A phrase. A speck in our discourse. A speck that sticks and accumulates. Each utterance by MAGA enthusiasts seemed to gain more steam and entry into the realm of truth. “White genocide.” Yes, white genocide. Yet, it is not a reference to the killing of European Jews by Nazis or the massive death tolls in 1990s Yugoslavia. Rather, President Trump, Elon Musk, and their MAGA supporters specifically pointed to the white farmers, the Afrikaaners, as evidence of white genocide.
With the proliferation of unvalidated, unsubstantiated, and outrageous falsehoods and claims made by Trump and his allies since the 2010s, this claim of white genocide in South Africa is just one of many bogus claims. What would such a claim do? What does this claim of “white genocide” do to the meaning of “genocide?” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to partially or wholly destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.” Does the MAGA case of white genocide in South Africa hold water? We can make a case for genocide in South Africa, but it is not white genocide.
This casual use of genocide, with the specific mention of white genocide, erodes the meanings and specificity of genocidal processes. By referencing a white genocide in South Africa, genocide no longer has a material correlation, it becomes just a string of letters and two words without any historical evidence or meaning. Its use, to put it bluntly, is devoid of history and devoid of an understanding of power relations. In contrast to the MAGA invocation of white genocide, Several Afrikaaners and Black South Africans have spoken, including the President of South Africa, to address the sheer absurdity of the Trumpian and MAGA claim of white genocide in South Africa. Such an ahistorical, inaccurate phrase erases the lived histories of Black and White people in South Africa.
First, it erases the history of Western colonialism and the presence of the Dutch in South Africa. With the erasure of this history, we fail to acknowledge the practices of Dutch settler-colonialism whereby the Afrikaaners violently disempowered, displaced, and controlled Black South Africans on Black land. The entire political system structured through apartheid, with the police, the courts, the legislature, and the executive branch, was run by Afrikaaners for Afrikaaners’ advantage until the 1990s. Any Black opposition to apartheid was met with imprisonment or death. Vuyisile Mini, Steve Biko, and Victoria Nonyamezelo Mxenge are just three of many who were brutalized and killed by the Afrikaaner political system.
The Afrikaaner-created system of apartheid enforced segregation through violent means and dehumanized Black South Africans. Even within such a violent genocidal system, Black South Africans organized for their freedom and access to participation in the government. We must not forget the work of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in ending this brutal system of apartheid, without reciprocating the violence against Afrikaaners. With Black freedom, Archbishop Desmond Tutu along with a variety of South African leaders assembled the Truth and Reconciliation Commission[i] that gave all sides to the conflict a chance to voice their concerns and experiences with the purpose of creating a more just society. It did not support any form of retaliatory violence against Afrikaaners. As we look at the very recent history of South Africa, there is no proof of this white genocide but instead radical ways of creating peaceful communities.
Instead, what we are seeing in the mention of white genocide is the process by which Trump and MAGA officials create counter-truths and alternative facts. Through the frequent use of white genocide, the repetition comes to stand in for truth. Through this falsehood, not only do we lose sight of the material violence and its history in South Africa, we lose the parameters and specificity of the word: “genocide.” What it is supposed to reference is lost through this MAGA invocation of white genocide. When used in these problematic ways, MAGA users take away any meaning, facts, evidence, and legitimate, scientific methodologies to understand genocide.
In a word, genocide will no longer be effective in addressing real conditions when it is used to talk about a false “white genocide” in South Africa. If we continue to use it in this way by which it flips reality and inverts actual power relationships, it will then legimitate the practice of naming the most powerful groups with access to state violence as the oppressed, marginalized, persecuted, and vulnerable communities. In the process, the perpetrators, such as the apartheid regime, are seen as the powerless victims. Such a rendition removes any sound analysis of power.
If we are to follow this MAGA conception of white genocide, we must attend to what the use of it will do to understanding power in the United States. We must think about how “woke” has been completely inverted of its meaning and its reference. Instead of “woke” referencing an understanding of the political system and attempts to create equitable worlds, the word “woke” has now become understood as the danger and the problem across the political spectrum. Similarly, the MAGA attempts to control the meanings of genocide will have a major impact on how we understand US history and power relations. The MAGA use of the phrase can then be employed to rethink the histories of genocide in the US.
If there is “white genocide” in South Africa, such a discourse can then foreground an American “white genocide” by refusing to acknowledge Indigenous death, dispossession, and displacement to reservations. Indigenous calls for sovereignty could be classified as “white genocide” by MAGA pundits. Any calls by Indigenous communities to reclaim their land and their relations to the land, as shown in the brilliant work of American Indian Studies scholars Audra Simpson, Kim TallBear, Matthew Gilbert, and Nick Estes, would then be interpreted by the logic of white genocide as the murder and the death of white people. Thus, any challenge to white supremacy would be seen as a practice of white genocide.
Such ahistorical, absurd theories, which are even dumber than some of the other conspiracy theories in our society, are set up by older idiotic theories. In particular, one must interrogate the mention of white genocide with an interrogation of white replacement theory. White replacement theory gained steam during the first Trump presidency and proliferated during the Biden presidency. As this theory first appeared in France with the fear of immigrants supposedly destroying French culture and displacing white French people, it now has a firm ideological foothold in the United States.
When I lived in Eastchester, NY, an Italian American neighbor of mine espoused this ridiculous idea. Eastchester is majority white, mostly Italian and Irish. Yet, his mention of white replacement did not look at how Italians were seen as not-quite white or respectably white in the late 1800s and early 1900s who were supposedly replacing Anglo-Saxon whites. In fact, as Thomas Guglielmo (2003) and David Roediger illustrate (2004), Italians were racialized as non-white and there were attempts to limit their immigration to the US. As Italians are now folded into whiteness in the US, it is interesting to hear an Italian American espouse the white replacement theory.
If most of the suburbs in New York state are still majority white, what is then white replacement? How does this conception of white replacement relate to white genocide? Whites moved into the suburbs in great numbers in US history,[ii] and even more so during the early stages of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As we can see, this reference to white replacement theory does not have any material, evidentiary basis. Rather, it is a psychological experience of trying to manage the anxiety of living and sharing quarters with non-white people. Like the Jim Crow laws and the practices of redlining, the presence of people of color is read as the problem, and white replacement theory underscores this without any evidence. This posturing to a manufactured white experience of violence, extermination, and replacement is frightening in that it removes our focus from actual experiences of violence and genocide.
What white replacement theory and white genocide do is create a realm of fear, a fear of whites being dispossessed, displaced, and killed. The sheer irony. What this does is refuse to acknowledge the histories of the genocide of Indigenous communities on Turtle Island, the violent histories of African slavery, the histories of anti-Jewish racism, and xenophobia in the service of white advantage. There is not a replacement of white people; there is, instead, a call to continued violence in the service of white supremacy, thus undermining possibilities for coalition building, collaborations, and conviviality.
If we go along with the Musk and MAGA conception of white genocide, it can then be foundational in refusing many genocides in our global history and in our current time. We have to recognize how this falsehood can other falsehoods:
- Use of white genocide would then blanketly refuse the Jewish holocaust and rather imply that white Christians in Europe suffered from supposedly violent campaigns by the Jewish people in WWII Europe.
- Mention of white genocide can erase the Chinese holocaust at the hands of the Japanese Empire, with the consequence of presenting the Chinese as the facilitators of violence against the Japanese (rather than the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).
- Mention of white genocide can do the work of refusing the Turkish nation-state’s historical practice of Armenian genocide.
- With such a callous and inaccurate use of genocide, it can also problematically refuse the on-going genocide in Gaza, while falsely claiming that Palestinians have destroyed all aspects of civil society and life in Israel.
This inverting of the process of violence can have detrimental impacts across the world. What it does is support oppressive regimes. In my book on Kurdish diasporas in the US (forthcoming from University of Texas Press), I address how Kurdish communities in the US manage the state-sponsored violence against Kurds across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. As a stateless community, they live precarious lives and face deadly assaults across national contexts. For example, thousands of Kurds were killed by Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party during the Al-Anfal campaign in the late 1980s. We see horrific state strategies to erase Kurds in the Turkish government’s attacks on Aleppo and Afrin, as well as the Iranian government’s violent policies and intentional underdevelopment of the Kurdish region.[iii] To flip the script and say that Kurds are leading genocidal campaigns against Turks, Persians, and Arabs would be absurd!
It is vital now to name the power and refuse the propaganda pushed forward by racists, fascists, imperialists, and colonialists. Genocide must be accurately analyzed for us to come up with solutions to end systemic, systematic violence against certain communities. Historically accurate forms of analysis offer the possibility for peace, a peace that can save us all. We need peace and honesty more than ever!
Stanley Thangaraj is an Anthropologist who studies immigrant and refugee communities in the US South. His book, Desi Hoop Dreams (New York University Press, 2015), looked at the lives of Pakistani Americans in Atlanta and their negotiation of American masculinity through co-ethnic basketball circuits. Thangaraj’s newest book looks at the lives of Kurds in the United States, their practices of place-making, and their expression of their desires and pleasures.
Notes
[i] Stuit, Hanneke (2016), Stuit, Hanneke (ed.), “Ubuntu and Common Humanity in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, Ubuntu Strategies: Constructing Spaces of Belonging in Contemporary South African Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 39–82,
[ii] See Kevin Kruse’s White Flight.
[iii] Mohammadpour, Ahmad, and Kamal Soleimani. “The Racial Policies of De-development in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Palestine and Rojhelat (Eastern Kurdistan).” Current Anthropology 65, no. 6 (2024): 965-989.