Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe received the following letter on May 14 from the Most Rev. Thabo Makgoba, archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA). On May 12, Bishop Rowe announced that The Episcopal Church would end its refugee resettlement grant agreements with the U.S. government after being asked to resettle white Afrikaners from South Africa.
The Episcopal Church has long had a connection with ACSA, first speaking against apartheid and commending the South African church’s witness against it in 1958. Beginning in 1966, The Episcopal Church urged church institutions to reconsider investing in South Africa. Later, the church supported the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission—led by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was then head of what is now ACSA.
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Dear Presiding Bishop Sean,
I write to thank you for your call on Sunday, and to assure you of our gratitude for the stand you have taken in support of ACSA and South Africa in regard to the group of South Africans being resettled by your Administration.
What the Administration refers to as anti-white racial discrimination is nothing of the kind. Our government implements affirmative action on the lines of that in the United States, designed not to discriminate against whites but to overcome the historic disadvantages black South Africans have suffered.
By every measure of economic and social privilege, white South Africans as a whole remain the beneficiaries of apartheid. Measured by the Gini coefficient, which measures income disparity, we are the most unequal society in the world, with the majority of the poor black, and the majority of the wealthy white.
While U.S. supporters of the South African group will no doubt highlight individual cases of suffering some members might have undergone, and criticise TEC for its action, we cannot agree that South Africans who have lost the privileges they enjoyed under apartheid should qualify for refugee status ahead of people fleeing war and persecution from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Afghanistan.
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Blessings,
