One of the things being least reported are minorities from Africa and India being prevented from leaving or having issues at the border trying to leave.
I'm all for Ukraine standing up and fighting, but if these foreign people want to GTFO, they should be allowed to, especially students who are going to school but stuck there now.
Is anyone else feeling just a little repulsed by this, by these insinuations of racism being made against Ukrainians and Poles as they try their damndest to deal with one of the worst crises of recent times? It goes without saying that everyone who wants to flee Ukraine for the safety of a neighbouring nation should have the right to do so, regardless of their national origin or their skin colour. But we need to maintain some scepticism about the idea that it is flat-out racism that has allegedly made the experience of exodus harder for African-heritage people. In the fog of war, it is always difficult to know what is going on. Jumping to the conclusion that Ukrainians are behaving with ‘bloodshot racism’ strikes me as far too kneejerk and definitive, not to mention being potentially, and ironically, an expression of its own form of prejudice. After all, among the Western European chattering classes there has long been a chauvinistic view of Slavic people as racist and regressive, as insufficiently woke, as not quite as au fait as
us with the correct lingo and attitudes. Is that what’s happening here?
What’s more, Poland has denied that it is exercising any kind of racial test at the border. A
spokesman for the Polish PM said the Western European media are ‘spreading misinformation’: ‘Refugees fleeing war-stricken Ukraine are entering Poland regardless of their nationality.’ In Ukraine itself, it seems possible that Ukrainian
citizens have been prioritised in certain circumstances, but is that racism or simply the Ukrainian state doing what many other states do when okaying people for urgent assistance? The
Independent reports that one Nigerian-heritage person in Ukraine was told by Ukrainian military personnel that ‘No English, no Polish, no blacks’ would be offered help to leave. Not only does this seem like a neatly unlikely thing for an official to have said – it also suggests, if true, that citizenship rather than race has been the main potential factor in the Ukrainian authorities’ difficult, hectic decision-making about who gets a seat on the first trains out of the country. After all, English people and Poles are white. How about a #PolishLivesMatter hashtag? How about a defence of the ‘oppressed’ English?
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What is happening here is that some Western journalists and activists – what’s the difference these days? – are projecting their Western-centric, navel-gazing and woke politics of race on to a situation that is far more complicated than that. How can they live with themselves, is what I want to know. ‘What did you do during the great Russo-Ukrainian War, mummy?’ ‘I implied that Ukrainians are racist shits, sweetheart.’ Well done. The woke Westerners who seem to imply that Ukrainian officials are anti-black and anti-African are unwittingly playing into Putin’s hands. They are potentially contributing to his claim that Ukraine is a hotbed of regression and ‘fascism’.
More importantly, this growing focus on Ukrainian and Polish ‘racism’, on the privilege allegedly enjoyed by white Ukrainians, confirms that wokeness is the implacable foe of solidarity. We are just four days into this horror and already the identitarian set in the West is projecting its eccentric, self-obsessed narrative on to a bloody and confusing warzone. The Ukraine crisis just doesn’t compute in the racial hierarchy constructed by the woke West, in which black people are always victims and white people are always privileged. And so these people have actively sought out alleged instances of anti-blackness in order that they might more readily relate to this crisis. In the process, they have likely exaggerated the problem of anti-African prejudice in the exodus, demonised white Ukrainians as prejudiced, and torpedoed Western solidarity with Ukraine by raising the possibility that this is a nation of white privilege and fascistic sensibilities. Putin, I bet, is chuckling.
Identity politics is the implacable enemy of human solidarity.
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