The History of White Refugee Narratives

Yahoo

3 hours ago

White South Africans who support U.S. President Donald Trump in front of the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa on February 15, 2025. Credit - Marco Longari—AFP/Getty Images
In May, a charter flight from Johannesburg landed at Dulles International Airport. About 50 white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, were on board, claiming that their livelihoods were jeopardized by a climate of "anti-white racism."
This depiction of South Africa has resonated among American right-wing commentators since at least the first Trump Administration. In the view of folks such as Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Stephen Miller, efforts to redress inequalities and injustices borne of the Apartheid era constitute, in Miller's words, 'race-based persecution.' The Afrikaners' whiteness, they claim, opens them up to discrimination, threatens the seizure of their farms, and makes them targets of violence.
In response, the Trump Administration has granted some Afrikaners refugee status, a glaring exception to the general halt it has put on the entry of people fleeing persecution from around the world. President Donald Trump has rationalized this exceptional treatment by gesturing to unsubstantiated and debunked reports of racialized attacks. 'It's a genocide that's taking place,' he told reporters. Trump recently used the same terms in an attempt to browbeat South African president Cyril Ramaphosa in the oval office. Now, the Afrikaners are on a fast-track to citizenship.
The characterization of 'Black' government as existentially threatening has a long history in the United States. Slaveholders first developed the trope in the 1790s in their representations of the emergent nation of Haiti, framing it as a dangerous site of social experimentation and savagery where Black freedom would inexorably lead to white death. This depiction was reductive, and purposeful. Haiti's 'horrors' served as a rallying cry and a cautionary tale; they justified a certain understanding of the nature (and future) of racial pluralism in the United States. Today, spurious depictions of South Africa as an anti-white hellscape swim in the same waters. The treatment of refugees, then and now, brings this similarity into high relief.
The Long History of the U.S. Backing White South Africans
Haitian independence was declared on January 1, 1804. Before that, Haiti was known world-wide as Saint Domingue, a French colony on the western third of Hispaniola that generated tremendous wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans.
The series of events that history deems 'the Haitian Revolution' spanned the prior 14 years and encompassed a staggering array of changes. Americans were intimately aware of those events. Over the period, 'St. Domingo' was depicted as a beleaguered colony, a site of fights over racial equality, a plantation economy unraveled by slave rebellion, a place where slavery was legally abolished, a diplomatic partner, and a player in European geopolitics.
After 1804, the country became the second independent nation in the Western hemisphere, one expressly defined around the absence of slavery and colonial control. All Haitians, regardless of their ethnicity, were constitutionally defined as 'Black'; land was to be shared; runaway slaves were declared free the moment they touched its shores. In an age of revolutionary change, there was perhaps no more radical shift than this.
For most white Americans, and especially enslavers, the white colonists of Saint Domingue experiencing these changes were a focus of racial empathy. 'When we recollect how nearly similar the situation of the Southern States and St. Domingo are in the profusion of Slaves,' South Carolina's governor wrote to the colony's General Assembly in September 1791, 'we cannot but sensibly fear for your situation.' The thousands of white French colonists who fled Haiti and arrived in American communities after a particular moment of disruption in June 1793 were met with open arms, receiving support from private groups, state governments, and the U.S. Congress alike.
Dominguans of color, meanwhile, were painted as figures of terror. 'French negroes' prowled Southern nightmares. Southern states and municipalities quickly passed laws that prevented Black refugees from entering their borders (and requiring those present to depart). Rumors of connections between Saint Domingue and slave resistance abounded in Virginia after 1793 and shaped how whites understood Gabriel's revolt in Richmond in 1800. Denmark Vesey's rumored insurrectionary plot in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822 centered around the notion that he had been in contact with Haitian leaders.
While posed as being about a threat from without, this U.S. hysteria had everything to do with domestic realities. White American anxiety over 'the horrors of St. Domingo' reified a nation that was white. The phrase cropped up repeatedly as a way to describe the dangers of antislavery activism and 'fanatical' notions of human equality within the United States that weakened the master class's authority and opened the floodgates for Black violence.
This narrative proved to be powerful and long-lasting. In 1859, 68 years after the initial insurrections, a proslavery writer would describe John Brown's raid as 'nothing more nor nothing less than an attempt to do on a vast scale what was done in St. Domingo in 1791.' A pro-Confederate cartoon in 1863 showed Abraham Lincoln penning the Emancipation Proclamation with his foot on the Constitution, the devil on his desk, and a blood-drenched picture of Haiti over his shoulder. By this treatment, Haiti was an upside-down world: Black people were free and white people were dead, a depiction that normalized and celebrated the United States as a white slaveholding republic.
The Vilification of Springfield's Haitians Taps Into a Long and Troubling History
There were other American understandings of the burgeoning Haitian Revolution alongside this one. Some Americans looked to Saint Domingue and saw a just struggle for human dignity and racial equality. Alongside the Revolution in France, Saint Domingue sparked conversations about an oncoming global democratic wave rooted in universal human rights, one that would sweep away tyranny of all sorts.
The fact that Americans, white and Black, made these cosmopolitan connections reminds us that, although the American war for independence was in the (recent) past, the American Revolution—the meaning, and quality of the new polity—was very much in flux. White Americans' reactions to events in Saint Domingue allowed for discussions about an American future in which slavery would not exist.
The white Dominguans refugees arriving in Philadelphia in 1793 entered a state in which slavery was being gradually ended and in which white and Black activists were attempting to spread that ethos nationwide. As elsewhere, Philadelphia's philanthropic community rose up to provide them food, shelter, and succor, but the white Dominguans were not permitted to maintain their slaves (despite their best efforts to do so). In the 19th century, Americans of color would take Haiti as an emblem of possibility, one that helped bolster pride and engender action. Like the proslavery usage, these efforts were an attempt to make Haiti into an argument about citizenship, race, and rights in the United States.
The Trump Administration's decision to grant Afrikaners refugee status flies in the face of U.S. procedures and practice in place since the 1980 Refugee Act, which, in accordance with the international definition, defines a refugee as a person with a 'well-founded fear of persecution.'
This initiative bears many of the hallmarks of a Trump policy—it originates from a selective understanding of the realities on the ground; it has been conveyed, explained, and rationalized via a blend of bullying and bluster; above all, it is driven by a venal self-interest. At its heart, the policy seems to bolster Trump's picture of the dangers of initiatives that place value on striving for racial equality. In this view, the Afrikaners are quite literally pale-faced messengers: their plight fits snugly alongside Trump's attacks on institutions of higher education and the U.S. civil service as bastions of antisemitism and DEI initiatives. As such, the administration is overtly taking a side in a longstanding, and ongoing, battle over the meaning of the American nation.
James Alexander Dun is a historian at Princeton University and the author of Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
Write to Made by History at [e-mail].