My neighbors said the notion was bonkers. But when I suggested there was a role for white South Africans to speak up and challenge Trump’s notion that whites were being persecuted in South Africa, they demurred. “Why should I even counter something so crazy?” one of them wrote. Crazy is as crazy does, and when countering a lie requires you to speak sentences such as “No, we are not yet being made to wear identifying garments, like the Jews wore in 1938,” you just don’t even go there.

Because the truth is the opposite, almost the exact opposite. It’s true that news organizations, in my view, under-report from South Africa. But the reality they under-report is that white life is amazing. The average household income for white-person-headed households in South Africa, according to a 2016 survey, is five times the average income of a black-headed one. They are almost 10 percent of the country’s population and still possess nearly three fourths of its privately owned agricultural land. It’s arguably the world’s finest quality of life—oysters, golf, fine wine—for the cheapest prices on earth. We buy a fillet of smoked salmon at the upscale grocery for more than most of us pay our black maids per day. In my nine years living here, and in travels all over the country, I have met only two white South African families that don’t employ black household help, a maid or a gardener.