“Great power” lens is inadequate to understand Russian aggression in Ukraine. Attention to racial dynamics is crucial to avoid repeat of cold war mistakes

(Ileana, Womens/Gender/SexualityStudies@Rutgers, , 3-4)

I started sending applications to U.S. universities that had doctoral programs in women’s studies. I was not interested in anything else. A couple of months after I mailed four thick applications, a brief email arrived at my Yahoo address: I had been accepted as a graduate student in a doctoral program and I was going to receive a teaching assistantship for four years. The message was signed by an American professor: in sisterhood, she said. I wanted to be grateful, but I could not image any kind of equality that could overcome the difference between our statuses, whether in terms of freedom of movement, power, or wealth. At that time, I also did not yet understand Eastern Europeans’ precarious grip on whiteness, and how it left us wedged in a complicated middle space of power and lack thereof. Now, I realize that the war in Ukraine, and the West’s reaction to it, simply cannot be understood without reflecting on the role of race. Scholars have coined various names for racialized categories adjacent to whiteness, but perhaps the simplest way to understand the racial paradox represented by Eastern Europeans is to understand that we are white but not Western. This whiteness is perhaps most visible when wielded as a cudgel against the Romani, a Ukrainian ethnic minority who have a long and painful history of being exploited, including half a millennium of slavery, in the region. And yet, non-Western status shows our powerlessness throughout the world. “Relatively civilized,” “relatively European,” opines Charlie D’Agata on CBS News, and this extraordinary statement, for which he has apologized, shows us bluntly the global hierarchies unfolding under Western eyes. On the one hand, “civilized” and “European,” more “like us” (Westerners) than people of color from other parts of the globe. The Syrian refugee crisis, for example, received a very different press only a few years back. On the other hand, Eastern European countries are perceived as only “relatively” civilized, only “relatively” European. Only in comparison with others—people of color, people of other religions—can Ukrainians be recognized as acceptable to the West, and then it will be in some sort of subservient position. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s statement that Ukraine is fighting to be “equal members of Europe” is rather unlikely to come to fruition, even if Ukraine’s membership in the European Union is miraculously fast-tracked. Judging by the experience of other former socialist nations, even joining the European Union has not necessarily resulted in prosperity, and most Eastern European countries have experienced successive waves of outmigration. It is rather common for Eastern European families to have members living in three or four different countries, a further dissolution of community ties that began with the end of socialism. Only a small number of Polish and Romanian citizens have reaped significant economic benefits from the European Union; many remain impoverished. The ability to work abroad might have mitigated the worst effects of poverty, yet it has resulted in a brain drain, as Eastern European countries are losing their doctors and nurses to the West, which has not invested in their education. In the European Union, Eastern European workers are still viewed as undesirable, second- or third-class citizens, even though they are necessary to the local economies. At the height of the pandemic, Romanian agricultural workers were airlifted to Germany to work on farms in unsanitary, unsafe conditions. Thus, the answer to this war is not to go back to using expressions such as “the free world” uncritically. Just as Putin is not only a product of postsocialism but also, and perhaps principally, of rapacious neoliberalism, Ukraine is not only a postsocialist country, it is also a part of global migration circuits. Among the refugees fleeing the country are not only Ukrainians and Romani, but also Indian students and Black Ukrainians of various backgrounds. The old framework of East versus West does not account for racialized experiences, nor for the measure of white privilege some Ukrainians can hope to acquire while others cannot. Yet only by accounting for race, for the way racialized language ranks experiences and pain and measures who, specifically, via their proximity to whiteness, is worthy of compassion, can we move toward true democracy, one that can be experienced regardless of skin color and nation of origin. I started writing this essay simply wishing the war to go away, worried that Ukraine might become the next instantiation of the endless war Americans have made of this century. Missiles destroying apartment buildings, demolished infrastructure, civilians searching for the remains of their prior lives among the debris of exploded concrete—these images are heartbreakingly familiar. The war is already destroying the lived environment of Ukrainian cities. Civilians who have stayed in Kharkiv consider themselves lucky if they live close to a grocery store, and can venture out to buy provisions. The only question I can ask, from the safety of the United States, is: Why is U.S. military help not on its way to Ukraine yet? And the regional solidarities of the postsocialist space are emerging again. Pussy Riot recently tweeted a video of Kharkiv’s bombed center, recalling that the Center for Gender Studies was the place where they first read feminist books. Ukrainian refugees are finding shelter in Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, the first two—the ones with the longest borders with Ukraine—considered the poorest countries in Europe. Their efforts are needed while richer countries like the UK, Western EU nations, and the United States wait to decide if and what they will contribute. There have been reports of racist incidents at the border. War and catastrophe amplify hierarchies and vulnerabilities that already exist; the lives of LGBTQ refugees are multiple times endangered. It is unfortunate that a lot of mainstream Eastern European intellectuals operating in a postsocialist framework have avoided any critique of Western democracies and, since the 1990s, have raged against political correctness. But a new generation of scholars and activists in Eastern Europe, multicultural and feminist, is ready to embrace an anti-racist politics that is global in its outlook and which intersectionally centers the needs of the most vulnerable. Reporters of color have shown that putting the category of race at the forefront of analysis is paramount to understanding the region. From Eastern Europe’s historical experience of second-class citizenship, of non-Western whiteness, and of poverty under neoliberal capitalism, a new form of solidarity should emerge, one that connects with impoverished people and people of color everywhere, from the First World to the Third. Rather than asking for whiteness, which will only be granted provisionally and partially, or “civilization,” whatever that means, from the margins, we can draw on our memories of socialism to demand an end to the rule of oligarchs around the world, an end to neoliberal capitalism, and true democracy and freedom for all.