Projection and the White Victimhood Narrative
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
, Archbishop Desmond Tutu
In 2018, Donald Trump made international headlines by tweeting that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate land seizures and the “large-scale killing of farmers” in South Africa, a claim rooted not in fact, but in a white nationalist conspiracy theory. Popularised by far-right commentators such as Tucker Carlson, this narrative was not merely political opportunism. It represented the globalisation of a psychological defence: the conversion of white anxiety into white innocence, and white supremacy into white victimhood.
The most telling moment, however, came not on Twitter but in the Oval Office. During a formal meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump ambushed his guest with a video produced by Fox News, an inflammatory media outlet promoting the myth of a “white genocide.” What unfolded was not diplomacy but theatre. Ramaphosa later described the encounter as jarring and disrespectful. A meeting intended for international cooperation had been weaponised into a performance of racial paranoia and neo-colonial assertion.
Trump presented misleading and fabricated evidence to substantiate the far-right assertion that white South Africans were being systematically targeted. The video included:
An image allegedly showing murdered white farmers, which was taken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, depicted humanitarian workers lifting body bags after clashes involving M23 rebels.
Footage of a so-called “mass grave” that was, in reality, a temporary memorial erected after two Afrikaner farmers were killed, a tragic but isolated event.
A clip of Julius Malema, a marginal opposition figure, misrepresented as a government official, with his provocative rhetoric falsely framed as official state policy.
This wasn’t misinformation; it was psychopolitical theatre, a performance of racial attachment panic. Trump sought to anchor a global audience to a collapsing identity model, offering distorted imagery as reassurance that whiteness remains under siege, and therefore justified in its defence.
This moment was not a diplomatic blunder. It was a symbolic reassertion: an American president projecting a white nationalist narrative onto African soil, recycling the colonial trope in which white settlers, even on land they stole, are recast as the rightful victims.
1. Historical Patterns of Defensive Projection
Trump’s ambush of Ramaphosa was not an isolated incident. It mirrored a familiar pattern in American history: when whiteness feels threatened, it casts itself as under attack.
Following the Civil War, during Reconstruction, newly freed Black Americans were momentarily empowered, only to be quickly demonised. Former enslavers recast themselves as victims of federal aggression and Black criminality. Similar reversals surfaced during the civil rights movement, when school integration, voting rights, and affirmative action were portrayed as assaults on white identity.
Trump’s invocation of the South African farmer myth follows this logic precisely. When white dominance is challenged, the narrative shifts: we are the ones under siege.
2. The Transnational Echo Chamber of Supremacy
Trump’s presentation of the Fox News video was not merely a breach of protocol; it was the export of white grievance across borders.
South Africa, much like the U.S., is a settler-colonial society. Land was appropriated, Indigenous peoples were displaced, and racial hierarchies were institutionalised. The fall of apartheid signalled a seismic political shift; however, economic power, land ownership, and corporate control continued to remain overwhelmingly white.
Even modest attempts to redress these imbalances have been met with cries of victimhood. The “white genocide” myth is part of a global script, circulated through far-right networks and amplified by media, linking American fears of demographic change with South African anxieties over land reform. It enables white individuals in one country to imagine themselves in existential solidarity with whites elsewhere, not as agents of history, but as its casualties.
By inserting this narrative into a diplomatic meeting, Trump was not merely questioning policy. He was imposing meaning. The American far-right story became the lens through which a Black-led democracy was interpreted. This was not engagement; it was a colonial intervention, with propaganda as its instrument.
3. Knowing and Not Wanting to Know: White Denial in South Africa
What makes the myth of the white farmer particularly fraught is that it circulates in a country where whiteness still retains power.
South Africa’s democratic transition in 1994 brought forth a new constitution, a Black-led government, and hopes for reconciliation. However, the structural pillars of apartheid—economic inequality, land disparity, and spatial segregation—largely persisted. Today, white South Africans, who constitute less than 10% of the population, still control the majority of private land and capital.
And yet many deny this. A surface-level admission that apartheid was wrong is often paired with a refusal to surrender its benefits. This produces a kind of psychic split: knowing and not wanting to know. Many white South Africans report feeling misunderstood, marginalised, and even persecuted, despite occupying the country’s economic summit.
This dissonance fuels projection. Instead of confronting a history of theft and structural violence, some retreat into myths of innocence. In this retelling, the white farmer transforms into a Christ-like figure: pious, industrious, and besieged. The harsh reality of land dispossession is erased. What remains is the fear of losing what was never rightfully owned.
4. Predictive Identity and the Threat of Equity
The predictive mind provides a powerful perspective here. When whiteness is established as the cultural, economic, and psychological norm, any progress towards equity is perceived as a threat.
Land reform? That is expropriation. Affirmative action? That is discrimination. A Black president, whether in the Union Buildings or the White House? That is instability.
These reactions are not simply ideological; they represent predictive responses to disconfirmation. The brain anticipates white centrality, and when reality diverges from that model, it generates a prediction error—a signal that something has gone awry.
Rather than updating the model, which would necessitate moral reckoning, grief, and responsibility, many cling to it. They reinterpret the world through the old lens: We are the victims. They are the danger. This is not ignorance. It is defence.
5. The Psychic Economy of Supremacy
W.E.B. Du Bois described it over a century ago: the “wages of whiteness” are not only economic but also psychic. They provide a sense of moral clarity and superiority in a world built on stolen land and silenced voices.
Trump’s ambush of Ramaphosa was not about facts; it was a performance of those wages—a gesture that said: We still control the narrative. Your reality is subject to our fear.
But beneath the bravado lies fragility. Modern whiteness is haunted by its history, by the possibility of reversal, and by a future it cannot command.
Projection becomes the mechanism through which that haunting is kept at bay. However, the cost is substantial: it postpones healing, distorts relationships, and ensures the wound, both psychic and historical, remains unhealed.
6. Toward Reckoning (Not Resolution)
If whiteness is to endure without supremacy, it must learn to grieve. It must mourn its illusions of innocence, entitlement, and control.
This will not happen through ambushes or propaganda. It will not occur in echo chambers of denial. It requires what psychotherapy terms rupture, a moment of contact with what has long been evaded.
The question is whether our societies, American, South African, and global, are willing to establish that contact. Whether we can cease projecting and begin witnessing. Whether we can endure truth without retreating into myth.
We are not there yet. But the ambush in the White House, the resurrection of the white farmer myth, and the transnational cycle of denial all show us what must be faced.
Not only by Black leaders like Ramaphosa, but by the white world that continues to convince itself that there is nothing left to reckon with.
(Rory Singer)