Black Africans, Indians and other people of color fleeing war-ravaged Ukraine are being held back and abused at border crossings because of their race.
Desperate students, migrant workers and others trying to leave Ukraine said they were badly mistreated and discriminated against at the border.
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Their tales of being forced to wait in lines for hours and days in the freezing cold, without food and water, and subjected to violence, have been widely reported by the media.
Rachel Onyegbule, a Nigerian first-year medical student living in Ukraine, said she and other foreigners were forced off a public bus at a checkpoint between the Ukraine and Poland border.
They were ordered to stand aside as the bus drove off with only Ukrainian nationals on board, she told CNN last week in a phone interview. Onyegbule was left stranded at the border town of Shehyni.
“More than 10 buses came, and we were watching everyone leave,” CNN quoted Onyegbule as saying. “We thought after they took all the Ukrainians they would take us, but they told us we had to walk, that there were no more buses and told us to walk.”
She was “numb from the cold, and we haven’t slept in about four days now.” She added: “There’s no need for us to ask why. We know why.”
Racism.
Chineye Mbagwu, a 24-year-old Nigerian doctor who was living in western Ukraine, said she spent more than two days stranded at a Poland-Ukraine border crossing.
The guards there allowed Ukrainians to cross but blocked foreigners, she told the New York Times. “The Ukrainian border guards were not letting us through,” she said in a phone interview.
“They were beating people up with sticks” and tearing off their jackets, she added. “They would slap them, beat them and push them to the end of the queue. It was awful.”
Ahmed Habboubi, a 22-year-old French-Tunisian medical student, told the newspaper, “the Ukrainian army beat me up so much I couldn’t properly walk. When I finally managed to enter Poland, the Polish authorities took me straight to the hospital.
“It was absolute chaos. We were treated like animals.”
Authorities in Poland and Ukraine have denied any discrimination or abuse. And many thousands of refugees are being helped across the border to safety every day in this humanitarian crisis.
Yet in the face of this horrific world disaster, at a time when we should be praying for peace in Ukraine, some are ready to oppress people who look different from them. Ukrainians first. White people first. People of color, get in line. It is not your turn, perhaps never your turn.
What does it say about our humanity if a group of people are denied safety and harbor in a humanitarian crisis? Inhumanity is the child of racism.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is the criminal in charge of this heinous attack on Ukraine, a nation that is choosing democracy and peace over oppression and war.
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Yet anyone who denies desperate human beings safety at the border because of their race is no better than Putin.
Listen to the prescience of W.E.B. Du Bois, the great thinker and human rights activist. He declared in July 1900: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the question as to how far differences of race-which show themselves chiefly in the color of the skin and the texture of the hair — will hereafter be made the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.”
Well into the 21st century, little has changed.
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