Overview
At the onset of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, when Ukrainians began to seek refuge in neighboring cities and nations, Black and POC Ukrainians began to report acts of discrimination at bus stations, train depots, and border checkpoints. Some reported physically violent encounters, resulting from the prioritization of white Ukrainian citizens over Black and POC individuals, including pregnant women and young children. Major news outlets soon began reporting on the situation, leading the UN to acknowledge the differential treatment Black and POC Ukrainian and immigrant refugees were experiencing.
Read news reporting on racism amidst the crisis in Ukraine:
- Abraham Achinga. African students say they faced guns, hostile guards as they fled Ukraine. Reuters. March 5, 2022. Read it online.
- Nyamekye Daniel. ‘It Does Not Justify It’: Peace Corps Guidance for Black Volunteers In Ukraine Causes a Stir After Being Exposed on Twitter. Atlanta Black Star. April 5, 2022. Read it online.
- Bate Felix. AU decries reports of ill treatment as Africans try to flee Ukraine. Reuters. March 1, 2022. Read it online.
- Goodman, Amy. Nonwhite Refugees Fleeing Ukraine War Held in Detention Centers in Poland, Estonia, Austria. Democracy Now! March 28, 2022. Read and watch online.
- Tanasia Kennedy. African and South Asian students fleeing Ukraine report racism, violence at the border. Miami Herald. March 1, 2022. Read it online.
- Catherine Thorbecke. 'We come for our own': How Black volunteers rallied online to help African students in Ukraine. CNN Business. March 18, 2022. Read it online.
Policymakers, scholars, social media influencers, and members of the media have also recognized and called attention to the discrepancies in the treatment of Ukrainian refugees and refugees and asylum seekers of other nations -- specifically nations in the Middle East and the Global South. In the media, numerous reporters on the Ukrainian conflict have made overtly racist and xenophobic on-air statements when reporting on open-door acceptance of white Ukrainian refugees into European nations.
Learn more on policy and media biases pertaining to Ukrainian refugees:
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Sana Butler. Op-Ed: Racist War Reporting by White Journalists Undermines Trust in Western Media. Ebony. March 15, 2022. Read it online.
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Laura Wamsley. Race, culture and politics underpin how -- or if -- refugees are welcomed in Europe. National Public Radio. March 3, 2022. Read it online.
Black News Matters.
Combat anti-Black bias by diversifying your media consumption with African and Black-centered news outlets:
| Africa | United States |
Black Journalist in Ukraine
Terrell Jermaine Starr | Twitter: @terrelljstarr
Starr in the News:
- Ruby Cramer. What Racism Taught an American Journalist About Covering the War. Politico. Mar. 19, 2022. Read the article.
- Terrell Starr. Human Toll of War in Ukraine. Black Diplomats podcast. Mar 16, 2022. Listen to the episode.
- Terrell Starr. Taking a Break from American Racism in Ukraine. Black Diplomats podcast. Sep 6, 2020. Listen to the episode.
- Terrell Starr. Why Black people should care about Ukraine, explained. TheGrio. Feb 5, 2022. Read the article.
Image Caption: Starr uses a selfie stick to report from the streets of Lviv.
Credit: David Butow for POLITICO
Black Eastern European History
Black history is global, and the history of Black people living in and traveling throughout Eastern European lands is long. Numerous Black writers recorded their experiences, which have helped scholars to understand race, racism, and race-making Eastern Europe and global contexts.
Black Writers on Their Experiences in Eastern Europe:
"Colonialism and the Russian revolution." In New Word Revew, no. 24 by
a long-time Communist Party USA publication promoting communism and the Soviet Union. The 1956 issue is not available at UConn Library. Submit an interlibrary loan request to access this article.
Publication Date: 1956
"Moscow Movie." In I Wonder As I Wander. by
In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow. It is the continuously amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around the often strange and always exciting world he loves.
Call Number: PS3515.U274 Z466 1993ISBN: 0809015501Publication Date: 1993
"Notes from a Trip to Russiea." In Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches by
A collection of fifteen essays written between 1976 and 1984 gives clear voice to Audre Lorde's literary and philosophical personae. These essays explore and illuminate the roots of Lorde's intellectual development and her deep-seated and longstanding concerns about ways of increasing empowerment among minority women writers and the absolute necessity to explicate the concept of difference—difference according to sex, race, and economic status. The title Sister Outsider finds its source in her poetry collection The Black Unicorn (1978). These poems and the essays in Sister Outsider stress Lorde's oft-stated theme of continuity, particularly of the geographical and intellectual link between Dahomey, Africa, and her emerging self.
Call Number: eBook; PS3562.O75 .S5 1984ISBN: 3446269711Publication Date: 1984
"Soviet Russia and the Negro." In Crisis Magazine. by
The Crisis magazine is the official publication of NAACP. It was created in 1910 by renowned historian, civil rights activist, sociologist and NAACP co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois. Access issues of the Crisis via Google books or by searching the HathiTrust database.
Publication Date: 1923
Secondary Scholarship Black History and Race-Making in Eastern Europe
Africa in Europe: studies in transnational practice in the long twentieth century by
This volume explores the lives and activities of people of African descent in Europe between the 1880s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. It goes beyond the still-dominant Anglo-American or transatlantic focus of diaspora studies to examine the experiences of black and white Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans who settled or travelled in Germany, France, Portugal, Italy and the Soviet Union, as well as in Britain. At the same time, while studies of Africans in Europe have tended to focus on the relationship between colonial (or former colonial) subjects and their respective metropolitan nation states, the essays in this volume widen the lens to consider the skills, practices and negotiations called for by other kinds of border-crossing: The subjects of these essays include people moving between European states and state jurisdictions or from the former colony of one state to another place in Europe, African-born colonial settlers returning to the metropolis, migrants conversing across ethnic and cultural boundaries among 'Africans', and visitors for whom the face-to-face encounter with European society involves working across the 'colour line' and testing the limits of solidarity. Case studies of family life, community-building and politics and cultural production, drawing on original research, illuminate the transformative impact of those journeys and encounters and the forms of 'transnational practice' that they have generated. The contributors include specialist scholars in social history, art history, anthropology, cultural studies and literature, as well as a novelist and a filmmaker who reflect on their own experiences of these complex histories and the challenges of narrating them.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1846317843Publication Date: 2013
Battleground Africa: Cold War in the Congo, 1960-1965 by
Winner of the 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title Battleground Africa traces the Congo Crisis from post-World War II decolonization efforts through Mobutu's second coup in 1965 from a radically new vantage point. Drawing on recently opened archives in Russia and the United States, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, Lisa Namikas addresses the crisis from the perspectives of the two superpowers and explains with superb clarity the complex web of allies, clients, and neutral states influencing U.S.-Soviet competition. Unlike any other work, Battleground Africa looks at events leading up to independence, then considers the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the series of U.N.-supported constitutional negotiations, and the crises of 1964 and 1965. Finding that the U.S. and the USSR each wanted to avoid a major confrontation, but also misunderstood its opponent's goals and wanted to avoid looking weak or losing its political standing in Africa, Namikas argues that a series of exaggerations and misjudgements helped to militarize the crisis, and ultimately, helped militarize the Cold War on the continent.
Call Number: DT658.22 .N36 2013ISBN: 9780804784863Publication Date: 2013
Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain by
Re-examines the relations between African Americans and the Soviet Union from a more transnational perspective and shows how these relations were crucial in the formation of Black modernism.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780822383833Publication Date: 2002-10-17
Blacks, Reds, and Russians: sojourners in search of the Soviet promise by
One of the most compelling, yet little known stories of race relations in the twentieth century is the account of blacks who chose to leave the United States to be involved in the Soviet Experiment in the 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by the limitations imposed by racism in their home country, African Americans were lured by the promise of opportunity abroad. A number of them settled there, raised families, and became integrated into society. The Soviet economy likewise reaped enormous benefits from the talent and expertise that these individuals brought, and the all around success story became a platform for political leaders to boast their party goals of creating a society where all members were equal. In Blacks, Reds, and Russians, Joy Gleason Carew offers insight into the political strategies that often underlie relationships between different peoples and countries. She draws on the autobiographies of key sojourners, including Harry Haywood and Robert Robinson, in addition to the writings of Claude McKay, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes. Interviews with the descendents of figures such as Paul Robeson and Oliver Golden offer rare personal insights into the story of a group of emigrants who, confronted by the daunting challenges of making a life for themselves in a racist United States, found unprecedented opportunities in communist Russia.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9780813545776Publication Date: 2008
Blacks and Reds by
In this important new study, Hutchinson examines in detail the American Communist party's largely unsuccessful effort to win the allegiance of black Americans in the 20th century. From the time of its creation in 1919, Hutchinson argues, the party sought to recruit African Americans, initially by arguing that Marxist ideology best served their interests; further, Communist ideologues declared that injustices visited upon African Americans resulted from economic and class antagonism, not racial bigotry. But as Hutchinson clearly demonstrates, tensions between blacks and "Reds" increased as time passed and as a African American leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson, and Kelley Miller made it clear that they would not permit African American interests and agendas to become subservient to party ideology. While Communism may have appealed to some, Hutchinson shows that most blacks were not interested in the party, its penchant for theoretical abstraction, or its call for proletarian revolt. He also dispels the widely held misconception that 20th century black political movements were largely creations of Communist initiatives. Such notions, he argues, are not only wrong, but serve as impediments to understanding African American organizations in the context of their unique and historically black identity.
Call Number: HX86 .O35 1995ISBN: 9780870133619Publication Date: 1995
An Empire of Others: making ethnographic knowledge in imperial Russia and the USSR by
Ethnographers helped to perceive, to understand and also to shape imperial as well as Soviet Russia's cultural diversity. This volume focuses on the contexts in which ethnographic knowledge was created. Usually, ethnographic findings were superseded by imperial discourse: Defining regions, connecting them with ethnic origins and conceiving national entities necessarily implied the mapping of political and historical hierarchies. But beyond these spatial conceptualizations the essays particularly address the specific conditions in which ethnographic knowledge appeared and changed. On the one hand, they turn to the several fields into which ethnographic knowledge poured and materialized, i.e., history, historiography, anthropology or ideology. On the other, they equally consider the impact of the specific formats, i.e., pictures, maps, atlases, lectures, songs, museums, and exhibitions, on academic as well as non-academic manifestations.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 9786155225772Publication Date: 2014
Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television by
Russia, one of the most ethno-culturally diverse countries in the world, provides a rich case study on how globalisation and associated international trends are disrupting, and causing the radical rethinking of approaches to, inter-ethnic cohesion. The book highlights the importance of television broadcasting in shaping national discourse and the place of ethno-cultural diversity within it. It argues that television's role here has been reinforced, rather than diminished, by the rise of new media technologies. Through an analysis of a wide range of news and other television programmes, the book shows how the covert meanings of discourse on a particular issue can diverge from the overt significance attributed to it, just as the impact of that discourse may not conform with the original aims of the broadcasters. The book discusses the tension between the imperative to maintain security through centralised government and overall national cohesion that Russia shares with other European states, and the need to remain sensitive to, and to accommodate, the needs and perspectives of ethnic minorities and labour migrants. It compares the increasingly isolationist popular ethnonationalism in Russia, which harks back to "old-fashioned" values, with the similar rise of the Tea Party in the United States and the UK Independence Party in Britain. Throughout, this extremely rich, well-argued book complicates and challenges received wisdom on Russia's recent descent into authoritarianism. It points to a regime struggling to negotiate the dilemmas it faces, given its Soviet legacy of ethnic particularism, weak civil society, large native Muslim population and overbearing, yet far from entirely effective, state control of the media.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 1138853283Publication Date: 2015
Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism by
Sojourning for Freedom portrays pioneering black women activists from the early twentieth century through the 1970s, focusing on their participation in the U.S. Communist Party (CPUSA) between 1919 and 1956. Erik S. McDuffie considers how women from diverse locales and backgrounds became radicalized, joined the CPUSA, and advocated a pathbreaking politics committed to black liberation, women's rights, decolonization, economic justice, peace, and international solidarity. McDuffie explores the lives of black left feminists, including the bohemian world traveler Louise Thompson Patterson, who wrote about the "triple exploitation" of race, gender, and class; Esther Cooper Jackson, an Alabama-based civil rights activist who chronicled the experiences of black female domestic workers; and Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist who emerged as one of the Communist Party's leading theorists of black women's exploitation. Drawing on more than forty oral histories collected from veteran black women radicals and their family members, McDuffie examines how these women negotiated race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics within the CPUSA. In Sojourning for Freedom, he depicts a community of radical black women activist intellectuals who helped to lay the foundation for a transnational modern black feminism.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 0822350505Publication Date: 2011
Under the Sky of My Africa by
A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.
Call Number: eBookISBN: 0810119706Publication Date: 2006
Up from Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul by
During the nineteenth century, literate Russians and educated American blacks encountered a dominant Western narrative of world civilization that seemed to ignore the histories of Slavs and African Americans. In response, generations of Russian and black American intellectuals have asserted eloquent counterclaims for the cultural significance of a collective national "soul" veiled from prejudiced Western eyes. Up from Bondage is the first study to parallel the evolution of Russian and African American cultural nationalism in literary works and philosophical writings. Illuminating a remarkably widespread cross-pollination between the two cultural and intellectual traditions, Dale E. Peterson frames much of his argument around W. E. B. DuBois's concept of "double-consciousness," wherein members of an oppressed section of society view themselves simultaneously through their own self-awareness and through the internalized standards of the dominant culture. He shows how the writings of Dostoevsky, Hurston, Chesnutt, Turgenev, Ellison, Wright, Gorky, and Naylor--texts that enacted and described this sense of double awareness--were used both to perform and to contest the established genres of Western literacy. Woven through Peterson's textual analyses is his consideration of cultural hybridism and its effects: The writers he examines find multiple ways to testify to and challenge the symptoms of postcolonial trauma. After discussing the strong and significant affinity expressed by contemporary African American cultural theorists for the dialogic thought of Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, Peterson argues that a fuller appreciation of the historic connection between the two cultures will enrich the complicated meanings of being black or Russian in a world that has traditionally avoided acknowledging pluralistic standards of civilization and cultural excellence. This investigation of comparable moments in the development of Russian and African American ethnic self-consciousness will be valuable to students and scholars of comparative literature, philosophy, cultural theory, ethnicity, linguistics, and postcolonialism, in addition to Slavic and African American studies.
Call Number: PG3012 .P48 2000ISBN: 0822325268Publication Date: 2000
Black Experience & Race Relations in Fiction
Amiable with Big Teeth: a novel of the love affair between the communists and the poor black sheep of Harlem by
The unexpected discovery in 2012 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay's final novel was hailed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as 'a major event which dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers'. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay's life and work, this colourful, dramatic novel centres on the effort by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of Mussolini-occupied Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history. At once a penetrating satire of political machinations in Depression-era Harlem and a far-reaching story of global intrigue and romance, Amiable with Big Teeth plunges into the concerns, anxieties, hopes and dreams of African-Americans at a moment of crisis for the soul of Harlem.
Call Number: PS3525.A24785 A83 2017ISBN: 9780143107316Publication Date: 2017
The Black Russian by
The Black Russian is the incredible true story of Frederick Bruce Thomas, born in 1872 to former slaves who became prosperous farmers in Mississippi. After his father was brutally murdered, Frederick left the South and worked as a waiter in Chicago and Brooklyn. Seeking greater freedom, he traveled to London, then crisscrossed Europe, and--in a highly unusual choice for a black American at the time--went to Russia. Because he found no color line there, Frederick settled in Moscow, becoming a rich and famous owner of variety theaters and restaurants. When the Bolshevik Revolution ruined him, he barely escaped to Constantinople, where he made another fortune by opening celebrated nightclubs as the "Sultan of Jazz." However, the long arm of American racism, the xenophobia of the new Turkish Republic, and Frederick's own extravagance landed him in debtor's prison. He died in Constantinople in 1928.
Call Number: Request via Interlibrary LoanISBN: 9780802122292Publication Date: 2014
Sources
- Jennifer Wilson and Jennifer Suchland. #BlackOctober Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora. Black Perspectives. African American Intellectual History Society. November 4, 2017. See the full reading list.
- Red-Black Thread Reading List. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2019. See the full reading list.
