American president Donald Trump has issued an govt order to withdraw assist from South Africa. He used to be reacting to what he has known as the South African executive’s plan to “seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”. Afrikaners are an ethnic and linguistic neighborhood of white South Africans whose house language is Afrikaans.
Trump’s outrage is in response to a misinterpretation of a brand new regulation – the Expropriation Act which got here into impact in January 2025.
Trump’s motion, amplified via provocative feedback from billionaire Elon Musk, has reignited debate about the concept that of “white victimhood”. We requested Nicky Falkof, who has researched the theory of white victimhood, for her insights.
What does ‘white victimhood’ imply?
White victimhood refers to an impressive set of ideals that treats white other people as particular and other, but in addition as uniquely in danger. Inside of this narrative white other people see themselves, and are on occasion observed via others, as abnormal sufferers, whose publicity to violence or vulnerability is extra regarding and essential than any person else’s.
White victimhood is normally speculative. It relates to not precise occasions that experience came about, however to white other people’s emotions of being threatened or unsafe. Complete political agendas increase round the concept white other people should be safe as a result of they face remarkable threats, which don’t seem to be being taken severely via a modern international order that fails to price whiteness.
That is on no account explicit to South Africa; we see it anyplace whiteness is primary. Certainly, concepts about white victimhood play an important function within the acclaim for Trump, whose name to “make America great again” harks again to an idealised previous the place white other people (in particular males) may just simply dominate the country, the place of work and the house.
The South African case is essential as it performs a central function in international white supremacist claims. Those mythologies declare that white South Africans, in particular Afrikaners, are the canary within the coalmine: that the alleged oppression they’re going through is a blueprint for what is going to occur to all white other people in the event that they don’t “fight back”.
What’s its historical past?
We will be able to hint this concept again to the beginning of the colonial venture. In 1660 Dutch East India Corporate administrator Jan van Riebeeck planted a hedge of sour almond shrubs to split his buying and selling station from the remainder of South Africa’s Cape. This hedge used to be a part of a defensive barrier meant to stay indigenous other people out of the Dutch buying and selling publish, which were constructed on best of historical Khoikhoi grazing routes.
On a sensible degree, van Riebeeck’s hedge used to be intended to defend Dutch settlers and farm animals from Khoikhoi raiders. On a philosophical degree, the hedge positioned the invaders because the “real” sufferers, who desperately wanted coverage from the violence and wildness of Africa. The sour almond hedge continues to be observed as a long-lasting image of white supremacy within the nation.
This early paranoia and securitisation has had an important impact on white South African tradition and nervousness. White individuals who can find the money for to take action barricade themselves in gated communities and boomed-off suburban streets, in the back of prime partitions crowned with razor twine, at the assumption that they’re the main sufferers of South Africa’s crime price.
In what techniques has victimhood been used over the centuries or many years?
Concepts about white victimhood have performed a task in a lot of South Africa’s maximum influential social formations.
The Nineteen Thirties noticed a big panic round “poor whites”, which resulted in commissions of inquiry, upliftment programmes and different makes an attempt at social engineering. The folk and establishments in the back of those tasks weren’t involved in poverty in South Africa usually, even if it used to be turning into extra of an issue because the inhabitants urbanised. Their simplest passion used to be in poverty amongst white other people, drawing at the assumption that it’s mistaken or extraordinary for white other people to be deficient, and that this had to be urgently remedied.
Those strikes weren’t merely about philanthropy and providing higher lifestyles probabilities to deficient other people; they have been about protective the bounds of whiteness. Deficient whites have been observed as a risk to the status quo as a result of they proved that whiteness wasn’t inherently awesome.
Extra just lately, the victimhood narrative has been a central a part of the panic round farm murders and claims of “white genocide”, an outdated concept that has been popularised and unfold on-line.
Farmers and supporters protest towards farm murders out of doors the South African parliament in 2020.
Jacques Stander/Gallo Pictures by the use of Getty Pictures
Rural violence is a big downside in South Africa that merits a powerful reaction. However white individuals are a ways from its simplest casualties. Certainly, violent crime impacts just about everybody in South Africa. When the deaths of white individuals are defined as a part of a focused genocide undertaken at the foundation of race, the message is they subject greater than the deaths of everybody else.
Once more, this implies one of those naturalisation of violence and hurt. When horrible issues occur to other folks they just occur and don’t seem to be remarked on. It’s simplest when white individuals are affected that they change into a urgent factor.
Has it helped white South Africans? Has it been efficient as a mobilising instrument?
White victimhood, just like the racial nervousness it is a part of, isn’t excellent for white other people. It doesn’t stay them more secure or lend a hand them to are living higher lives.
That stated, it’s been moderately efficient as a mobilising instrument. The apartheid-era Nationwide Celebration used to be professional at the use of white worry for political achieve. Its communications continuously performed on white fears of the swart gevaar, the “black danger”, which encapsulated the tough trust that whites have been extra in danger from black other people than vice versa, regardless of all proof on the contrary.
In a similar fashion, recent organisations just like the Afrikaner “minority rights” power staff AfriForum and the Afrikaans business union Unity turn on and manipulate white other people’s senses of abnormal victimhood. This drives them additional right into a line of defense, the place the whole thing from farm murders and street title adjustments to the Nationwide Well being Insurance coverage invoice is designed to assault them in my view.
White give a boost to for a lot of these organisations and the political positions they espouse, whether or not brazenly or covertly, is a minimum of partly pushed via the efficient manipulation of white victimhood.
How efficient is it nonetheless?
It stays disturbingly tough. The structure of white supremacy relies on the concept white individuals are abnormal sufferers. That is the using perception underneath the nice alternative principle, a far-right conspiracy principle claiming that Jews and non-white foreigners are plotting to “replace” whites. It additionally underpins violent reactions to the worldwide migration disaster and the upward push of populism within the north.
I don’t assume it’s going too a ways to mention that whiteness as a social building is intrinsically tied to victimhood. The concept whiteness if truth be told makes other people extra fairly than much less inclined is more likely to stay a central a part of white other people’s collective psychic imaginary for a while.
