There's no "genocide" against White people in South Africa. Stop the rumour mill!

So people on the right are spreading rumours that there's a "genocide" against White people occurring in South Africa. This is completely false. The socialist government has been seizing private land from wealthy landowners, and while I'm strongly opposed to this policy, it's not equivalent to genocide at all, for two reasons.

First, the policy targets people based on class, not race. It has a disproportionate impact on Afrikaners (White South Africans of Dutch descent) because they comprise the majority of wealthy landowners, but they're not being targeted on the basis of their race, at least not officially. Unofficially, I'm sure racial resentment played a role in building public support for this policy, but let's be real, you could say the same about a lot of U.S. policies that have disparate impacts on minority groups.

Second, the landowners are not being killed, or imprisoned, or forced into exile. They're having their land taken away and being given what the government feels is adequate compensation for it. Again, I think it's wrong, I think it's a bad policy, but the use of eminent domain for land redistribution is far from genocide. It's still the worst kind of authoritarian socialism and should be harshly condemned for that, but to claim that it's equivalent to genocide is to make light of actual genocides.

As for the left-wingers who are cheering this policy on, or saying that the White South Africans should just leave the country, they deserve a "fuck off" just as much as the right-wingers spreading false rumours of genocide. The Afrikaners have been living in South Africa for over 300 years. I'd say that at this point, they have just as much of a right to be there as anyone else. Besides which, the actual indigenous people of South Africa (the Khoikhoi and the San) comprise less than one percent of the total population. The majority ethnic group is the Bantu (which includes the Zulu people), and they arrived in the 16th-17th century, around the same time as the Dutch! Just because the Bantu and the original natives are both "Black" by American standards doesn't mean they're the same; that's just Americans projecting their own understanding of race onto foreign countries.

So really, Americans on both sides of the political spectrum need to shut the fuck up about this and stop acting like racial politics in South Africa are just an extension of racial politics in North America. I don't know that much about South African politics myself, but I know enough to realise that the American right and the American left are getting it horribly wrong.