There are two groups of people. Those who spend their whole lives thinking in terms of politically correct clichés and those with deep insight and understanding. The one group is very big and the other very small. Data on how South Africans feel about United States (US) President Donald Trump’s South Africa refugee programme is a case in point.

The cliché is that white people are recalcitrant right-wingers and therefore support the refugee programme and are keen to sign up for it, whereas black people revile both Trump and America and would never think of it. It turns out that is exactly wrong.

In a July poll, this newspaper put a set of questions on the refugee programme to South Africans. One of those was whether a respondent would qualify as a refugee on grounds of having suffered terrible violence and economic hardship as a consequence of the policies of South Africa’s government, and, if so qualified, whether they would take up the offer of refugee status in America.

The data revealed that black South Africans were significantly more likely to do that than their white fellow citizens. In our accompanying report this morning, you can read the data, which show that black South Africans would be three times more likely than their white compatriots to move to America as refugees.

That makes a lot of sense if you get past the clichés.

South Africa’s economics is such that black South Africans suffer an unemployment rate way above that of whites. Among young black people, the figure is over 50%.

Black society is not predominantly middle class, which means blacks have fewer institutional links to walk away from than is the case for whites, who are more likely to have complex business, investment, and tax ties to South Africa.

Black South Africans don’t have the familial and business connections or the same degree of skills to emigrate out of South Africa as many whites are able to do.

Black South Africans are exposed to the most frightening criminal violence without the same degree of private security as is the case for whites.

Black society is also deeply conservative in key respects, which makes for a more natural alignment with aspects of the Christian conservative culture of the Trump administration in Washington than is the case for many whites who hold more liberal views.

There is a lot to read into all of that.

It is damning of Pretoria. Just think what it means that, thirty years after democracy, black South Africans, more than white South Africans, would take up refugee status in Trump’s America. This in turn reveals how out of touch South Africa’s anti-US foreign policy is with the views of the country’s people.

On the American side, it reveals the great pity that Washington has cast South Africa’s problems as a battle that pits black against white, and by extension that black South Africans are against America and whites in favour of it. This framing is poisoning the immense goodwill that Trump’s Washington could have drawn out of black South African society. Depending on what happens with Simonstown, the South Atlantic, and Africa more broadly, that may come to stand as one of the most studied failures of contemporary American foreign policy.

Lastly, it shows just how shallow popular understanding of a society can be when it is forced through a prism of political correctness, and how misleading it can be to build a view or strategy on such a shallow understanding.