A student waiting to flee Ukraine Credit: Wojtek Radwanski/AFP/Getty
Fourteen years ago, when Boris Johnson was a mere twinkle in the British electorate’s eye, I wound up shadowing the then MP for Henley-on-Thames as he campaigned to become Mayor of London. He won, of course, then bagged a second mayoral term and, while still mayor, acquired another safe Tory seat. Along the way he had a few affairs, sired several children, and said some rather horrid things about black people. Then he became Prime Minister. Say what you like about Johnson, he’s a serial winner, albeit mainly of one-horse races.
One rare moment of excitement during that first Mayoral campaign occurred when Johnson’s team shipped in a bunch of Ugandan politicians and dumped them on the streets of south London to spice up the optics of an otherwise all-white campaign. Some years later, while on the Obama campaign trail, me and Suzanne Moore were similarly used as effnik stooges at a John McCain rally in Richmond, Virginia. We were plonked just feet away from the presidential wannabe to add a multicultural couple to an otherwise sea of white.
Today, however, the fine line between racism, tokenism and cynical opportunism is being revealed as the war in Ukraine enters its third month. Amid the exodus of five million people fleeing the Russian invasion, several expat African, Asian, and Middle Eastern students, as well as non-white Ukrainian nationals, have reported how the authorities are giving white citizens free passage out of the beleaguered country while holding back “foreigners”. Having spoken to legions of black friends, relatives and colleagues in my Caribbean bolthole, across the diaspora and back home in the UK, such accounts appear to confirm the Afro-cynical view that the Ukraine conflict is a white man’s war and one black people would do well to keep out of.
For many in the African diaspora, myself included, the sight of Poland’s EU commissioner pledging to shelter Ukrainian refugees in his own home, and of the UK government creating a “Homes for Ukraine” scheme, and of the US opening its doors to 100,000 Ukrainians smacks of Eurocentric self-interest — a self-interest that reinforces a sense of black cynicism and resentment. As Trevor Noah pointed out during one of his monologues on The Daily Show at the start of the war: “It is interesting that Eastern Europe has been so willing and able to accept a million people coming into their countries in just a few days, when, just recently, they didn’t seem to have any space for a different group of refugees.”
We’ve all seen countless images of Syrian refugees in convoy zigzagging their way across Europe in search of safe haven, while the EU pays off Turkey to keep them from getting to Greece. We’ve heard the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki state publicly that “we will not be receiving migrants from the Middle East and North Africa in Poland”. We’ve seen Hungary’s 13ft razor-wire fence stretching 115 miles along its border with Serbia designed to keep out refugees like wild dogs. And we’ve seen the gut-wrenching images of migrants’ corpses washed up on our shores or packed into the back of container lorries like dead meat, while successive prime ministers galvanise the sort of “hostile environment” immigration policies that led to the Windrush scandal and the bizarre outsourcing of asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Helping to prosecute this “narrative” is a Western news media which black readers, viewers and listeners have become all too adept at decoding for dog whistles and subtexts and racial bias that don’t seem to matter in the context of expressing solidarity with Ukraine. “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed,” Ukraine’s Deputy Chief Prosecutor, David Sakvarelidze, told the BBC. “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan… This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city,” reported CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata. “Just to put it bluntly, these are not refugees from Syria; these are refugees from neighbouring Ukraine. These are Christians, they are white, they’re … um… very similar to the people that live in Poland,” intoned NBC News correspondent, Kelly Cobiella. “Now the unthinkable has happened to them. This is not a developing, third-world nation. This is Europe,” gushed one ITV “reporter”.
Add to this the weight of history, Europe’s discriminatory migration policies, and the existence of various neo-Nazis on both sides of the frontline, and it comes as no surprise that very few black people have been inspired to take up arms and join President Zelenskyy’s International Legion of Ukraine. There are two notable exceptions: Malcolm Nance, a 61-year-old former US intelligence officer and ex-MSNBC analyst, and Ben Grant, a former Royal Marine and eldest son of Tory MP Helen Grant, have both signed up to the Legion.
