By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Two June Sixteenths
I am writing these words in South Africa, on the 50th anniversary of June 16, 1976 — the day when the students of Soweto marched against the Apartheid system's demand that they be educated in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors, and were met with bullets. Hector Pieterson was thirteen years old. He was shot and died almost immediately. The photograph of his body being carried by a fellow student, his sister running alongside in grief, became one of the most iconic images of the last century. Since 1994, the year of its first democratic elections, June 16 is a national holiday in South Africa, known as Youth Day. Hector has a memorial and museum in Soweto named after him, commemorating the events of that day.
June 16 carries another resonance. It is Bloomsday — the day on which James Joyce set the entirety of Ulysses, following Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. Joyce chose an ordinary day among ordinary people — a Jewish advertising canvasser moving through a city that regarded his Jewishness before it saw his humanity — and made of it an inexhaustible meditation on consciousness, identity, and belonging. Ireland in 1904 was under British rule, and had been for centuries, its language suppressed, its people defined by imperial power that regarded them as inferior. Joyce's response was to insist, through sheer accumulation of inner life on the page, that the colonized mind is as rich, as complex, as worthy of attention as any in the world.
The connection between Bloomsday and the Soweto uprising is of course a coincidence — but not an empty one. Both are, in their different ways, assertions of human interiority against systems that sought to deny it.
The students who marched in Soweto seventy-two years later were making a related claim at far greater personal cost: that their inner lives, their language, their dignity, were not for the colonizers to define. The connection between Bloomsday and the Soweto uprising is of course a coincidence — but not an empty one. Both are, in their different ways, assertions of human interiority against systems that sought to deny it. It is this shared philosophical conviction — a claim about the relationship between consciousness and freedom — that gives June 16 its double resonance, and that I find myself returning to throughout this anniversary.
What the Cities Say
Each city in South Africa offers its own education. The Black cab driver originally from Limpopo, close to the border to Zimbabwe, who takes me to my guesthouse in Johannesburg — Jo-burg — tells me how his mother, working as a maid to Afrikaners during Apartheid, once showed him around her employer's residence. He remembers his astonishment at the sheer size of the place, at the fact that children would not only sleep in beds but each in their own beds. The guesthouse is on a tree-lined street in Melville, near the University of Johannesburg. Every house is a small fortress: walls, barbed wire, signs announcing security companies prepared to use lethal force or dogs ready to inflict real harm. Private security officers are stationed on some corners. There is no sidewalk — homeowners do with their frontage what they choose. Public space exists only for cars to pass through. Everyone tells you that you venture out at your peril. A South African colleague who also stays here and normally resides in Eastern Cape province does venture own at her own peril because she does not want to cede the streets to crime.
Another South African colleague who teaches in Pretoria — where people are clearly comfortable being on the streets in residential neighborhoods in ways they are not in Jo-burg — nonetheless prefers to live in Jo-burg because as a Black woman she experiences condescending racism more acutely in Pretoria than in Jo-burg. (Black people are more than 80% of South Africa's population.) People from Jo-burg generally speak of their city with deep affection. On the face of it, this is perplexing, given how dangerous a place this city is. But Jo-burgers not only praise their city for the opportunities South Africa's economic powerhouse provides — they also insist that a very different city is to be found beneath the fortress mentality of residential streets. It seems the warmth here lives behind the walls — and one could readily imagine that it does if many such walls cover up the kind of enchanted garden that surrounds my guesthouse.
Cape Town feels very apart from the rest of the country — it even has a separatist movement, has its own politics opposing the ruling African National Congress (ANC), and carries the air of a European city — but it hides its poverty on the outskirts. A Congolese man who has lived there for twenty years becomes agitated when I ask whether he would consider South African citizenship. It would make little practical difference, he explains: employment opportunities are coded for native-born South Africans, unavailable to the naturalized. He and his family must be careful which neighborhood to live in, since there are Black South African neighborhoods where he would be killed if he tried to settle. His three South-Africa-born children do not normally reveal that their parents are Congolese. He adds, with some edge, that he thinks Black South Africans make excuses when explaining deficiencies in their lives by reference to Apartheid, more than thirty years after it ended.
The fortress architecture of Melville and elsewhere is not incidental. It is the spatial legacy of Apartheid's unresolved contradictions — a city of enormous wealth and catastrophic inequality where the boundary between private and public has been militarized because the social contract is radically incomplete. The students who marched fifty years ago helped bring a democratic South Africa into being. Whether it has become what they marched for is a question the architecture answers, partially and uncomfortably.
A Lunch and a Life
On this particular June 16, I have the privilege of lunch with Richard Goldstone — one of the most consequential human rights figures of the past half century. There is something additionally resonant about this meeting on Bloomsday: Goldstone is a Jewish South African whose life has involved sustained negotiations with questions of identity, conscience, and belonging not entirely unlike those Joyce gave to Leopold Bloom — questions about what it means to be simultaneously insider and outsider, about the obligations that position imposes.
Goldstone rose through the South African legal establishment during Apartheid, using the limited space judicial office provided to advance procedural fairness and resist executive overreach within a system designed for the opposite purpose. His chairmanship of the Goldstone Commission in the early 1990s, investigating political violence that was soaring during the transition to democracy, helped to keep negotiations between the ANC and the then-ruling National Party alive by providing authoritative findings neither side could dismiss. As Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, he later built, from the ground up, the principle that those who commit crimes against humanity can be held accountable regardless of political circumstances. The work of these two tribunals is a lasting success story in the creation of international criminal law.
His subsequent work on the Gaza conflict — the 2009 report, and his partial recantation of one of its central findings in 2011 — belongs to his story. I mention it not to adjudicate a debate that remains contested — whether Israel had deliberately targeted civilians, whether the report was justified to claim it had, and whether the recantation in turn was justified — but because it illustrates something essential: human rights work at the highest level often requires making judgments under conditions of incomplete information, operating under pressures so intense that the line between intellectual revision and capitulation to that pressure can be difficult to discern. Goldstone has lived with this ambiguity publicly. It is part of what makes him a serious figure rather than a merely admired one.
Sitting across from him on this anniversary, I find myself thinking about what fifty years has meant — what has been built, what remains unfinished, and what is under threat. And we discuss all that, especially for the United States and South Africa.
Two Traditions, and Their American Counterpart
The students who marched on June 16, 1976, were children of two intellectual traditions whose tension has shaped South African politics. The first runs through the ANC and Nelson Mandela: non-racial democratic nationalism, the Freedom Charter's declaration that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white," and its most powerful embodiment in Mandela's vision of constitutionalism and reconciliation. The second runs through Steve Biko and the Black Consciousness Movement: the conviction that before political liberation could come, psychological liberation was necessary. "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor," Biko famously insisted, "is the mind of the oppressed." Apartheid's deepest wound, for him, was not material but internal — the internalization of inferiority, the habit of defining Black identity through White eyes. Black people needed to recover psychological sovereignty before real political agency was possible.
This debate has an American counterpart. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X represent, structurally, something analogous to Mandela and Biko — though the analogy should not be pressed too far. King's vision was integrationist and universalist, his method moral appeal to the conscience of White America, his strategic genius making visible the gap between democratic ideals and racial practice. Malcolm X was skeptical that White America had a conscience on race that could be appealed to. Where King sought integration into American institutions, Malcolm X argued that those institutions were constituted by racial domination — that seeking admission to a burning house was not liberation. His emphasis on Black pride, psychological self-recovery, and the damage of internalized inferiority anticipated Biko's Black Consciousness, though the two men developed their ideas in different contexts. Both drew on Frantz Fanon's analysis of colonial psychic destruction — the self-hatred and dependence that had to be overcome. Both died young and violently, and were transformed into symbols whose meaning continues to be fought over.
Here Joyce is relevant, not merely as framing. Both Biko and Malcolm X were insisting on something Joyce demonstrated through literary form: that the inner life of the colonized — its richness, dignity, and irreducibility — cannot ultimately be possessed by the colonizer, however hard the colonizer tries. Leopold Bloom moves through Dublin as a man who belongs and does not belong simultaneously, human in ways the city around him sometimes refuses to acknowledge. Joyce’s insistence on his full interiority is an act of literary justice. The colonial history Cedric Robinson traced in his 1983 book Black Marxism gives this connection more than symbolic resonance. Robinson argued that the English construction of the Irish as savage and racially inferior established the patterns and techniques of racial domination later deployed broadly in colonial projects. Ireland was not merely a literary backdrop but a foundational instance of the racial capitalism that would eventually produce Apartheid. When Bloom moves through Dublin and the students march through Soweto, they are moving through different chapters of the same long colonial story.
The analogy should not be pressed too far, I said. The United States arose from a conquest that dispossessed Indigenous peoples and then imported kidnapped Africans as enslaved labor — today Black Americans are roughly one eighth of the population, and Indigenous Americans less than 2%. In South Africa the Black population is about 80%, and here Black Africans were the Indigenous people. As guides at Robben Island explain, centuries before Mandela was imprisoned there, European colonizers held captive the leaders of South African Indigenous groups who refused, unlike leaders elsewhere in Africa, to cooperate with the enslavement of their own people. Enslaved people were still brought to South Africa. But they were kidnapped in other regions around the Pacific rim and the rim of the Indian Ocean — their descendants today contribute to South Africa’s population diversity. These differences create profoundly different political option spaces. For instance, when Marcus Garvey proposed in the 1920s that Black Americans might find liberation through a "return" to Africa, he was imagining something that could have no equivalent in a country where Black people had always been home.
What Redistribution Looks Like from Here
A week before meeting Goldstone, I had lunch with Tshepo Madlingozi, a commissioner on South Africa's Human Rights Commission and a prominent public intellectual — so prominent that a reference to his views appears in an exhibit at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town. Madlingozi is rooted in South Africa's human rights tradition, but he believes it falls short: a thorough rethinking of economic and political arrangements is necessary, given the colonial legacy and its lasting implications. In this effort — engaging the colonial legacy and its reflection in how people think and feel — he is also joined by academics associated with the African Institute for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS), headed by Veli Mitova – an institute dedicated to epistemic justice, decolonising knowledge, and centering African philosophical voices on the global stage. It is this institute that is hosting me in Jo-burg and at whose invitation I am in South Africa.
Madlingozi is also gravely worried about inequality and its consequences. When I ask how he hopes to achieve his goals politically — how he expects to persuade White South Africans to surrender some of their privileges — he says it would simply be the only way of creating a more cohesive and safer society, and that they eventually would have to realize that. I wholeheartedly agree. And it is precisely a very modest, insufficient version of this redistributive ambition — democratic land reform, economic reckoning with a colonial legacy — that got White South Africans classified as political refugees in Trump's America.
One thing is worth mentioning here. Nelson Mandela remains a global icon for human rights and reconciliation. But views about him these days among South Africans are mixed. His sacrifice for a better South Africa stands unquestioned. Still, many younger South Africans feel he conceded too much when he left to the Whites their economic power. In hindsight of course such choices always look different. The fierce violence that erupted when it became clear that South Africa would abandon Apartheid — the context of the Goldstone Commission mentioned above — suggests that White South Africans would have resisted even more fiercely had yet more been at stake. The Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria is not a monument to a people who let things go easily. And they placed it on a hill where it dominates the skyline for miles.
The Inversion
I find myself unable to observe Youth Day 2026 without reflecting on what the American government is currently doing in relation to South Africa, and what that reveals about the political moment on both sides of the Atlantic. White South Africans are just about the only refugees Trump's America accepts: of the roughly 6,000 refugees admitted since October 2025, nearly all are White South Africans. It must be said plainly: White South Africans are among the great winners of the turmoil of the twentieth century. After centuries of colonialism and decades of brutal exploitation that was the core of Apartheid, the only price they paid was to relinquish political power while preserving most of their economic privileges, privileges that are unthinkable without oppressive legislation such as the Natives Land Act of 1913 that greatly limited land-ownership of Black Africans (and is brilliantly captured in Sol Plaatje’s 1916 book Native Life in South Africa) — not to mention of course the brutal oppression of the period officially known as Apartheid that is so aptly captured in the magnificent Apartheid Museum in Jo-burg and put into the larger context of South African history in the equally magnificent Freedom Park in Pretoria. (For Apartheid-related legislation from 1850-1970, see here.)
The asylum policy carries a message directed not primarily at South Africa but at America. It says to White South Africans: the American right sees you as a template for what they fear is coming for them.
The South African government has not pursued a policy of persecution against White citizens — and it certainly has not inflicted genocide on them, as Trump claimed during his humiliating White House meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa on May 21, 2025. (For opinions on Trump in South Africa broken down by race, see here.) What it has pursued is land reform, an attempt however imperfect and contested to address the most enduring material legacy of colonial and Apartheid dispossession through democratic legislative processes. Farm murders are a real phenomenon, but they are part of a broader violent crime crisis that devastates South Africans of all races. White farmers are not disproportionately targeted relative to that pattern. Had he brought up the subject of corruption with Ramaphosa, he would have been on to something. But unsurprisingly, that topic was of no concern to him.
The inversion is the point. The system under which Hector Pieterson was shot was built by White Afrikaner nationalism. The beneficiaries of Apartheid were White South Africans. The victims were Black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans — denied education, property ownership, the vote, the most basic dignities of citizenship, not for years but for generations. A former prisoner now serving as guide on Robben Island describes the murder by South African security forces of two human rights lawyers in the 1980s — lawyers who had tried to keep the likes of him out of prison for minor acts of political resistance — as "messy the way it is messy when ducks kill another duck." The asylum policy says, in effect: we are concerned about the White South Africans. Not the students who were shot fifty years ago today. Not the families forcibly removed from District Six in Cape Town under the Group Areas Act (as so many others were elsewhere). Not the workers paid a fraction of white wages under the industrial color bar. The concern is for the descendants of those who built and benefited from that system, at the moment when democratic South Africa is attempting, however inadequately, to address its legacies.
This is the defining rhetorical move of a particular kind of politics operating simultaneously in the United States and across several Western democracies: the move by which historical victimhood and present victimhood are exchanged — by which those who accumulated advantage through generations of structural privilege claim, at the moment when the structures begin to be reformed, that they are now the persecuted. Both Biko and Malcolm X would recognize this move. Both spent significant energy analyzing the psychological and political mechanisms by which systems of racial domination maintain themselves — including the mechanism by which the powerful represent themselves as victims of the powerless.
The asylum policy carries a message directed not primarily at South Africa but at America. It says to White South Africans: the American right sees you as a template for what they fear is coming for them. Your situation — a White minority in a democracy pursuing even modest redistributive politics — is the story American White nationalists tell about their own future. By offering asylum, we are not making a humanitarian claim. We are making an ideological one: that democratic majorities using democratic processes to address historical injustice engage in persecution. This framing has profound implications for what democracy itself means — and it is a framing that Martin Luther King, who spent his life appealing to democratic principles against racial hierarchy, would recognize as betrayal of the very vocabulary he invoked.
There is a further dimension. South Africa brought a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, alleging violations of the Genocide Convention in Gaza. Sympathies for the plight of Palestinians run high in South Africa — in the Bo-Kaap neighborhood in Cape Town, a historical Muslim community, strikingly many of the colorful houses carry inscriptions supportive of Palestinian self-determination. Whatever one's view of the merits, South Africa exercised a legal right available to states parties under the Convention, in a forum established by the United Nations for this purpose. The Trump administration's response — including the asylum policy, threats to cut aid, attacks on South Africa's trade status — suggests that refugee protection is used as a diplomatic weapon against a country that exercised its legal rights in ways Washington disapproves of. This is a corruption of the refugee system's purpose that must concern the human rights community.
The Reagan administration opposed sanctions against Apartheid South Africa, arguing for "constructive engagement" and famously describing the ANC as a terrorist organization. The FBI surveilled and harassed Martin Luther King Jr., and the United States government treated Malcolm X as a subversive threat rather than a political thinker whose analysis of American racial reality was more accurate than that of those surveilling him. History has judged those positions harshly, and rightly so. Trump's asylum policy belongs to the same family of errors. America's approach to humanitarianism under Trump is profoundly embarrassing. It would be comical — material for satire — if it were not real.
What the Anniversary Asks
Both the United States and South Africa built economies substantially on racial exploitation. Both underwent formal legal transitions away from racial hierarchy. Both emerged with racial wealth gaps so profound that formal legal equality could not close them. Both are now living through the political consequences of that incompleteness — backlashes that deploy language of victimhood on behalf of the historically advantaged, and that use democratic instruments to dismantle frameworks designed to address historical injustice.
The students who marched fifty years ago today understood both. They marched having internalized what Biko taught: that dignity cannot be given by an oppressor, only claimed by the oppressed, and that claiming it — however dangerous — is the only act of genuine self-affirmation available under conditions of systematic dehumanization.
Goldstone's career offers one model of what the human rights response to such a moment looks like — the patient building and defense of accountability mechanisms that make it harder for power to rewrite history in its own favor. The traditions of Biko and Malcolm X offer another: the insistence that formal equality without transformation of consciousness and material conditions is an incomplete and unstable achievement. This is also the conversation that Tshepo Madlingozi — deeply steeped in these various traditions — seeks to have with his country. Both models are needed. The institutional work without the consciousness work produces legal equality that leaves material hierarchy intact. The consciousness work without the institutional work produces political energy that has nowhere to go. The tension between these traditions — King and Malcolm X, Mandela and Biko — is not a problem to be solved but a permanent condition of any serious attempt to address the legacy of racial domination.
The students who marched fifty years ago today understood both. They marched having internalized what Biko taught: that dignity cannot be given by an oppressor, only claimed by the oppressed, and that claiming it — however dangerous — is the only act of genuine self-affirmation available under conditions of systematic dehumanization. This is the conviction that connects Soweto to the American civil rights movement, the pass laws to Jim Crow. And it is the conviction that connects both, on this June 16, to Leopold Bloom walking the streets of Dublin — moving through a city that sees his difference before it sees his humanity, whose full inner life Joyce insists on with the most ambitious literary form of the twentieth century.
Trump's asylum policy would have seemed too absurd to contemplate to the students who marched in 1976 — that half a century later, the most powerful government in the world would offer protection to the heirs of those who built the system that shot them. But that is the reality now. What remains true, and what this anniversary asks us to hold onto, is the conviction on which those students staked their lives: that no political convenience can ultimately possess or rewrite the inner life that claims its own dignity. Joyce knew this. Biko knew this. The students of Soweto demonstrated it at the cost that gives this day its meaning.
On June 16, 2026, in Johannesburg, that conviction feels both more endangered and more necessary than it has in a long time.
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