@PennHistory Ph.D. student | Race and Blackness in USSR & GDR | Writer | @H__Ukraine Review Editor | @Swarthmore & @Harvard REECA alumna. Langs: 
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My research on race and experience in Ukraine, Russia and the Soviet Union has taught me: Race is fluid and contextual, and the American racial paradigm too often shapes the global discourse. Ukrainians are often at the bottom of the European racial hierarchy. 1/
If Germany or France or even Poland were being invaded like this, they would have support. Ukraine is multi-ethnic with a significant Roma population, and growing Afro-Ukrainian and African population. Not being European enough has been lobbed at Ukraine since it’s independence/2
So, the recent jackass comments from Western European journalists not believing their eyes b/c these people are like them is incredibly new to the discourse. In 2014 when Crimea was taken, when Luhansk and Donetsk occupied, Ukraine was backward, not European enough. 3/
In closing, we can have strong critiques of the racism in current media treatment of Ukraine, but please believe, this is new. Because Russia is doing this now because in 2014 the West decided Ukraine wasn’t European enough, and the 2014 conflict was just another E. Europe dustup
I may lose followers for this thread, but understand this: I am a historian, and one of less than five Black people in my discipline. I’m here to contextualize what is happening for those who want to know more. I educate, and I’ll do that long after I’m back to 3k followers.
Well said. The interesting thing is of course that in the Soviet context Ukrainians were more in the middle-top, but definitely not at the bottom, of the Soviet ethnicity hierarchy. And yet in the Putin years they became one of the dominant enemies in the Russian imagination.
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