Originally published at: Mainstream reporters talk like racists when sympathizing with "white" Ukrainian refugees | Boing Boing
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Racism is everywhere, sadly.
It’s a sickness of the soul, one which is taught and spread intentionally.
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What little hair I have was almost torn out by me when these f@ckers are readily aired with no thought to what bullshit they are saying. This is real Fox News level reporting, disgusting.
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Perhaps the disconcerted media outlets will revive the old term “displaced persons” from the last time this happened on a mass scale with white people so that they don’t have to call them “refugees”. Sort of like the current distinctions between “immigrant” (brown and black skin) and “expat” (white).
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White people…
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Actually a significant number of Ukrainian refugees are people of colour, especially Africans who came to study. So these descriptions are not only racist, but also factually incorrect.
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Unless they’re deliberately distinguishing between Ukrainian refugees and refugees from Ukraine, in which case they’re merely racist.
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So weird to begin with the line “these aren’t people from a developing nation.” Ukraine is very much the definition of a developing nation. Just shows how Eurocentric thinking usually means the former imperial powers of Western Europe.
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I love how useful this song has become. I grew up being “forced” to watch musicals and kinda hated South Pacific, but it’s a remarkably… dare I say woke… film. I do recall some fairly racist API imagery, though, but haven’t seen it in probably 35 years.
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I don’t watch a whole lot of mainstream news but I have been kind of waiting for the blowback of why is this crisis treated so differently from other similar events that aren’t happening in Europe. The amount of support is very different from say what happened in Syria. So not surprised at all by the reporting even if it is so on the nose that you’d expect them to be more self aware of their own biases.
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Of all the old films that have gotten an unnecessary reboot/remake, updating South Pacific would actually be worthwhile IMO…
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I was struck early on by the overwhelming support from almost everyone for the Ukrainian people, versus the lack of caring or support for people fleeing places like Darfur or Syria. I said to my white self, it’s because our old enemy Russia is invading sovereign territory; it’s a David and Goliath story, and people like an underdog. Etc.
It’s disgusting to see reporters saying the quiet (racist) part out loud and broadcasting it to the world. We white folks sure have a lot of work to do on ourselves.
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Good article on this fucked up problem yesterday at The Guardian:
What all these petty, superficial differences – from owning cars and clothes to having Netflix and Instagram accounts – add up to is not real human solidarity for an oppressed people. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s tribalism. These comments point to a pernicious racism that permeates today’s war coverage and seeps into its fabric like a stain that won’t go away. The implication is clear: war is a natural state for people of color, while white people naturally gravitate toward peace.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/RX0qk
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Canada’s take on this is so steeped in racism it’s a whole mess.
Canada will take people from Ukraine because we have a significant population of Ukrainian descent. We have that population largely because when Canada couldn’t get more of it’s preferred white people from the US and Britain, we expanded our immigration to other people the government thought would be white enough. Ukranians were part of that group. This wasn’t a soft policy, it was written.
The public feelings about potential refugees from Ukraine vs. Syria are pretty obvious. Raising questions about these differences is considered to be insensitive to Ukrainians right now, even though no one has suggested that Ukrainians shouldn’t be permitted to immigrate.
Edit: I should add that the concerted effort to “populate the west” (the prairies) was the same concerted effort as the one to depopulate the west of its existing Indigenous inhabitant.
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It’s the global scourge of racism;
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Thread:
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I’m pretty sure that MSF (Doctors without Borders) uses that term often, though it seems they use the term internally displaced persons as well as refugees. They had an exhibition a few years ago called “Forced From Home” which showed how displaced persons have to live when they are on the move, or living in camps, etc. I agree that this a term with far less baggage that should be used generally.
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Right!?
-108th in the world in GDP
-Gini coefficient 26.6 (low)
-74th Human Development Index, behind many Caribbean, South American countries.
And those are western-centric metrics.
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Sort of related:
There was an NPR story this morning where the reporter was interviewing a number of different, diverse groups of foreigners volunteering to fight in Ukraine. Most are obviously sympathetic characters fighting for a just cause. But, depressingly, there’s also a neo-Nazi affiliated militia that’s been brought in as well. They’ve been accepted because they have a reputation as being particularly fierce fighters. I guess that when your country is under full attack from a larger one it’s hard to turn down any help no matter where it comes from, but still pretty damn disappointing. And it helps give a thin veneer of plausibility to some of Putin’s obvious “denatzification” lies.
The relevant part starts at about 5:45 in this story:
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Like racists or as?
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