The combination of the Trump administration granting expedited refugee status to white South Africans and the Episcopal Church ending a 40-year partnership with the federal government rather than help resettle fake refugees leaves me with contradictory feelings.
As an Episcopal priest and a dual citizen of the United States and South Africa, I am proud of the Episcopal Church for standing up and speaking out about the U.S. government’s lies of a white “genocide” in South Africa. In equal measure, I am devastated that the work our church has done for decades, giving hope and care to people forced to leave their homelands, is ending because of white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
I am devastated that the work our church has done for decades is ending because of white supremacy and Christian nationalism.
Our parish, All Saints’ Atlanta, has a vibrant refugee ministry, and this year, in response to the end of government funding for refugee resettlement, the parish committed to continue to support the refugee families the government had abandoned and to actually increase the number of families it’s supporting. The mission of showing “hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels” (Hebrews 13:2) or treating “the stranger who sojourns with you as a native among you … for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33-34), is central to our faith community.
The denomination’s decision to end a decadeslong partnership with the U.S. government that offered support to people fleeing oppression and war was not taken lightly. But I applaud the Episcopal Church answering the call and standing up to powers and principalities that oppress and call it freedom and lie as they call it truth.
If the Episcopal Church had agreed to resettle South African Boers, then it would have elevated a lie that will affect refugee resettlement for years to come. If white South Africans are experiencing genocide, then it is truly an enviable genocide. White South Africans, who are about 7% of the country’s population, own about 75% of South Africa’s farmland and control a great majority of senior corporate positions. Our Palestinian brothers and sisters experiencing a true genocide would likely be happy if they had control over 30% of their ancestral land.
The U.S. government’s sudden concern with the possibility of land confiscation without compensation leads me to ask: Where was this outrage in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s when Black communities were forcibly evicted from their ancestral home and their land given to whites? There are Black communities who had their land taken by the apartheid government on the eve of our first democratic election in 1994 and are now expected to pay market rates for the land that was stolen from them. And yet the U.S. is granting refugee status to those who benefited from apartheid? Where is the logic?
The Episcopal Church has taken a moral stand. The Boers who arrived on U.S. soil this week are not refugees. They are white people using their privilege to leap over legitimate refugees who have been waiting to escape political repression and life-threatening situations. In welcoming them and expediting access to the U.S., the Trump administration has proved its racist bona fides. It has stopped the asylum of Afghans and Iraqis who fought alongside American troops only to resettle a group that views the loss of absolute domination of South Africa’s Black majority as oppression.
Earlier this year, I said to some friends that the deafening silence of Americans after masked men abducted a young woman off the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was proof to me that people in this country do not recognize a police state when they see it. The insufficient outrage to the resettlement of 49 Afrikaners, who landed with huge amounts of luggage, tells me that we as a country are not willing to face up to the reality that white supremacy is now the order of the day. The Episcopal Church has spoken. When will the rest of the country step up and say enough is enough?
As I write this article, I realize how angry I am:
- angry that people who abused and oppressed my people for generations and are still benefiting from that abuse and oppression are claiming victim status
- angry that the country that offered me an education (at Berea College in Kentucky) when my native land had closed those doors to me is now selling the myth of oppressed whites in South Africa
- angry that there is not a more forceful reaction to the U.S. attempting to change and degrade the definition of what it means to flee your home in fear.
As a Black woman, I’m glaringly aware of how my anger will be perceived. I considered tempering it. But this is a holy anger.
And if I silence it, I harm not only myself but all those who are harmed by this grotesque falsification of what it means to be a refugee. I would be untrue to thousands of Black, Coloured, Asian and white South Africans forced into exile by the evil that was apartheid. It would be untrue to the millions of Palestinians who have been refugees for generations, especially poignant as May 15 is 77 years since the Nakba. Untrue to those all over the world forced to flee their homes and communities because of violence and oppression.
So I speak today, as the Reverend Nontombi Naomi “Angry Black Woman” Tutu. Praying that other people of faith will be angry too and that they channel that anger into actions for the common good. Far too often, we as the human family look back at injustices and evil and say, “We did not know.” Future generations will not allow us to make that claim about our inaction in 2025.