In a year marked by overlapping refugee crises—from Gaza to Congo to Sudan—the news that 59 white South Africans have been granted asylum in the United States raises a deeper question:
What does it mean to be seen as vulnerable, and who does the world believe is worth protecting?
Their claim? Racial discrimination.
To many, it may seem contradictory. How can white citizens of one of the continent’s wealthiest nations be classified as persecuted, while Black and brown asylum seekers are met with barbed wire, bureaucracy, or burial at sea?
But this isn’t a contradiction. It’s the system doing what it was built to do.
Because global systems of racial power continue to protect and elevate white identity. When fear is expressed by white bodies, it is believed. When that same fear is voiced by the racialised and displaced, it is criminalised.
The Inverted Victimhood of Power
President Donald Trump warned that white farmers in South Africa were being “brutally killed” and their land stolen, echoing far-right narratives that have long positioned white discomfort as existential threat. Elon Musk, a white South African himself, echoed these claims, warning of a “white genocide.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly refuted the accusations, clarifying that those leaving were not fleeing persecution but resisting the democratic transformation of a post-apartheid nation.
Nonetheless, the myth persisted and shaped real policy outcomes. The U.S. used it as a basis to grant asylum, reframing white unease with social change as evidence of danger.
Today, white South Africans make up less than 10% of the population, yet still control most private land. Their dominance is structural, not speculative. Yet international sympathy continues to flow in their direction, validating the discomfort of the historically powerful as if it were persecution.
This is how racism adapts through inversion. When those with structural advantage present themselves as at risk, their claims are not only heard, they are prioritised.
Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Global Policing of Equity
This is not a new phenomenon.
In 1979, Britain signed the Lancaster House Agreement as part of Zimbabwe’s negotiated independence. One of its key terms was the commitment that the British government would fund land redistribution to the Black majority—compensating white farmers for land acquired through colonial theft. In the years that followed, the UK contributed over £41 million toward this process.
But over time, funding was quietly restricted. Then, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, Britain withdrew completely, with Blair stating that his government bore no responsibility for colonial-era commitments. The promise was broken.
Left without international support to honour the agreement, Zimbabwe’s government began a fast-track land reform programme, returning land to Black Zimbabweans without full compensation to white commercial farmers. This response, while chaotic and controversial in its execution, was born of a global betrayal.
And yet the international outrage focused solely on Robert Mugabe. The former coloniser—Britain—faced no real scrutiny for its role in precipitating the crisis. The media vilified Zimbabwe’s leadership, imposed sanctions, and cast the country as unstable, corrupt, and irrational—all while erasing the initial breach of contract by the West.
A similar dynamic is now unfolding in South Africa. As the country moves through difficult conversations about transformation, redistribution, and post-apartheid justice, Western powers, particularly the U.S., are already beginning to frame reform as instability, and white departure as victimhood.
Zimbabwe was punished for acting.
South Africa is being pressured for even thinking about it.
This isn’t about land. It’s about which nations are allowed to challenge white capital—and which ones are punished for doing so.
The Racial Politics of Refuge
I don’t write this from theory. I’ve lived it.
In 2022, I fled Ukraine as a Zimbabwean medical student. I was in my second year of training to become a gynaecologist. My daughter was at home in Leicester with my mother. Alongside thousands of other international students—many of us from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—I began the impossible journey to safety.
But unlike white Ukrainian families, our fear was met with suspicion.
At the Romanian border, I stood behind a metal fence in the snow, watching others walk through freely. I had no food. No toilet access. No sanitary products, even though I had started my period. Soldiers told us they were “prioritising women and children.” But I was a woman, just not the kind they meant.
I witnessed African students denied buses, turned away at checkpoints, beaten by locals. I founded the Africans in Ukraine Education Fund to help others navigate the chaos, raise emergency funds, and document the abuses we were seeing. Had we not done so, many of us would have remained stranded, unseen and unsupported.
Meanwhile, Western media described Ukrainian refugees as “civilised,” “middle-class,” and “like us.” These were not neutral descriptions—they were quiet affirmations of who qualifies as human, relatable, and worthy of care.
In the UK, this moral hierarchy was codified into policy. The Homes for Ukraine scheme—the first of its kind—offered British households financial incentives to host refugees. Application processes were streamlined. Public figures posted selfies with Ukrainian families. For the first time, the idea of welcoming refugees became mainstream, but only because the refugees were white.
There is no equivalent “Homes for Sudan” scheme. No resettlement portal for Congolese families. No fast-track for Gazans. The kind of political will and bureaucratic creativity that emerged for Ukrainian refugees proves one thing:
The issue isn’t capacity. It’s comfort.
And this double standard isn’t limited to Europe.
In the United States—the very country that offered refuge to the 59 white South Africans—Black and brown migrants are being detained, deported, and disappeared at staggering rates under ICE.
Children sleep under foil blankets in detention centres. Deportation flights take off in the middle of the night. Families fleeing violence in Haiti, climate collapse in Central America, or conflict in Sudan are labelled threats, not survivors.
While whiteness is granted asylum, Blackness is met with a cage.
This is how racialised logic operates in asylum systems—through who the world is trained to recognise as victims, and who is treated as a burden.
When Political Language Mirrors Structural Exclusion
This logic is not confined to borders. It’s embedded in political rhetoric—including here in the UK.
Just last week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer warned that Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers” if immigration is not curtailed. His comments—likened by MPs to the language of Enoch Powell—were accompanied by calls for language tests, visa crackdowns, and restrictions on citizenship.
To suggest that migrants must “integrate” or “earn” their place in Britain, while framing their presence as a threat to national cohesion, is not just populist rhetoric—it is a continuation of the same racialised logic that marks some lives as incompatible with the nation.
When those in power use the language of fear to describe migration, they do more than shape policy. They tell the public who belongs, and who doesn’t.
Whose Safety Counts?
My experience was a lesson in how the global refugee system prioritises proximity to whiteness over proximity to danger.
Across the globe, people are fleeing war, displacement, and climate catastrophe. But not all lives are met with the same urgency.
We must ask:
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Whose fear becomes policy?
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Whose safety becomes a matter of international concern?
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Whose pain is mourned—and whose is rationalised away?
Asylum systems are not just determined by need. They are shaped by stories—and by whose humanity those stories centre.
This Was Never About Land
The asylum granted to white South Africans under the banner of “discrimination” reveals something deeper: the enduring afterlife of racial empire.
Racial power does not merely seek protection. It seeks centrality. It refuses to be displaced, and when it is, that loss is rebranded as trauma—met with institutional sympathy and legal remedy.
What is under threat today is not land. It is memory.
It is the story of who belongs, and who always has. It is the challenge to a racial order that has long assumed white people are the rightful holders of space, safety, and legitimacy.
Until we confront that truth, we will continue to confuse privilege with persecution—and call it policy.
Written by Korrine Sky is a Zimbabwean-born writer and cultural strategist. She is a former medical student who fled the war in Ukraine and now writes at the intersection of migration, identity, and power. She is the creator of Culture & Commerce, a platform exploring the politics of branding, culture, and systemic equity.
