While the world watches global crises unfold—from Gaza to Haiti, Sudan to Syria—the United States has opened its doors.

But not to the thousands of Black, Brown, and war-torn refugees stranded in limbo—many of whom have already been approved for entry. Not to asylum-seeking families ripped apart at our borders. No, this month, the red carpet was rolled out for 59 white South Afrikaners who arrived in Washington, D.C., under the pretense of racial persecution.

The Trump administration insists these Afrikaners are escaping a “genocide” in South Africa—a claim long debunked by South African police data and international observers. Yet, they were processed, approved, and flown into America in record time: just three months. Meanwhile, thousands of vetted refugees from Central America, the Middle East, and Africa remain stuck in bureaucratic purgatory, waiting for years—sometimes decades—for a home.

So the question burns: why them, and not the others?

Trump, alongside his ideological architect Stephen Miller, has made no secret of his obsession with “Western civilization” and his disdain for immigration that supposedly threatens the cultural fabric of America. When asked to explain the inconsistency of halting refugee admissions from nearly every other nation while fast-tracking white Afrikaners, Trump deflected with a lie: “Farmers are being killed… they happen to be white. Whether they are white or Black makes no difference to me.”

That’s demonstrably false—and offensively dismissive.

If race truly didn’t matter, then why are refugees like “Alyas,” a Yazidi man fleeing religious genocide in Iraq with his family, still stranded overseas after being legally approved for resettlement? Why are unaccompanied children from Honduras and El Salvador deported in the dead of night—sometimes to countries they’ve never even known? Why are U.S. military veterans, children battling cancer, and immigrant mothers separated from their children and left to die at our borders while white South Africans get a streamlined welcome?

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about humanitarianism—it’s about optics, race, and political theater.

White South Africans, especially Afrikaners—the very architects of apartheid—are now being painted as victims of the very system of inequality they built and upheld for generations. While many may face economic challenges in post-apartheid South Africa, this does not constitute genocide. Even South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, has vowed to confront Trump about this fiction in an upcoming White House visit. Official data show that of the 225 farm killings from 2020 to 2024, fewer than a quarter involved white victims. Most were Black farm workers.

And yet, Trump keeps repeating the white genocide myth, encouraged by right-wing influencers like Elon Musk—himself a South African—who uses his platform to amplify these distortions while supporting policies that dehumanize Black and Brown immigrants here at home.

All of this unfolds while Black Americans, particularly descendants of Black South Africans and other Africans who were violently enslaved and forced into the United States, continue to be denied justice. Generations of Black people built this country—literally—and have received nothing but slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, mass incarceration, police brutality, and ongoing economic oppression in return. Communities have been flooded with drugs the U.S. government allowed—or even enabled—into circulation, only for Black Americans to be blamed for the addiction crises those policies created.

We are talking about communities criminalized for their survival, stripped of their history, and systemically robbed of wealth and opportunity. These are the real refugees of America’s conscience—displaced in their own country, betrayed generation after generation.

And yet, the gates are opened wide for white South Africans.

Why? Why are you, Mr. President, welcoming Afrikaners into a nation you can barely govern? Why are you prioritizing the comfort of a group with the privilege of whiteness while ignoring the pain of those who have been abandoned by your policies—refugees, children, veterans, cancer patients, and the very Black Americans this country owes everything to?

Your actions betray your words. Your policies expose your prejudice. Your favoritism reveals exactly what you think the “right kind” of refugee looks like.

So if the gates of this nation are only open to the pale and politically convenient, let’s stop pretending this is about safety, justice, or democracy. This is about power. About preserving a narrative. About upholding a racist myth that says white pain matters more than anyone else’s.

The world is watching.

And so are we.