The global left has traditionally got South Africa wrong by defining it through a prism of black vs white interests with the implication that the one must overcome the other for the country to be a success. The contemporary White House makes the same mistake by inverting that conflict. Both South Africans and Americans would stand to gain a lot by correcting that mistake.

The inference in the United States (US) originally introducing, and then in May this year raising, a quota for white Afrikaners to be admitted as refugees, is that these are under siege at the hands of South Africa’s black citizens. That’s wrong.

Let’s get the politically correct crap out of the way right from the start. White people and Afrikaners are discriminated against by the South African state in terms of race and politics. You can read any of over a hundred statutes to see that. Property rights are also under threat, as the most basic reading of the relevant legislation makes clear. And farmers are attacked and murdered at a rate far higher than the average of the population. South Africa’s foreign policy stances are hardly an attempt to secure the moral high ground but a clear and affectionate alliance with some of the world’s worst scoundrels and dictators.

President Donald Trump is on solid ground, therefore, when he speaks of terrible things going on in South Africa. That is not mythmaking in the main as alleged.

But it must be made clear from where those attacks arise. They do not arise from black South Africans targeted at white people. They arise from the state – a state that has lost the confidence of its people and a former ruling party that is headed for just a third of the vote in elections scheduled for November. And many black South Africans are victims of the policies in question too, and in ways not dissimilar to the ways in which white South Africans are.

That requires some explaining.

Black professionals are also encumbered by empowerment laws when these are used as fig leaves to conceal corruption and demands for bribes and the like to get a job or win a contract. Across the fertile east of the country, more than half of land by private capacity is in black hands but not ownership, because it is the policy of the government that many black people should not own land. Black commercial farmers are gunned down with their white compatriots. More black people stand to lose their medical cover as a consequence of national health insurance proposals than white people do. When the government’s preferential procurement policy drains resources from the state, it is black people who suffer arguably more than white people because black people remain more dependent on the state for services than white people do.

The hard left and the hard right both want you to fall for the idea that these policies pit black and white against each other. They want you to respond to an article like this with anger and say it is all wrong and that your side is the victim and the other side the perpetrator. Come to your own conclusions but think hard if that is really fully so.

What some in Washington seem unable to understand is that these shared experiences in turn reflect shares values. On every question of values polled by The Common Sense and its partner, the Social Research Foundation, the same result comes back: that seven to eight out of every 10 South Africans, regardless of race or politics or history or incomes, share the same values.

On expropriation for example, the central pillar of left nationalism in South Africa, strong majorities of black people, white people, Democratic Alliance (DA) voters and African National Congress voters reject the idea that the state seize assets without compensation.

At odds with this the apparent view in Washington is that most South Africans belong to a hostile alliance of black nationalists, Marxists, and progressive internationalists. White people, and Afrikaners among them, are seen as an isolated Christian minority and America’s only natural partners in the country. And, worse, that the former is perpetrating a genocide against the latter.

The lack of understanding extends directly to Afrikaners too. Their abiding political motivation is towards inclusion in South African society. That is why the bulk of Afrikaners vote for the multiracial DA and not the more narrowly nationalist Freedom Front Plus. Yet the American refugee policy offers them the opposite of that – exclusion from South Africa. This newspaper has previously warned that the refugee policy will not only see America lose on the potential to find common ground with the black conservative majority but with Afrikaners themselves.

That there are Afrikaners who sign up for the refugee policy is a function of the fact that many people in any society if given the opportunity to move to America to work and start a life would take it, because America is such a great place. Open the policy to all races and queues miles long would snake around the American embassy.

But it is increasingly hard to think that this all comes down to a misunderstanding of South Africa. There are too many bright people in Washington to think that they are making such a compounding list of basic analytical mistakes. At a certain level it seems ever more like a deliberate misrepresentation of South Africa’s reality and an effort to recruit the white Christians to America to offset the consequences of previous immigration waves. In that South Africans as a whole and Afrikaners too are being played – their legitimate grievances subsumed into a domestic American agenda to portray the demonstration there as the saviour of white Christians everywhere that they come under siege.

The correct policy for America to take towards South Africa would be to say, firstly, that the policies of its government are inherently counterproductive and threaten the economic prospects and civil rights of all its people, even where these are purportedly directly only at white people Secondly, that a distinction must be drawn between the state and the people, and that the people are rejecting the state, and that there is a vast storehouse of common values between black and white, and more so that those values align closely with what Western liberal ideals should be. Thirdly, that the objective of both governments must be to leverage that middle ground to advantage of their respective people.