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The Racial Subtext on Ukraine

by richard03545

Treatment of Africans, Reporters’ Words at Issue
Askia Muhammad Celebration to Air Saturday

Homepage photo: Zhan Beleniuk, Afro-Ukranian member of Parliament, Olympic gold medalist. (Credit: Twitter)

Journal-isms Roundtable photos by Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks

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Jessica Orakpo and others in Ukraine from Africa and India are outraged by their treatment as they tried to leave, but Deutsche Welle talked to some who thought the racism accusations were exaggerated. Serge Nyangi, who helps Congolese students access bursaries to study in Ukraine, told the news organization Monday, “There are people trying to climb over the barriers, some are fighting with guards. If you see what is happening there, you would know it’s impossible for guards to choose who to let through.”

Treatment of Africans, Reporters’ Words at Issue

On Tuesday, the BBC interviewed Nigerian medical student Jessica Orakpo, who was trying to flee Ukraine by train for the Polish border, but was turned away. “The official literally looked me in my eye and said, “Only Ukrainians, that’s all. That if you are Black, you should walk.”

The next day, “Democracy Now!” devoted a segment to Nigerian student Alexander Somto Orah, who “says the discriminatory treatment he and other African students faced started at the train station in Kyiv and continued at the border with Poland.

” ‘We started protesting and telling them they have to let us go, that this is rubbish. They take in like a hundred Ukrainians and then take in like two Africans. It doesn’t make sense, because there are more Africans there than Ukrainians at the border,’ Orah recalls. ‘So we started pushing, and the police cocked their guns and pointed at us . . . and told us that they’re going to shoot us.’ Orah eventually made his way to Warsaw and is now helping other students to cross.”

In South Asia, meanwhile, readers of Outlook India saw a story headlined: “Racism Amid War: Asian And African Students Face Discrimination While Fleeing Ukraine.”

The Journal-isms Roundtable held a special Zoom session on Ukraine Tuesday with MSNBC terrorism expert Malcolm Nance, Remi Adekoya, a U.K.-based, Polish-Nigerian journalist and lecturer of politics who spent 19 years in Poland, and others. Fifty-three people were on the Zoom; another 58 watched via Facebook; more than 140 had watched the video on YouTube as of Friday morning. You can see the video here or click on the embedded version above.

News stories had already appeared reporting on the refusal of some gatekeepers to allow Africans and Indians to leave Ukraine, and about the language used by some Western correspondents. The Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association characterized their reports as “examples of racist news coverage that ascribes more importance to some victims of war over others.” [PDF]

Nance (pictured), a former counterintelligence agent, had just returned from a month in Ukraine. He said the news media and some analysts had underestimated the resilience of the Ukrainians. “For some strange reason, the news media seemed to forget that Ukraine had an army,” Nance said. “They only showed . . . the Russian propaganda videos of Russian forces on battle exercises.

“They only spoke about the Russian army. They only spoke about how fast the Russians would take Ukraine. . . .”

Nance was in the country as part of an “asymmetric warfare analysis group” that spoke with the Ukrainian soldiers. He was not representing a news organization.

Nance alerted us to the existence of Afro-Ukrainians, who are rarely mentioned in the U.S. mainstream media.

Adekoya (pictured, below) acknowledged that racial concerns were not top of mind either in Europe or in the Americas as the world reacted to the invasion the Russians began on Feb. 24. “I’m sort of. . . talking about this because we are in a sort of a collection of mostly Black or people of color and journalists here,” he said. “I have no doubt — I lived there for 19 years. I know eastern Europeans don’t really care what Black people think about them, you know, so I have no illusions about that.”

Given that audience, ears perked when Nance mentioned his friend and colleague Terrell Jermaine Starr, a Black U.S. journalist who has studied Eastern Europe and is now reporting from there for Rolling Stone and other outlets. Among the few other Black journalists, Karl Bostic was reporting for PBS and Clive Myrie for the BBC. Ann Simmons, Moscow bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, appeared from Russia Friday on PBS’ “Washington Week.”

Starr is “awesome,” Nance said. “I mean he gets tens of thousands of comments now [on social media], because he is the African American perspective on what’s going on there.

“More important, he educated us all on something we didn’t know: There is an Afro-Ukrainian society.

“There are people who are children of mixed-race marriages in Ukraine, and, in fact, one of the top Olympic wrestlers, gold medalist Olympic wrestler was an Afro-Ukrainian who was now a member of Parliament,” Nance said in a reference to Zhan Beleniuk.

“He’s this massive, rock-looking guy, and you know his father was Nigerian, his mother’s Ukrainian. “And so there’s an entire society there which you would see, because, as he explains . . . Africans have been in Ukraine for centuries. You know, going back well into the court of Catherine.”

Beleniuk has acknowledged racist verbal abuse after he won at the Olympics last year, but posted a video on Facebook Wednesday asserting that “Ukraine is a tolerant state and doesn’t have any pressing racial issues,” and strongly urged African leaders to support his country in its time of need.

On the denied exits, Nance said the Ukrainians “have now made it a priority to get them out of the country.”

In addition to the growing number of news stories on the issue, the Nigerian government has protested, and on Wednesday in the United States, the National Bar Association announced “an urgent appeal to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the United Nations and to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on behalf of African refugees facing racial discrimination . . . as they seek to flee. . . .”

With 4,000 studying in Ukraine, Nigerians made up the second biggest group of foreign students in the country. Morocco supplied the largest, with 8,000 students, while Egyptians were in third place with 3,500 students, according to Deutsche Welle.

Three days after the invasion, Al Jazeera became among the first to report dissatisfaction with Western news reports.

“On Sunday, Al Jazeera English presenter Peter Dobbie described Ukrainians fleeing the war as ‘prosperous, middle class people’ who ‘are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war; these are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa, they look like any European family that you would live next door to.’ ”

The network apologized, saying the comments “were inappropriate, insensitive, and irresponsible”.

Charlie D’Agata of CBS News similarly apologized for his own wording.

Rasha Elass (pictured), editorial director of New Lines magazine, which focuses on the “Middle East and Beyond,” was quoted in a piece by the Washington Post’s Sarah Ellison and Travis M. Andrews:

“ ‘The casual racism is shocking,’ said Elass, a D.C.-based Syrian American journalist who traveled to Syria to cover the conflict there for a variety of publications. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is jarring, because ‘this is literally the closest it has gotten in our lifetime to a world war, … and in that regard, it is very different from the U.S. invading Afghanistan or the regional war in Syria. But it is not because one area is civilized and the other is not. It is because of the geopolitics and what is at stake.’ ”

At the Journal-isms Roundtable, Elass compared the situation to that of the war in Iraq, but spoke of similarities, not differences. “There were a lot of blind spots. There wasn’t a lot of diversity in the reporters who were covering the stories. They were always just sort of no nuance.”

It wasn’t that the offending reporters weren’t correct in noting the comforting familiarities between the West and Ukraine.

“The city of Kyiv is very modern, very Western,” Nance told the group. “I’ve seen more Teslas in Kyiv that I’ve seen in Hollywood, and that’s saying something. So it’s very advanced. Sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I was In Stuttgart, or Lyon, or the suburbs of Paris, depending on where I was . . . Lviv is just like being in sections of Vienna. . . . So, so much for that theory that two countries with McDonald’s won’t go to war, right?”

Reporters for major outlets, Nance said, are staying in five-star hotels.

As for the journalists’ mindset, Kenneth Walker, NPR’s Africa bureau chief from 1999 to 2003, told the group, “I’m here to tell you, white people who are foreign correspondents for the U.S. in general tend to be some very racist people. They are supporting and advancing white supremacy. . . . They’re not there with any sensitivity to certainly people of color in places that they’re deployed. And so this is just par for the course. . . . “

Like other close observers of the news, those on the Zoom wondered where the conflict will lead. On Friday, days after the Roundtable, Ukrainian American journalist Lev Golinkin again raised the racial issue: “Ukraine’s far right is the primary benefactor on the Ukraine side of this war because they now get to attract people from all over the world, and they get to be seen as on the frontlines of fighting for white civilization,” Golinkin said.

At the Roundtable, the speculation was about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Adekoya said, “I do think he needs to be given a sort of way to somehow save face and get out of all this.”

Korean-American photographer Hyungwon Kang (pictured), who keeps a close eye on East Asia, said China does not have the credibility to be a good mediator, and that the invasion is already playing a role in South Korean elections scheduled for March 9.

Adekoya offered a final thought:

“I read a very interesting article a couple of weeks ago, which essentially said, if you really want to understand Putin, think Dostoevsky, not Marx. So it’s not really . . . about setting up any kind of communist union, or even a Soviet Union.

“It’s an almost, you know, it’s an almost Messianic belief in this sort of Messianic role of Russia, this sort of pan-Slavic world or pan Slavic empire which he’d like to build . . . Someone from his circle was quoted [as saying] he’s recently very much into esoteric mysticism, they say, and so he’s really gone off — I don’t want to say ‘the rails’ . . . . it’s not a sort of cold calculating, you know, as we may think, and you know he’s 69 years old, so who knows?

“Maybe he thinks, you know, he’s gonna lay everything on the line . . .

“Think Dostoevsky, not Marx, and think Russia mysticism, and rather than some . . .. terribly cold, you know pragmatic calculation right here, but actually something more messianic.”

Nance replied, “You know that’s another trait that he has in common with Hitler. This is like 1939 all over again.”

Askia Muhammad (Credit: Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)

Askia Muhammad Celebration to Air Saturday

“Each Other’s Dreams: Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Askia Muhammad,” the multimedia journalist, radio host, photographer and poet who died in Washington on Feb. 17 at 76, will be streamed over the internet Saturday on the websites of Pacifica stations WPFW in D.C. and WBAI in New York.

The family and WPFW announced that the ceremony will take place in Washington March 5 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern at Busboys and Poets, 450 K St. NW.

“The tribute will include poetry, music, visuals, memories, and remarks in celebration of Askia’s life and legacy, as well as the reading of his poetry.

“Seating is limited; doors open at 3:30pm, and masks are required. . . .”

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Richard Prince’s Journal-isms originates from Washington. It began in print before most of us knew what the internet was, and it would like to be referred to as a “column.” Any views expressed in the column are those of the person or organization quoted and not those of any other entity. Send tips, comments and concerns to Richard Prince at journal-isms+owner@groups.io

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