HERE’S A HEARTWARMING STORY:

KAKUMA, Kenya — The engines rumbled and the red sand swirled as the cargo plane roared onto the dirt airstrip. One by one, the dazed and impoverished refugees climbed from the belly of the plane into this desolate wind-swept camp.

They are members of Africa’s lost tribe, the Somali Bantu, who were stolen from the shores of Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania and carried on Arab slave ships to Somalia two centuries ago. They were enslaved and persecuted until Somalia’s civil war scattered them to refugee camps in the 1990’s. . . .

Over the next two years, nearly all of the Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya — about 12,000 people — are to be flown to the United States. This is one of the largest refugee groups to receive blanket permission for resettlement since the mid-1990’s, State Department officials say. . . .

In Somalia, the lighter-skinned majority rejected the Bantu, for their slave origins and dark skin and wide features. Even after they were freed from bondage, the Bantu were denied meaningful political representation and rights to land ownership. During the Somali civil war, they were disproportionately victims of rapes and killings.

I think it’s going to be quite an adjustment for them, and no doubt there are people (nearly all non-Bantu) who are outraged that their traditional ways are going to have to change in the process. I suspect, though, that they’ll do better here than they would in, say, France.

The New York Times, however, can’t help but make a hash of the story by including this passage:

The refugees watch snippets of American life on videos in class, and they marvel at the images of supermarkets filled with peppers and tomatoes and of tall buildings that reach for the clouds. But they know little about racism, poverty, the bone-chilling cold or the cities that will be chosen for them by refugee resettlement agencies.

They know little about racism or poverty? Read your own freakin’ story — they’ve been enslaved because of their skin color, and they’re living in refugee camps! They’re encountering running water and flush toilets for the first time! Jeezus. To a certain class of writer, “racism and poverty” can only exist in America, and have no meaning anywhere else.