Racist coverage of Ukraine undermines real action
Western- focused narratives reinforce dangerous biases
“This isn’t a place — with all due respect, you know — like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict ranging for decades,” said CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata while reporting live from Kyiv last month. “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose these words carefully too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope it is going to happen.”
Within western media circles, D’Agata wasn’t alone in trying to distinguish the unfolding war in Ukraine from other humanitarian crises around the world. “These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from areas in the Middle East … or North Africa,” explained one commentator on Al Jazeera. David Sakvarelidze, a former prosecutor in Ukraine, emphasized this point further on BBC: “It’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blond hair being killed.”
While global solidarity for Ukraine’s people is urgently necessary, these western media narratives reinforce dangerous racist biases that still permeate through much of our humanitarian news. For people who have experienced recent crises in Syria, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic and beyond, the insult is loud and clear: unless you are a white European, your suffering is unexceptional and less worthy of global outrage.
At Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières ( MSF), we’ve witnessed the direct consequences of racist and dehumanizing humanitarian news coverage. While images of forcibly displaced people in Ukraine rightly compel pundits to get “very emotional,” migrants and refugees attempting the deadly sea crossing right now from Libya to Europe — often escaping horrors within Libya’s notorious detention centres — are met with skepticism and furrowed brows. And while journalists seek to paint a rich picture — albeit generalized at times — of the lives of Ukrainians prior to war, migrants aboard fragile rubber rafts on the Mediterranean Sea are often characterized exclusively by that single, most devastating moment in their lives.
These racist media narratives are not only hurtful — they have also emboldened policies with disastrous impacts on humanitarian action. Since 2015, MSF medical teams working on search- and- rescue ships have witnessed with horror as thousands of people have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea or been forcibly returned to horrific conditions in Libya. MSF’s search- and- rescue work is a direct response to Europe’s reckless policies of non- assistance at sea, which have condemned over 1,500 people to lose their lives or go missing this January alone.
These experiences make us wary of the potential impacts that racist news coverage may have on current humanitarian activities in Ukraine, too. When western journalists and pundits express concern for refugees with “blue eyes and blond hair” at Ukraine’s borders, where does that leave people who do not fit this description? Initial reports have already suggested that Africans in Ukraine are experiencing abuse and discrimination while seeking safety.
As an organization compelled to assist people in need regardless of who they are, we demand that the health, rights and safety of all — regardless of skin or nationality — are upheld.
As Canadians flip through these difficult news headlines, MSF has set up emergency response activities in Ukraine and deployed teams in Poland, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Belarus and Slovakia. Our teams have been working around the clock to respond to urgent needs by providing training to hospitals on how to manage mass casualty incidents. We are also engaged in a race against time to get the right medical supplies to the right places.
If one thing is for certain in this unpredictably evolving crisis, it is that stories we tell right now will shape humanitarian responses for days and months to come. For the people in Ukraine — in all their diversity — as well as communities affected by humanitarian emergencies around the world, anti- racist media coverage is the least we can do.
When western journalists and pundits express concern for refugees with “blue eyes and blond hair” at Ukraine’s borders, where does that leave people who do not fit this description?