the 20 years since, South Africa HAS come a long way, but the bigots have somehow gotten more mendacious. Now, it’s not enough for them to argue that apartheid was good, actually. The world universally rejected that, and so now they must argue that the relative “equality” that now exists in South Africa is, in fact, a horrific tragedy. They do that with the phrase “white genocide.”
I alluded to this last week in my video about how easily “AI” chatbots can be manipulated, using the recent example of white South African Elon Musk obviously manipulating his chatbot “Grok” to respond to every query as though it relates to “white genocide” in South Africa, but Musk is so terrible at programming that he couldn’t even get Grok to say “white genocide” is a real thing, or in fact anything better than a horribly racist hallucination.
Musk has obviously also been trying to reprogram his other chatbot, President of the United States Donald Trump, who welcomed dozens of white South African “refugees” to the US a few weeks ago, after making room for them by deporting hundreds of people of color who had committed no crimes, many of whom were captured at immigration offices while in the process of legally completing their documentation. For months now, Trump has been claiming that South Africa has been discriminating against white Afrikaaners, and committing a genocide against them as “white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated.”
Making this racist nonsense a thousand times more embarrassing, last week Trump said all this directly to the face of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Ramaphosa attempted to gently correct him, but Trump’s brains are made of particularly viscous oatmeal, and so all he could do was repeat the statements Elon Musk previously programmed him to say.
So here I am to rebut the points, in fond memory of Sparky, the anti-apartheid kitten.
The idea of a “white genocide” has been spreading around far-right extremist circles since the fall of apartheid in the ‘90s. Apartheid consisted of the White minority government systematically and forcefully removing millions of Black people from their homes from the 1960s through the ‘80s, concentrating them into ghettos and removing their citizenship. So you understand that you can’t just fix things by saying “Oh, our bad, you guys can now live wherever you want and participate in government and society!” Because now their homes are in the hands of white people. This wasn’t even a generational thing–it wasn’t like “Hey, your grandparents stole this home from my grandparents.” It’s like, “Hey Bobby, you were my neighbor and I let you borrow my lawnmower and now you are currently living in my home and I’m on the street in another time zone.”
And so from an ethical standpoint, it would have been perfectly fine in my opinion for the new government to knock down doors and drag White people kicking and screaming from the properties they stole, but luckily for them, I was only 12 years old and living in New Jersey when this stuff was worked out. Instead, the new government came up with incentives to encourage White people to sell their land back to the Black people they stole it from.
But far-right racists decided to make up a lie that the government was doing the thing I wish they had done. They claimed that not only was the government “stealing” “White people’s land” and giving it to Black people, but also that they were looking the other way while Black people murdered White people to steal their property–particularly, lucrative farmland. Hence, white genocide.
Not only was that a lie, but the government’s attempts to gently encourage White people to sell back the land they stole didn’t even work: White people are about 7% of the population but still own about 70% of the farmland. Black South Africans make up about 80% of the population and own about 4% of the farmland.
Because of that abject failure, in January Ramaphosa signed a law that gave the government permission to expropriate land for the public interest without paying the owner, but only as a final effort if all other negotiations with the owner fail. It hasn’t been used yet, but that’s probably how this far-right conspiracy theory finally broke containment via the genocidal South African Nazi who bought the US government.
So we know for a fact that the South African government has not, in fact, been “stealing” the farmland of White South Africans, but what about the idea that Black people are taking matters into their own hands and murdering them?
This is going to shock you, but it turns out that that’s a lie, too! According to the South African Police Minister, from January to March of this year there have been six people killed on farms. Five of them were Black. The one White person wasn’t a farmer. They just lived on the farm. In the previous quarter, he said that 12 people were killed on farms and again, only one was White.
Let’s compare that to another ongoing conflict which many people argue is a genocide, but which others claim is not: Israeli forces killed dozens of Palestinians, many of whom were sheltering in a school, on Monday. Like, it was just a Monday. Since October of 2023, Israel has killed at least 53,939 Palestinians, at least 16,500 of whom were CHILDREN. I’m not saying that something needs to be that bad to be classified as a genocide. I’m just saying that two White people murdered while they were on stolen farmland doesn’t even come close, but far-right bigots will think that’s far worse than the wanton destruction of brown people happening live in front of our faces.
So no, that’s not happening either, but that didn’t stop the President of the United States from sitting next to the President of South Africa and forcing him to watch a little video showing thousands of “burial sites” for all “the White farmers” who had been murdered. In actual fact, the video showed a protest from 2020 that sought to call attention to the murder of farm workers of all races. People erected small crosses as symbols for those workers killed, most of whom, as mentioned, were Black.
Trump also came equipped with print outs, like a photo of people lifting body bags that he claimed showed “all white farmers that are being buried”. In actuality, that was a screengrab of a video posted by Reuters in February. Those aren’t South African White farmers–they’re victims of battles that were happening in eastern Congo, which is about three straight days of driving from South Africa.
It’s not exactly surprising that stupid bigots would use stupid bigoted lies to support their stupid bigotry. It’s the only play they have left: when every bit of available evidence shows that it’s White colonizers who continue to murder, oppress, and displace people of color, they MUST resort to blatant lies to advance their position that actually THEY are the victims who need protection. And sadly, a lot of other stupid bigots are only too eager to believe it.
