By Sonali Kolhatkar
March 07, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- "Economy
for All"
It was inevitable that when
brown-skinned Afghan refugees fleeing war
were
turned away from European borders over
the past few years, the callous actions of
these governments would come back to haunt
them. A whopping
1 million people have fled Ukraine from
Russia’s violent invasion in the span of
only a week. They are being welcomed—as
refugees should be—into neighboring nations,
inviting accusations of racist double
standards.
Poland offers the most egregious example
of national racism. Its government, whose
nation borders Ukraine, has warmly welcomed
traumatized Ukrainians, just months after
turning away Afghans. If these optics
weren’t bad enough, Polish nationalists have
sought out people of color who are among the
refugees fleeing Ukraine and violently
attacked them. According to
the Guardian, “three Indians were beaten
up by a group of five men, leaving one of
them hospitalized.” African nationals
studying in Ukraine joined the exodus after
Russia’s invasion, and have been
stopped at the Polish border. Poland
might as well erect a giant sign on its
border declaring, “whites only.”
In elevating such disparate
skin-tone-dependent attitudes toward
refugees, Europe is giving its colonialist
heritage a new lease on life. We see echoes
today of the dehumanization that enabled
European colonization of the Global South
and the enslavement of generations.
It’s not just Poland. The Arab and Middle
Eastern Journalists Association has
denounced the overtly racist language of
many Western journalists, including American
ones like
Charlie D’Agata of CBS who said of
Ukraine that “this isn’t a place, with all
due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that
has seen conflict raging for decades.” (In
fact, Ukraine has seen
plenty of conflict in the past years.)
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D’Agata’s insertion of “with all due
respect” was perhaps his belated realization
that he was veering into dangerous territory
by contrasting Ukrainian civilization
against the presupposed barbarity of the
darker nations. But then, he continued,
saying, “this is a relatively civilized,
relatively European—I have to choose those
words carefully, too—city where you wouldn’t
expect that, or hope that it’s going to
happen.”
Again, D’Agata likely realized as the
words were escaping his mouth just how
racist he was sounding. He needed to choose
his words carefully in order to avoid the
appearance of bias. He clearly failed. His
later apology was not very convincing.
D’Agata exposed his personal allegiance
with the Global North when he expressed
“hope” against war breaking out in a nation
whose people look like he does. The implied
flip side is that he harbors no such hope
when the conflict-ridden nations of the
Global South are embroiled in violence.
Serena Parekh, professor of philosophy at
Northeastern University in Boston,
told me in a recent interview, “it is
very human to feel connections to people
that you perceive to be like you and to feel
more remote from people you perceive as
being not like you.” At the very least, this
is a good reason why newsrooms across the
United States need to diversify their staff.
Parekh, who has written two books,
including
No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee
Crisis and
Refugees and the Ethics of Forced
Displacement, says that one
“assumption” she has heard justifying
favorable treatment of the latest wave of
refugees in Europe is that “Ukrainians are
not terrorists and they are not criminals,
and so we can let them in safely, without
having to worry about screening them.” She
calls such views “racialized assumptions…
largely unsustainable by any evidence.”
Such assumptions are infectious. Social
media platforms
abound with images sporting the
now-ubiquitous blue and yellow of the
Ukrainian flag. Ukraine’s President
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has emerged as a
larger-than-life hero to the morally
outraged. So invested are people in
believing Zelenskyy’s heroism that many have
shared a photo (including several of my
own Facebook friends) of him in military
fatigues as evidence of his courage in
standing up to Russian militarism, when in
fact the image was captured well before
Russia’s invasion.
Similar expressions of solidarity with
brown-skinned resisters of Western
militarism or victims of Western wars have
been far less common.
Pointing out the double standards of
governments and the press at a time when
Ukrainians are watching their nation getting
utterly destroyed will inevitably spark
accusations of insensitivity and of engaging
irresponsibly in “whataboutism” to make a
point.
But now is the time to clearly call out
what human rights groups and independent
journalists have for years been saying: that
the U.S. and NATO-led wars in Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere are
racist, and that the callous dismissals of
the resulting humanitarian catastrophes are
equally barbaric.
There’s another reason why brown-skinned
refugees are seen as undesirable. Welcoming
those people fleeing wars that the West has
fomented would be an admission of Western
culpability. Not only do Ukrainian refugees
offer palatable infusions of whiteness into
European nations, but they also enable
governments to express self-righteous
outrage at Russia’s imperialist ambitions
and violent militarism. If Ukrainian
refugees are evidence of Russian brutality,
then Afghan and Iraqi refugees are evidence
of the same kind of brutality on the part of
the U.S. and NATO.
While Europe’s double standard toward
refugees is on full display in Russia’s war
on Ukraine, the United States is certainly
not innocent either. Former President Donald
Trump effectively
slammed shut the door on refugees during
his tenure and bolstered his anti-refugee
policies with
racist language.
President Joe Biden, who campaigned on
reversing Trump’s anti-refugee rules,
initially
faltered on keeping his promise when he
took office. But, even after the limits on
allowing refugees into the U.S. were
eventually lifted,
few have been admitted into the country.
Last year, when U.S. troops left Afghanistan
at the mercy of the Taliban, Afghans were,
naturally, desperate to flee. While the
Biden administration laudably
fast-tracked U.S. resettlement for
Afghans, problems remain, with one refugee
advocate calling the process, “kind
of abysmal.”
Parekh says that decisions by Poland and
other nations to admit fleeing Ukrainians
with open arms, “[show] that the European
Union can take in large numbers of
asylum seekers and can do so in a relatively
efficient way.”
In light of the sudden wellspring of
compassion toward Ukrainian refugees
emerging from Western nations, media, and
the public, a simple thought experiment
could protect governments, journalists, and
us from further accusations of racist double
standards: we could treat all refugees as
though they were white-skinned Ukrainians,
as though they were human.