Ukraine’s Crisis is No Excuse for Racism or Xenophobia

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Mar 10, 2022

“This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades, he said. “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city where you wouldn’t expect this to happen. So it’s partly human nature but they’re not in denial.”

And that was his attempt to choose words “carefully.”

But I’m not angry with D’Agata. As he said in his apology, he meant to say that Ukraine had not seen war on this scale in recent years, compared to conflicts he’d covered in other parts of the world.

Instead, he “said the quiet part out loud,” as the saying goes, in a culture that has too long presumed Europeans to be more civilized than other people.

At least, he wasn’t as embarrassing as David Sakvarelidze, the former deputy prosecutor general of Ukraine, who described his feelings in a BBC interview as “very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed” by Russia’s assault.

At least he was being candid, I guess. Days earlier, Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov was similarly candid in explaining why his country was welcoming refugees from Ukraine.

“These people are Europeans,” Petkov said. “These people are intelligent, they are educated people. ... This is not the refugee wave we have been used to, people we were not sure about their identity, people with unclear pasts, who could have been even terrorists.”

With that, we hear a hint of the xenophobic attitudes that have roiled European politics for years over immigration issues in ways that make Donald Trump’s proposed Mexican border wall look like a minor kerfuffle.

American politics are hardly strangers to such tribal conflicts but, compared to most countries, our American identity is bound together by shared ideas and values more than by tribe. In dealing with the rest of the world, our diversity is our strength, contrary to such monocultural naysayers as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.

Instead of seeking an eye-for-an-eye, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached that we should reach out to embrace others in times of crisis. It’s a big world out there, but smaller in many ways than we might think.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)