The World Is Racist

Analysing the importance given to the Russian-Ukraine war

The statements below were made on NEWS networks reporting the recent Russian invasion. How do the following lines sound to you?

“This isn’t a place like Afghanistan or Iraq….This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city where you wouldn't expect that to, or hope that it is going to happen” — Charlie D’Agata, Foreign Correspondent, CBS News.

“What is compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the middle east….they look like any European family you would live next door to.” — Peter Dobbie, Presenter, Al Jazeera.

“These are not refugees from Syria, these are Christians, they are whites. They are very similar to us,” NBC News reporter on the Ukrainian refugee crisis.

“It is very emotional for me because I see people with blue eyes, blonde hair being killed” — a guest on BBC reporting on the Ukrainian refugee crisis.

If they sound ‘normal’ or ‘justified’, I have a question I would like you to ask yourself — Do you see people of colour, people from the ‘third world’ as less than human?

Some animals are more equal than others. — George Orwell

I am a South Indian and my hide is browner than black skin. I have done my time globetrotting, I have lived in the ‘third world’, ‘second world’ and ‘first world’ and I have had my fair or a rather unfair share of ill-treatment based on what the world sees me as. I have been physically assaulted, verbally abused and humiliated because of my skin, my culture, my language, my religion, my accent. In other words, I have got the shit beat out of me, and hence, a writer.

“You are too sensitive,” “You overthink,” “The world is not that bad,” “Racism does not exist,” a few replies I had received from people I had tried sharing the sickness I was born into with. It was always hard to prove for it was not that I got spat on every day of my life.

You just need to get spat on once and your brain knows to read even the smallest intentions rather well. You can read it in their eyes

Back to the Ukraine invasion — Not only does the global hype for this historical event showcases the importance of skin colour and race, but the language used in these reports highlight the global rhetoric of the ‘supreme race’. And the acceptance of these statements and the weak attempts at justifying them prove to me that the hatred and the disgust I read in the eyes of many of the first-world citizens that watch me walk past is no delusion.

This was a fairly mellow video on the mistreatment of coloured people (mostly students) fleeing the Russo-Ukrainian war. You are going to cringe if you dig deeper into this topic for the images that are going around are appalling.

A Ukrainian musician who I follow on Instagram, who has escaped the war and is sitting in comfort in some European country tried to justify why people of colour can’t cross the Ukrainian, Polish borders — her reason was “Its a passport issue,”

Again if her argument made sense to you, our Legal Fictions’ trance has you on a leash, for even the hunter-gatherer early-man would have understood that life>paperwork — life>scribbles on a processed piece of tree

Conclusion

The article here is not me trying to give a perspective on the Russian invasion or to report the events. I am no journalist. There are millions of professionals doing that.

And of course, I empathise with people losing their families, and families losing their fathers in Ukraine. But what is shameful is the comparative lack of importance of the invasions and wars fought in the third world; what is shameful is the demonising of immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and on and on and the list goes on, whilst the ‘cultured’ people with blue eyes, blonde hair, dressed like the middle-class, European neighbour has the world weeping; what is extremely embarrassing is the willful ignorance towards those war crimes committed by the US and its allies. (What the US did to those countries makes Putin look like he is not even trying.)

These double standards are the unwritten laws that hide under the covers of the “Holier than thou” image the west showcases to the world and these underpinning laws have governed most of their actions for centuries. And this behaviour and these sentiments are very well reflected by many of the First world’s common man.

It highlights not only your superiority complexes but the very birth of those complexes — your brittle ego and your insecurities. And you, my insecure friend, seem to be more afraid than the ‘backward’, brown-skinned, black-eyed refugee fleeing his home to save his dear life.

This piece, like every other piece I write, is to discover who I am and what is my connection with the world around me and how I am a part of the world I crave to make sense of. I want to end this bit with the following.

If you want to understand Capitalism, study market crashes.

If you want to understand the human psyche study schizopherinia.

If you want to understand collective human behavior, study war.

For it is in these exaggerated circumstances that the ‘real’ of such complex ideas and features are exposed.

And it is a shame that this is all we are.