How Should You Feel About the War in Ukraine if You’re Black?
So let me just get one quick disclaimer out of the way — my perspective on the war in Ukraine is not exactly theoretical. I have been to Ukraine many times, I have colleagues and close friends who are Ukrainians living in Kyiv. On the morning of the invasion, I was exchanging messages with several of them while they fled their homes and businesses. They have sent me images of themselves spending their nights underground in cold, unpowered metro stations as their children cry. They have tagged me in photographs of places we have visited together that have now been bombed to the ground. Their fear is palpable, their rage is insurmountable. Their resistance; unbreakable.
An old school friend of mine has been posting videos of his escape from Kyiv as he tries to get his family to the Polish border. It’s taken him 3 days driving and he’s still not quite there. We spoke last weekend and he was in good spirits. He’s British so has a plan to get his Ukrainian family out. For my Ukrainian friends, it may not be so easy. If you’re a male aged between 18–60 you’re expected to fight, so for many of them, they may have to decide if they want to leave their family behind.
Those have been my last 12 days.
I haven’t been sleeping particularly well, I am so terrified for people that I call my friends. But my fear is nothing in comparison to their reality. I’ve been very lucky to never know anyone that was living through a war, and even luckier to never live through one myself. Now that has changed overnight and it sort of feel’s like nothing will ever be the same no matter what.
A few days into the conflict my wife sent me a video of African students unable to leave Ukraine. The caption in the clip explained that they were being sent to the back of the queue and being told they couldn’t leave. It went on to say they were being treated like they were less important than anyone else. That they were being pushed off of trains in favour of Ukrainians. Basically: Racism 101.
Now I’m going, to be honest, my immediate response to this clip surprised even myself. I’m the Black Lives Matter Black guy, the racism is everywhere Black guy, the write blogs about racism Black guy…right? Right. So why was my immediate instinctive reaction silent? Why was I internally so quick to believe that this account had been manipulated and was structured in a way to trigger my unconscious bias? Why did I desperately want to believe this account had been manipulated and the truth behind the clip was that this wasn’t actually about race and that any non-Ukrainian was experiencing the same?
I’ll try and answer that in a moment. But first a little bit of context.
10 minutes before my wife sent the clip I had just had an emotional discussion with a former Ukrainian colleague who was fleeing her home as I spoke to her. I was desperately trying to find the words to ask if there was anything I could do, deep down knowing there was not.
The people of Ukraine had been nothing but good to me. I write in another medium article here about how I experience more racial superiority from White Britons and White Americans than White Eastern Europeans. In my opinion, White Eastern Europeans don’t have the same intrinsic tendency to patronise and condescend to Black people as some others from the country I live in do. The Ukrainians I’ve met have never once given me the feeling that they felt they were better than me because of their race. Yet I feel that way on an almost daily basis in other more “developed” White majority countries.
So to answer the question; when I looked at the video I guess I made the mistake of believing that I couldn’t take up the simultaneous position of wanting to investigate accusations of racism in Ukraine AND being a staunch supporter of Ukraine. My brain just shut down.
This was honestly my bad. I can be both. I choose to be both.
When I scrolled down the comments in the video from people White and Black saying that Ukraine was clearly a racist country and that the people were getting what they deserved, I honestly felt angry. I had people that I called my friends who had their lives torn apart overnight and now there were people who had never met them and knew nothing about them, telling them they deserved it. It was a weird feeling to feel like I was mad about people being mad about racism. What was that about?
Of course, I was not mad about people being mad about racism. I get that now.
I was mad at something else, and I was also forgetting something quite important. What I was actually mad at was the double standard. America, Great Britain, France showcase examples of profoundly consistent racism every single day. These countries are riddled with it. Built on it. In America, you can kneel on a Black man’s neck for 8 minutes and have half the country believe he deserved it. In Great Britain, you can have an institutionalised racist police force operate for decades and then write your own report declaring yourself the least racist country in the world. In France, a literal fascist party can come 2nd in the first round of Presidential voting.
Despite all this, no right-minded person believes that the average American deserves what they got after an act of terror. We prayed for Paris. Of course, there are racists in Ukraine, and that brings me to the important thing that I was forgetting — racism is everywhere. Let’s just be absolutely clear it is a travesty that any Black student was treated any lesser than anyone else fleeing the warzone and as Black people we should not be afraid to highlight this, to talk about this. We are not inserting ourselves into somebody else’s troubles and making ourselves the centre of attention by doing this. We are simply doing what we always seem to end up doing…pleading for our humanity.
But that being said, we should also not buy into the idea that Ukraine is a country more racist than our own. We should not accept a narrative that the Ukrainian people are a collection of Neo Nazis that hate Black people. These are not the Ukrainians I know that I call my friends and this is not the country I have experienced.
The Western media however are a different story. If we are looking for any more evidence of how alive and well racism is then the systematic attempts to paint blue eyes and fair skin as being a higher class of refugee is sickening at best. Klansman-like at worst. The ease that these journalists have done this is so brazen that I think it will be tough to get a credible All Lives Matter hashtag operating ever again. All lives clearly, clearly do not matter in the same way. But we knew this already.
But all of our lives should matter.
And because they should we should be able to hold the seemingly contradictory ideas in our head that it is ok to unapologetically condemn racism whenever we see it, while still being sympathetic to the unimaginable plight that average Ukrainians are going through right now. We should call out racism. We should also stand with Ukraine. We can do both. We should choose to do both.
People in Ukraine are worthy of our sympathy. Just as we should demand we are worthy of theirs and everyone else’s. What all of us should take from this is that the next time there is conflict and war in one of those brown-eyed countries that we descend from, there should be nothing less than the same international solidarity. Because if there is not; screaming Black Lives Matter from the rooftops will have never have been more justified.
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