This article might be misunderstood as an apologia for racism or a misdirection, so I must start it with a statement:
Please do not mistake an explanation for an excuse.
There is a lot of racism towards non-white people in all of Europe. It is strong in the Slavic nations and it is indeed very strong in Poland, which is currently ruled by a racist covert clerical-fascist party (which luckily does not have overwhelming majority support yet I might add). This does no doubt play a significant role in Poland’s willingness to accept Ukrainian refugees readily, whilst it was refusing Syrians staunchly for the last few years. A policy that I find abhorrent and which should never be in place. Czechia is guilty of the same thing and I oppose that too. I criticize my own government for this and I shall continue to do so.
However, that is most definitively not the sole reason and it might not even be the main reason in this particular case. In my opinion, the main reason here is not that Ukrainian refugees are white, but that the aggressor they are fleeing is Russia and the refugees are Slavs.
There is a lot of panslavic sentiment still floating around (I have written about it before). Slavic people do have a shared identity and they do feel some connection with each other. One of the reasons for that apart from some intelligibility of our languages is that most Slavic nations were oppressed minorities pretty much everywhere for several hundred years, many gaining independence from an oppressive regime only very recently.
But wait, you might say, aren’t Russians Slavs? Yes, they are.
And they are probably the single exception to the rule since they were mostly the oppressors, certainly for the last few hundred years. Poles do not like Russians specifically that much. Russia played for example no insignificant role in destabilizing and partitioning the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in a way that eerily resembles current events in Ukraine. And they did not rule their part of Poland exactly kindly afterward either.
Poles and Ukrainians thus share not only a generic common Slavic identity but also a relatively recent common history. They were both compatriots and allies as well as enemies and rivals in that history, but not very recently and those differences pale with one thing they have common very recently indeed – a ruthless oppressor, Russia. Ukrainians did not forget the Holodomor, Poles did not forget the Katyn massacre and both definitively remember the forty-something years of being dictated what to even think from Moscow afterward.
It is all of course much more complicated than I can ever hope to describe in a short blog post even if I knew everything there is to know about it. And motivations on an individual level always vary wildly. It definitively is not as simple as “Poles think brown people bad, white people good”, although a lot of (not only) Poles are no doubt like that.
Charly. that’s still just racism. Not to mention that Hungary isn’t part of a panslavic identity, yet it its still doing a 180 turn on refugees.
Here’s a statement from the Bulgarian prime minister:
https://twitter.com/TihomirSabchev/status/1497264454236610563
I’ll copy the text below:
The Bulgarian Prime Minister was asked today about the possibility of accepting refugees from Ukraine. His reply is telling:
“These are not the refugees we have used to”
“These are people who are Europeans, so we and all other EU countries are ready to welcome them”
“These are intelligent people, educated people…some of them are IT specialists, highly qualified”
“In other words, this is not the refugee wave we have used do, where we do not know what to do, people with obscure past, maybe terrorists”
“These are Europeans who just got their airport bombed, who were shot at, who were hiding in the metro”
“So none of the European countries is afraid from the immigrant wave that is about to come”.
+++
The point isn’t that we shouldn’t be doing everything we can to help the Ukrainian refugees, the point is that we should do this for all refugees, but just a few weeks ago these very same people set the dogs on brown babies. Sure, right now, in Europe we’re focussed on what’s happening here, but we couldn’t have demonstrated large parts of the world that they don’t matter at all, that they have no human rights or protections by international law if we’d tried.
All lives don’t matter. Just white Christian lives do.
Well -- the heavily medialized terrorist attacks and rape cases, the fact that significant percentage (in early phases of 2015 migration crisis even majority) of refugees coming from Middle East were relatively young males (unlike Ukrainan, who are almost exclusively women and children), the fact that language barrier combined with cultural and/or religious background of some of those refugees makes it waaay harder to integrate them into society… and plethora of other stuff, no matter how much blown out of proportion, definitely don’t help to paint a nice picture of refugees in the eyes of general public.
And although I objectively know and understand that the suffering of “brown” refugees is equally or even much more horrible than that of “white” Ukrainians, the current Ukraine disaster resonates more strongly in my head. Mainly because, for me as a Czech, Russia’s attack eerily reminds me of takeover of Sudetenland by Germany in 1938 and invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact in 1968.
What also troubles me is the increased hatered against ordinary Russians (both in Russia and abroad) simply due to the fact that they are Russians by birth (which is equally stupid as judging someone due to the “brownness”/”whiteness” of color skin). Current events will forever be a stain on Russian history and Russia itself and history tells us that the consequences can last for centuries.
Well, I just was about to mention it, but here’s our very own blogging colleague pointing out the racism that black people are currently suffering in this war, who are not being helped despite fleeing the same aggressor.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/yemmynisting/2022/02/27/africans-in-ukraine-face-racism/
Saying that “Ukrainians” are just more like “us” follows the racist argument that only the white, Christian, lived there for centuries Ukrainians are “real” Ukrainians while everybody else can never be one, no matter how long they lived there. I also don’t hear about non Slavic white Ukrainians being turned away.
Besides, I don’t see what Ukrainians have more in common with the average German (Germany is also preparing to take in refugees) than Syrians.
@Giliell, I do not in part understand what you mean, and in part I do not think it contradicts anything I say.
Lets start with what I do not think we understand each other.
The mere existence of shared identity and connection due to historical, cultural, and linguistic commonalities is not racism. If it were so, the word racism would lose all its meaning. That is why white supremacists in the USA are using this argument against people of color all the time as “identity politics” and I refuse to believe that you are making that argument. That is why I think I do not understand you correctly.
So to clarify my position -- a shared identity is not racism, discrimination, and prejudice in a power differential against people who do not belong to that shared identity -- that is racism, whatever that identity is.
My point exactly! Isn’t it weird that a Hungary, a state ruled by a racist wannabe dictator that was up to his ears in Putin’s ass until recently has made a complete U-turn once Russia invaded Ukraine? That is because the said panslavic identity is only a part of the whole picture -- as I am indeed saying in the OP. Hungary shares with Ukraine, Poland, and many others another important part of this ugly puzzle -- the part of being invaded and brutalized by Russia in very recent history. So recent that ti is still in living memory.
As a counterpoint, I would like to show towards the good ole United Kingdom, who oh-so-kindly has said that they will accept Ukrainian refugees. Who apply and qualify for a working visa. Yeah. Right.
The UK talks tough, but they are showing that there are more shades to racism and prejudice than just the white/brown divide.
And?
Germany does not need to have more in common with Ukrainians than with Syrians to do the right thing, because as far as I am concerned Germany as a whole has behaved very decently towards refugees of any color or nationality in the last few years. If other countries behaved the same way -- if Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia for example were not such racist obstructionist pains in the ass in the EU -- the world certainly would be a much better place.
We have a saying in CZ “Když dva dělají totéž, není to totéž”. Roughly translated “When two (different entities) do the same thing, it ain’t the same thing”. Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria might do the right thing now for some very wrong reasons and I do agree that those reasons are wrong. And Germany does the same thing for right reasons. They do the same thing, but it is not the same thing -- the context is different.
No, but when that identity becomes a stand in for “good, moral, civilised and deserving of help”, while those “other people” are wicked and uncivilised and probably terrorists and need to be fought, it is. You also cannot separate the skin colour from the identity, which always puts identities of people who have also suffered from conquest, rule of empires, and yes, racism, into such a difficult place. The hospitality also doesn’t extend to the 400k Roma people who live in Ukraine and who have been victims of several pogroms under Selensky, because they are a minority that never gets the status of innocent victim.
No, we haven’t. With the exception of a few weeks in the summer of 2015, we have behaved horribly. We only look good in comparison with others.
@Giliell, regarding Germany, you have certainly more information than I do. Other than that, I do not see any de-facto point of disagreement between us, so I will drop this.