Politics and culture, not race and ethnicity, explain why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with Ukrainians.
Does racism or ethnocentrism explain why we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis? That’s what many commentators would have us believe.
“We care more about Ukraine because the victims are white,” declares Newsweek columnist Michael Shank.
“The alarm about a European, or civilized, or First World nation being invaded is a [racist] dog whistle to tell us we should care because they are like us,” argues Nikole-Hannah-Jones, founder of the hugely influential 1619 Project.
‘The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media compared to their browner and blacker counterparts,” adds MSNBC host Joy Reed.
The Racial Prism. Of course, it is not surprising that American and European leftists have fabricated a racial angle through which to view Russia’s war on Ukraine and thereby bash the West.
The Left, after all, has a deep-seated antipathy for the West and has long used racism, real and imagined, as a cudgel to try and delegitimize the West.
As usual, though, they are wrong, because they conflate race and ethnicity with politics and culture. They mistake a distinctive Western outlook or attitude with a determinative racial identity.
But the truth is that the West is not defined by race; it is multiethnic and multiracial; and it includes people of all hues, complexions, and colors.
True, most Westerners are caucasian and Christian, and the determinative political and cultural ideas that gave rise to the West originated in Christian Europe.
But that does not mean—and historically, it has not meant—that only European Christians can be Westerners or Western in their outlook.
To the contrary: Israel, Japan and South Korea, for instance, must now be considered part of the West; and these countries have relatively few Christians and few Europeans. But their commitment to liberal democracy and democratic civic engagement places them squarely in the Western camp.
America, likewise, cannot be well understood or appreciated without acknowledging the important contributions to our nation’s history made by Jews and African Americans.
And so, while it is undeniably true that we in the West identify with Ukrainians to a far greater extent than we ever did Syrians, Afghans, or Iraqis, the reason for this has nothing to do with race and ethnicity and everything to do with politics and culture.
Indeed, it is not because Ukrainians “look like us,” but rather because they think and act like us, that we feel a sense of kinship with them.
Ukraine, after all, clearly yearns to be part of the West—something that could never be said about Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
That’s why Ukraine seeks membership in the European Union and NATO. And that’s why even Russian-speaking parts of Eastern Ukraine are manifestly anti-Russian and reject Putin’s attempt to subjugate their country within a new Russian empire.
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, likewise, speaks in Churchillian tones, invokes Shakespeare, and cites critical milestones in American and Western history—Pearl Harbor, 9/11, World War II, Dunkirk, the Holocaust…
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. No political leader in Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan ever spoke so movingly or so compellingly, or in with such fluency in the Western political and cultural lexicon.
And whereas Afghan President Ashram Ghani fled Afghanistan as the Taliban descended upon Kabul, Zelensky refused to leave Kyiv when the Russians invaded.
In other words, there are very clear and obvious reasons why we in the West feel a real sense of kinship with the people of Ukraine, and these reasons have absolutely nothing to do with race and ethnicity.
Instead, what we in the West identify with is the Ukrainians’ fighting spirit, their desire for freedom and independence, their will to win, and their desire to become part of our political and cultural patrimony.
Indeed, if the Ukrainians were all black or brown, African or Middle Eastern, and exhibited precisely the same Western outlook and behavior, we would feel the same sense of kinship with them that we do now.
Our bond with Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Ukrainians “look like us” (meaning caucasian Americans and caucasian Europeans). This is a truly ludicrous and farcical notion that defies the empirical evidence which shows otherwise.
What draws us to Ukraine is the country’s political idealism, the Ukrainians’ manifest commitment to liberal democracy and civic engagement, and their overall (Western) cultural outlook. Race and ethnicity are obviously irrelevant.
Feature photo credit: The stark differences between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) and former Afghan President Ashram Ghani (R) go a long way toward explaining why the West has embraced Ukraine much more so than Afghanistan. Courtesy of Khaama Press.