This week on Our Body Politic, Farai looks back on the 2016-2017 Dakota Access Pipeline protests with investigative journalist Jenni Monet to discuss activism among indegeonous peoples in America and across the globe. Farai also talks with MacArthur Grant Award winner, Harvard professor and author Tiya Miles about one family heirloom from the enslavement period that remarkably stood the test of time. Then in our weekly segment "Sippin' the Political Tea" Farai is joined by Christina Greer, political scientist and Associate Professor at Fordham University and Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Pennsylvania, as they examine the discrimination and other barriers international students and also non-white Ukrainanians are facing in result of Putin's invasion.
Farai Chideya:
Hi folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you have time, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, it helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. We'd also so love you to join in financially supporting the show if you're able, you can find out more at ourbodypolitic.com/donate. We are here for you, with you, and because of you, thank you.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic, I'm Farai Chideya. Last month marked the fifth anniversary of the end of the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock, North Dakota. For nearly a year, thousands of people camped, prayed, and protested to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, they argued it lacked proper environmental review and endangered both water supplies and historic sites. Those who traveled to Standing Rock as water protectors came from of US federally recognized tribes. There were also indigenous people from all over the world, including Sammi people from Northern Norway, Sweden and Finland. Yes, there are indigenous Europeans too.
Farai Chideya:
Shortly after the 2016 election, I went to Standing Rock as an independent reporter. One night during a blizzard Chee Jim, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, and Giovanni Sanchez, a member of the Mojica tribe, saying "Wopila.", it's a Lakota song and word, which means thanksgiving for all of existence and the blessing inherent in each moment of it. Chee Jim, a veteran and founder of the organization, Healing Arrows, told me why he and others came.
Chee Jim:
With this particular situation here, it's important to remember that this doesn't just face the Standing Rock people, or even the people who drink out of this water, all the 18 million other people, but that problems like these exist everywhere.
Farai Chideya:
The encampments at Standing Rock are long gone, but the pipeline story continues to evolve. Investigative journalist Jenni Monet was one of the first reporters on the ground there, five years ago. Among her many projects, she runs her own newsletter, Indigenously Decolonizing Your Newsfeed. I checked in with her this week about the significance of the anniversary and the current state of the pipeline battle.
Jenni Monet:
I really appreciate you drawing attention to what otherwise was also a five year anniversary of when those camps were raised in late February, the protest camps. And I think people could probably scroll back their memories and recall those images of that time from five years ago, where you saw structures from anything from tiny homes to tepes being completely bulldozed by federal agents, a small army of National Guardsmen and militarized police, that had kind of colored the anti-pipeline demonstrations over the months at Standing Rock. I was there on the ground, and in late February, there was an important court decision, the Supreme Court that had denied to hear the case from energy transfer partners, the oil company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline. They were trying to essentially take the case to court to argue against what has been central to court battle at Standing Rock, which centers around this environmental impact statement. It is what lives at the heart of the struggle right now that could essentially stop this pipeline.
Farai Chideya:
And in this newsletter, you write, "The pipeline will not be forced to shut down in the meantime as was previously court ordered.", so that's referring to, even though there's been new court decisions, it's not going to stop the pipeline from operating. Who has the ball here? Who has authority and right of way?
Jenni Monet:
I think the natives do, on a lot of different levels. And that has to do with this new era that we're living in under the Biden administration, where there is still an unprecedented number of natives in key positions in his administration. There is now a real opportunity for decision makers to take a look at how these infrastructure projects, dams, mines pipelines have all been decided over centuries of the colonization of this country with natives at the helm, not just with Deb Holland as the Secretary of the Interior, but we have Michael Connor who is Tao's Pueblo, and he was recently appointed the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works, which is third in command over the Department of Army and has direct oversight over the US Army Corps of Engineers. And if you know anything about the Corps, they have a horrible track record on basically taking lands and displacing native people over and over and over again. And Standing Rock has already endured this once before with the Oahe dam, of which it's now trying to protect for its water supply. So, you now have a native who is sitting at the helm of this decision making, whose very lifeline comes from actual water protection, he stems from the Taos Pueblo, and that's also what I wrote about, was connecting what Mni Wiconi stands for, water is life, and I just fine the symbolism so rich.
Farai Chideya:
So, there's also been a change in the Standing Rock Sioux tribe leadership, it recently elected a new leader. Can you tell me more about that?
Jenni Monet:
That's right. Last fall, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe had a tribal election. And from that they have elected Janet Alkire, who is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and she represents the first woman to lead the tribe in over six decades, which is really exciting. I think people think that when those camps were raised and the protesters also went home, that suddenly this battle to stop a pipeline seemingly ended. You were there Farai in December of 2016 when they temporarily stalled that pipeline to take a look at safety issues, and with all of this indigenous representation in the federal government, there's no longer, I think the hurdles that it once took to do a lot of the explaining of treaty rights and consultation, those concepts are already understood.
Farai Chideya:
I was there. I was invited by some friends in radio to join a group of both indigenous and non-indigenous folks at a camp at Standing Rock. And I went around doing extensive reporting, and in one case, I happened to be at the right place at the right time with Lakota elder, Phyllis Young, on that day in December 2016, that the Obama administration basically reversed itself and gave grounds for blocking the pipeline. Of course, that did not stand up once president Trump took office the next month, but she said to me... I said, "How do you feel?" and she's "I'm used to promises being broken." And at the time, there's a part of me that's still a little "Oh shucks, can't you just be happy?", and of course she was right. It was a transformative trip for me. But what I really realized was, kind of, how much this was a seminal moment for indigenous people to meet each other. I mean, what kind of feelings did you have?
Jenni Monet:
Standing Rock is one of those things that always evolves for me as an indigenous woman, as an indigenous survivor of violence, as someone who's very job it has been to chronicle this really painful, traumatic past, and not have them be taken seriously. All of that, right? It was super loaded.
Farai Chideya:
And not to mention that you yourself were treated in ways that are unbecoming of a human being and journalist.
Jenni Monet:
Yeah, and that too, right? I mean the whole press freedom, and then also people just not taking me seriously as a journalist because I'm brown and I happen to be "dressed like all the protestors", which I still don't know what that means other than wearing clothes and looking native. I think that what you struck most importantly for I was what I had always called the test kitchen for living under Trump, these challenges that people were willing to stand up and fight for. I think that we have done that, and now we find ourselves here in a new administration, still with many challenges, but I think really benefiting from the gains of those intersectionalities that were made at Standing Rock, people identifying common struggles that we're all too late bare in 2020, right after George Floyd, from the pandemic, the inequalities that marginalized people share across the board. I'm grateful that we now can talk about things like colonization and inequalities on multiple levels that no longer take a lot of unpacking like they used to. I don't think that we're completely enlightened and I hope that we never are, and we continue to grow in that way.
Farai Chideya:
So, what's bringing you joy? That's something we ask a lot of people. But tell us about where you are now, physically, and what you're up to and what brings you joy.
Jenni Monet:
Well, hearing from you Farai brings me joy.
Farai Chideya:
Thank you, Jenni. Talking to you brings me, likewise.
Jenni Monet:
I do mean that. Hearing from my friends, I feel I haven't seen my friends in a while. I guess anytime I can connect with people that I really honor and celebrate in my life, that brings me joy. My writing has been bringing me joy, although I feel there's never enough time. And then I'm really enjoying exploring this new sense of self where I am in Alaska. I'm not an Alaska native, I'm from Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, but I've been coming to Alaska for about 15 years for reporting, and I've recently relocated here last July. And I'll be honest with you, I've survived my first winter, we're not completely out of the woods yet, and it's really grown on me because I've immersed myself in understanding it and exploring all of its sides.
Farai Chideya:
Well, Jenni, we will have to talk to you about further reporting adventures and life adventures, but I was profoundly just, kind of, existentially changed by going to Standing Rock and witnessing the gathering of indigenous people from around the world, particularly from North America, in support of the idea of self-determination and, just frankly, due process, but much bigger than that, the right to live, the right to love, the right to have healthy children and clean water. All of that was so meaningful to me. And thank you for sharing more about the updates.
Jenni Monet:
Well, any time Farai. Thank you so much for noticing the update on Standing Rock, because I was really surprised that it was so underreported in the press.
Farai Chideya:
Thank you. That's Jenni Monet, investigative journalist, media critic, and editor-in-chief of the newsletter, Indigenously Decolonizing Your Newsfeed. You can find it indigenously.org. Coming up next, historian Tiya Miles on her latest book, All That She Carried and it's lessons for today, plus racial politics surrounding the conflict in Ukraine. That's on Our Body Politic.
Farai Chideya:
Welcome back to Our Body Politic. For some Americans, passing down family heirlooms is standard practice, but for those of us whose ancestors were enslaved, the picture is different. During slavery, humans were considered property, families were separated and keepsakes were hard to get, let alone to hold onto. One, now popular, museum artifact flies in the face of that reality, a century and a half old embroidered cotton sack. MacArthur winner and Harvard historian Tiya Miles saw the cloth bag on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. It inspired her latest book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. All That She Carried won last year's National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Farai Chideya:
I sat down with Tiya to talk about her book and the valiant struggle of enslaved people to preserve dignity, love and family heritage. So, this book is magnificent, I have been spending time listening to the audio book version with my mother. And it just... We both talked about the intensity of the experience, like at points, I've cried about the narratives in your book, and it really stuck with me. It's so deep and so powerful and so critical to talk about the history that is not told. So, describe Ashley's Sack and what it looks like now and a bit of its journey.
Tiya Miles:
Well, Farai, I cried many a time too, working on this project, doing the research, writing the drafts, when I read from the book, I oftentimes can't help but cry, because it is such a sad history, such a mournful history. But Ashley's sack, an artifact that has been preserved from the period of enslavement really helps us to see both the pain and the perseverance. And that is why I love this object so much and why I think it has so much to teach us.
Tiya Miles:
Ashley's Sack is the name that was given by museum curators to an old cotton bag from the 1850s, an agricultural sack used for carrying seeds or for carrying cotton. It ended up in the hands of an enslaved black woman named Rose, who was living in Charleston with her enslavers. And Rose took this sack, this plain ordinary utilitarian bag, and she packed it with critical items that she thought would help to preserve her daughter's life, because her daughter, Ashley, was about to be sold away from her. The inscription that was embroidered onto the sack by the descendant of Rose and Ashley sewed these words, "My great grandmother, Rose, mother of Ashley, gave her this sack when she was sold at age nine in South Carolina. It held a tatter dress, three handfuls of pecans, a braid of Rose's hair, told her, "It be filled with my love, always." She never saw her again. Ashley is my grandmother, Ruth Middleton, 1921."
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. You really capture the vulnerability throughout this book, of black women, black mothers and black children, and yet this is a story with so much hope in it. And I want you to start out with a little bit of the prologue, can you read to us?
Tiya Miles:
Just as Rose and Ashley found on their forced journeys through slavery's landscape, there is no safe place of escape left for us. The walls of the world are closing in, we need to get out of here in a hurry, we need to get out of these frames of mind and states of emotion that elevate mastery over compassion, division over connection, and greed over care, separating us one from another and locking us in. Our only options in this predicament, the state of political and planetary emergency, are to act as first responders or die not trying. We are the ancestors of our descendants, they are the generations we've made, with a radical hope for their survival, what will we pack into their sacks?
Farai Chideya:
And so, when you think about this book, to me, this book is an embodiment of exactly what Ashley's sack represented, which is something to carry forward. And I loved how in your book you talk about in the act of imagining that her daughter could have a little bit of food to survive, and a lack of her hair and these other things that she packed into it, she was imagining her daughter had a future, and she did, and you are part of that. What's your relation to this story? We haven't talked explicitly about that yet.
Tiya Miles:
I think we are all a part of that, right? And that is how I tried to tell the story and how I tried to write the book, to open the sack up wide, to make room for us all, because this is a story for black America, a story for black women, but also a story for the whole country because slavery is the history of our country. I came to know the sack because a journalist down in Georgia told me about it and insisted that I had to see it, and when I finally did see it in the Smithsonian, I just could not walk away.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And you have a whole section on hair in the book, and so what does the braid represent to you and what did hair represent in the context of enslavement? What did it mean for Ashley to receive a lock of her mother's hair?
Tiya Miles:
Hair can be viewed as, kind of, a trivial thing, and yet we know when looking at the history of black women, it was not trivial in the least, it was centrally important to black women's maintenance of their own dignity. And yet they had to fight tooth and nail to try to protect that dignity. And hair is just one way they did it. And so when you're dealing with that few items, you know that each item is important. That braid must have meant everything to Rose, it would've meant everything to Ashley, a hair means everything to us, because it's a symbol of ourselves, our belief in ourselves. We see in the record of slavery, black women taking their Sundays off to do their hair off, to plat their hair, to twine their hair, maybe to untwine their hair if they had had it twined during the week, to find pieces of fabric that they thought were beautiful or bright and to put that fabric around their hair, to braid their hair, and do that from one another. This was an act of love, this was an act of self preservation. And this is how we know that when Rose cut off one of her braids for Ashley, she was continuing that message of self love, self care for her daughter.
Farai Chideya:
This is Our Body Politic, I'm Farai Chideya. We're speaking with Tiya Miles, historian and author of the book, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. You prepared a second reading for us that gets to some of the stakes and what people were facing. Could you share it with us?
Tiya Miles:
I'd be happy to. So, this second passage comes from the chapter called The Auction Block. The scenes of forced parting that shadow slave narratives are difficult for us to absorb as 21st century readers. Vivid descriptions of fathers begging and mothers whaling as children cried out for rescue are almost too much for us to bear, even with the sense of time, which operates as our emotional shields. In a culture devoid of moral values and in which they were financial assets, children like Ashley were hand selected for victimization. If we can hardly contend with the enormity of despair that characterized the thousands of partings, how would a child cope with a sudden loss of family. In our modern era in 2018, the US federal administration began arresting and incarcerating undocumented immigrants at the Southern border. According to clinical psychologists who work with these children and research psychologists who assess lead data on their condition, the research demonstrated the intensification of fear, a feeling of helplessness, and a sense of endangerment among these youths. Children taken away from their parents experience increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder. And during mental health effects, "on part with beating and torture", the psychological wellbeing of these already fragile children shatters when they are deprived of parental care.
Farai Chideya:
So, why did you choose that to share with us?
Tiya Miles:
I wanted to share that with you because it's an example of a place in this history and a place in the book where we can see the past and the present coming together and meeting. I wanted to, sort of, shake us up and help us to see that we actually have data that can shed a light on how a child like Ashley may have felt, we don't have her own words, we don't have a narrative by her, but we know that psychologists who study children today who are separated from their parents have found that these children, they struggle for a lifetime.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. I think that among all the other gifts that you give us, is this gift, very painful at times, of feeling something for Ashley. And I think of my mother's great grandmother, when she was a little kid, her family were free black farmers in Virginia during the Civil War, it was a slave holding state and, of course, the seat of the Confederacy. And so she lived into her mid 90s, and when my mom was still a little kid, she repeated this story, "The pattyrollers came and they threw me in a ditch." And, she, my great, great grandmother, was talking about the pattyrollers or patrollers who would snatch up people and sell them into slavery, a la 12 Years a Slave, and her own relatives had to hold her down as a little girl and keep her quiet to keep her from being kidnapped into slavery. And it was only after my mother's great-grandmother passed that she realized, my mom realized, she'd been talking about kidnapping and the patrollers. So, I almost didn't exist, my ancestral line could have been snatched away and sold into the deeper south, and if you were "free" like her, it wasn't really that free, and children were not free.
Farai Chideya:
So, I really relate, and I think a lot of us looked at the kids in cages and were "Oh, that's horrible." and yet it happened, and it happened in what we think of as the beacon of democracy sometimes. So, how do you think people navigated their own ownership of themselves when they literally did not own themselves?
Tiya Miles:
Yes. Well, I mean, that's the question, that's what we need to know, right? Because we want to respect them by doing our best to understand their experiences, and we want to be able to gather what we can from their experiences to ensure the future survival of our children, our descendants, even ourselves. So, you asked, we want to know how they did it.
Tiya Miles:
One of the things that I worked hardest on in this book was trying to see if I could come closer to approaching what it was like to be the mother of an enslaved child, a person having to live with the fact that they did not have the ability, the freedom, the right to determine their own life choices, to protect their children, to choose who they would love, to maintain and hold on to the fruits of their labor. They didn't have that. I cannot imagine how helpless and hopeless I would feel if I were in that situation. But we know that even being in that situation, our ancestors, many of them, not all because we lost many to this total brutality, but our ancestors managed to push through, they managed to make a way, they managed to form families, and to love one another, and to braid each other's hair, and to find joy, and to make art. And I think they did it because of these bonds of love, at least that's what the artifact of Ashley's sack tells me, that's what I drew from this research and from this project, fundamentally, is that through love, they made a way.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And you wrote a guest essay in the New York Times last month, titled, When Everyone Is Talking About The End, Talk About Black History. I absolutely loved it, and loved that you talked about the climate crisis as part of the framing. Tell us a little bit about that essay and what you were trying to get at.
Tiya Miles:
My goodness. I mean, every day it feels like we're walking further down the path of chaos, to melt, and the things that we know break you down, right? And this has been happening for years. When Donald Trump won that election, it felt like things are falling apart, we saw racial violence mount, we saw political separation and vilification increase, people can't even talk to each other anymore. Now we're seeing this unbelievable set of scenes from Europe, we're seeing the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it feels like things are falling apart, it really does. And my approach to it was sometimes to just try to hold it at bay, hold it at bay, keep on, keep it on, right? And we do have to keep on keeping on, as our ancestor did.
Tiya Miles:
But at the same time we can't address the problems and crises we face by burying our heads in the sand. We might even say that part of the reason why we are in this maelstrom of crises right now, we have buried our heads in the sand for too long around things like climate change, around things like a political conflict and division, around things like the continuing legacies of slavery, around racism. That has not really put us in a good position to work together to try to deal with some of these existential threats. We have to look at it, we have to recognize that yes, something huge is going on. And I decided to try to put a name to that something huge to help us, I think naming things helps us to get a hold of them and to begin to think about them and to understand them. And I decided to name that thing change. And then lo and behold, I was right back into the research of All That She Carried, of this book of slavery, because I think this was the condition that black people who were held as chattel faced, constant change, chaos, fear, anxiety, maybe the desire to say, "I can't face it today.", but if they hadn't faced it, today we wouldn't be here Farai, they faced it. We are here and we have to be here in the same way for our descendants.
Farai Chideya:
And you also quote Octavia Butler from the Parables, and Lauren Olamina is one of my heroes and I think that of a lot of people, who is a character in the Parables series that she did, who is able to face chaos and change when other people can't wrap their brains around it. I think I'm going to need a few more readings of All That She Carried because it has really landed with me in my heart space, my brain space and my soul space. Tiya, thank you so much.
Tiya Miles:
Oh Farai, thank you, thank you so much for this conversation.
Farai Chideya:
That's Tiya Miles, professor of history at Harvard University and Radcliffe alumni professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She's the author of All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. Coming up next, the racial politics within the Ukraine conflict, with Fordham University's Christina Greer and UPEN history, PhD student, Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon. You're listening to Our Body Politic. Each week on the show we bring you a round table called Sippin' the Political Tea, joining me this week is political scientist and associate professor at Fordham University, Dr. Christina Greer. Hi, Christina.
Christina Greer:
Hi there. How's it going?
Farai Chideya:
Going well. And we have Kimberly St. Julian-Varnan, PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome Kimberly.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya:
So, Kimberly, I want to start with you. There have been reports of racial discrimination at the border of Ukraine and Poland, there are videos of people of color being blocked from boarding trains, and you have been in contact with African students evacuating from Sumy, a northeastern Ukrainian city hit by Russian airstrikes on Monday, it killed 21 people, including two children. So, what is the current reality for black refugees and other people of color trying to leave Ukraine? And why are there black people in Ukraine to begin with? Not that we aren't everywhere, but I'm just saying.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
So, the situation has changed so much since the war started two weeks ago. The students I've been in contact with before, who weren't Sumy but were in other places in Ukraine, they've gotten through to Poland, and some of them are already back home. The problem is, now, they've gotten from Sumy and most of them are heading towards the Polish or the Hungarian border, but if you don't have diplomatic presence there from your home country, you're still having a problem getting through. So, you have a humanitarian crisis at the border, but you also have the problem of once these students and foreign residents who are of color get out of Ukraine, being processed in Poland, being processed in Hungary, Slovakia, they aren't EU citizens, so they don't have the same privileges. But the EU agreement about Ukrainian refugees is only for Ukrainian passport holders, who get free passage and get accepted into the EU, this does not count for third country nationals. So, all these African students, Indian students, Middle Eastern students, they count as third country nationals. The African students I was in contact with, they get 30 days in Hungary, and then they have to go to another country or they have to go back home.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
So, it's a very complicated situation. But, the diaspora is everywhere, and there are these people called Afro Ukrainians, they exist, there are also Afro Russians. So, you have first and second generation Afro Ukrainians, many of them, one of their parents was an African student or an African worker who lived in Ukraine, who settled down and had a family. So, you have people of color who are native Ukrainians. They are also unique in this situation because you have the problem of, when you're Ukrainian you're getting across the border, if you're denied your Ukrainianess, then that means you're not being allowed to stay into these EU countries for the amount of time you're supposed to.
Farai Chideya:
Professor Greer, how do you factor the African diaspora into how you look at geopolitical conflicts, not just the Ukraine, but in general?
Christina Greer:
Yeah. Well, I think what Kimberly raises is a really important point that I feel I bring up a lot when we're talking about blacks in America, which is, can we ever be full citizens? And what we're seeing now is... This is a conversation on a global level, it's, as you just said Farai, black people are everywhere, we've been everywhere.
Farai Chideya:
I have met folks in Tokyo. There used to be a Russian newscaster who was Afro Russian.
Christina Greer:
And I always think about Paul Robson. I think about Paul Robson in his time, not just in Europe but obviously in Russia and in other countries, or when W. E. B. Du Bois is kicked out of America as well and spending time on the continent, but also spending time in Europe and Russia and Asia. And so, when we're looking at Afro Ukrainians or Asian Ukrainians, and this idea that, well, whiteness is nationality and citizenship, even though these people are carrying proper passports, proper paperwork, it's still a question of, "Well, do they belong?" And so, as we grapple with these questions on American soil, we can look across the water and see people, who are our people, who are still going through the same racism, white nationalism. We can all agree what is going on is horrible and it's atrocity and we need to keep our eye on the prize.
Christina Greer:
However, I'm just still worried about not just the Afro Ukrainians who are trying to get out, and we know that the racism and white supremacy is global, we can't just think about it as a uniquely American problem or uniquely British problem, but where was the outrage in Afghanistan or Syria or Haiti or in the Southern border? Kimberly is from Texas. We have been doing this to people, it's just those people didn't look like white people, and the conversation has been totally different now, that it's "I can't believe these mothers are separated from their children." Well, what about what happened at the border when Donald Trump separated all those children who were too young to even know their names? They'll never be back with their parents. My level of compassion is definitely there for what's going on, but if we're going to have this collective outrage and concern, my question for a lot of these folks is, "Well, where was it last month, or the month before that, with all these folks who have been denied citizenship and also humanity?" And that's the real troubling piece that I'm, sort of, struggling with in sitting with today.
Farai Chideya:
Kimberly, when you look at this media coverage against the lens of your expertise at examining Eastern Europe and the Soviet union, how do you think we might be able to better frame this? As a journalist of 32 years, I find it hard to imagine a world where racial, cultural biases and nationalistic biases don't influence the news coverage. Right now, there is mass starvation in Afghanistan, and that's totally been pushed off of the news radar, for example, but even in Afghanistan, there was widely criticized news coverage in the US that talked about how they had light eyes and how they looked like Americans, and is that really our standard for humanity? Is that looks like American means looks white means we care?
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
I've been working on Ukraine since I was 20 years old. So, it's interesting to me-
Farai Chideya:
And why? Let me just interrupt your answer. Yeah, why did you choose that? Yeah, I'm just curious.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
So, I've been studying Soviet in Russian history since my freshman year of college. My first history course I signed up for was the History of the Soviet Union. And since then, I've just been, "This is my jam, this is what I do." And I tell people Russia is very much like Texas, so I understand... I use critical race theory in my work, which is also why I'm in Pennsylvania doing my dissertation, not Texas. This is all about proximity to whiteness, because in 2014 when Russia invaded Eastern Ukraine and when it forcibly annexed Crimea and started actively oppressing the minority Crimean Tatar population who are Muslim, none of you all said anything, no one was saying, "Oh, these Ukrainians look like us.", no one was saying "They're Crimean Tatars, they have hair like us."
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
So, the problem me is this proximity to whiteness that Ukraine has gained is very new, and I mean, a month ago new. But also, you hear these little words like "they're relatively civilized, they're relatively like us.", which shows you the proximity to whiteness, it's happening right now, but I also want to see if it'll be existing in two months, because last month they didn't look like you, and that's why we're in the situation we're in now. I think the media and people within the media are definitely showing and saying the quiet part out loud now, and I appreciate that because we always said, "You thought this way and now you're proving it."
Farai Chideya:
And I just want to pull up a couple of quotes very much to this point, these were compiled in an article by the Independent, from the UK, a CBS news correspondent apologized, he used the civilized term, "This is a relatively civilized, relatively European.", on and on and on, and then, there was actually someone from Al Jazeera English who also said, "These are prosperous middle class people, these are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East or North Africa, they look like any European family that you'd live next door to." So, it was striking to me that it's not just one media outlet originating in one nation, that this is, kind of, a global bias towards what civilization looks like.
Farai Chideya:
I'm going to come out of us discussing the frame of race and this geopolitical construct to also talking about what the US government is doing. This past Wednesday, congressional leaders reached a bipartisan agreement to provide Ukraine and European allies with $13.6 billion, it's part of a larger $1.5 trillion government funding package. Dr. Greer, at a time when the two parties can agree on almost nothing, including things like school lunch programs, why are we seeing bipartisan support here?
Christina Greer:
Well, I think this bipartisan support comes from Kimberly's point, which is... Part of what I studied in my book about black ethnics is how other white groups become white, and all of a sudden Ukrainians are now white. And we have to understand that a country that is deeply embedded in white supremacy and anti-black racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, that's on full display in this conversation, now that we're talking about what is now perceived as a white nation. So, as you said, this is a Congress that couldn't even agree on infrastructure, which was always the sort of softball, but when it comes to the money to give to another perceived white nation, everyone's on board. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be on board, but I do think that it should be noted. When we look at Afghanistan from last month or Syria and Yemen from a few months prior, or what is happening to Haitians at the Southern border of Texas, there was no bipartisan support and there was barely any democratic support or outrage. That's why we're seeing folks that are "We have to put this to an end. We can't have Europeans feeling unsafe. We can't have a ground war in Europe." But is it okay to have a ground war in Afghanistan for 20 years, when they had nothing to do with 9/11?
Christina Greer:
I think my frustration is, at this moment, who gets to become white, and those are the people who get not just the attention but also the resources they need, because when we start talking about mothers and children, there're mothers and children all over this world who are struggling, who will never see their children again, who have given birth in caves or on the street with bombs going on around them. It should be commended that they're working together in a bipartisan way, but we have to ask ourselves why, what is the root cause of this excitement to work together on behalf of whiteness?
Farai Chideya:
You are listening to Sippin' the Political Tea on Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya, and this week we're discussing how race impacts the Ukrainian refugee crisis, plus the overall US response with Dr. Christina Greer, political scientist and associate professor at Fordham university, and Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania. If you're just tuning in, you can catch the whole conversation on our podcast, just find Our Body Politic wherever you listen podcast.
Farai Chideya:
Kimberly, I'm going to come back to you. As someone who, as you put it, has studied the former Soviet Union ever since your early college education, as we look at people of color globally, how do you view the ongoing question of race, particularly with the US-former Soviet axis, US-Russian axis? For example, I talked to some Africans who were "The Russians actually were better to us than the United States.", and that's a very complicated thing to hear.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
Absolutely. And I think this is something that's been missing in American coverage, but also Western coverage, of this war. Russia has for the past 15, somewhat, years, been heavily investing in the continent. And so, and these African students, there's a reason they're there. Ukraine, since the Soviet period, has welcomed African students, there have been 1000s of people from Africa who have studied and lived in Ukraine. And including many of the students who have left, a lot of them say they want to come back, when it's safe, they want to finish their educations. So, we have to also think about what has the former Soviet Union offered the continent and offered Middle Eastern countries and Southeast Asian countries that the West hasn't offered.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
In terms of geopolitical understanding of this war, I think the key thing is, Putin wants to reshape our geopolitical order. And he said it a few times, he wants a normalization of relations. That does not mean what people think it means, it's not, "We want peace." When he says normalization of relations, he means he does not want what he perceives as a unipolar world with United States and Western institutions being the only centers of power, and he said that multiple times. So, I think what he's trying to do is show, "If you are not of a particular realm or a particular rung on the European ladder, NATO's not going to help you, so you need to come and join on the Russian side, on the Chinese side and align with us because we can actually help you, but we can also harm you."
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
And I think this is a key thing when we talk about American support for Ukraine. One, I think the bipartisanship is fascinating to me because literally three we weeks ago, Republican talking heads were saying Ukraine was in the wrong and they were saying a lot of things that were supporting Russia. If we don't understand long term what Russia has been doing and the moves it has been making on the geopolitical level outside of Western Europe, we're not going to understand why you have countries like India who are abstaining in UN Security Council votes, they have significant economic and political backlash that will happen to them if they turn against Russia.
Farai Chideya:
Yeah. And I just want to say that, for me, as someone who supports freedom and self-determination including the freedom of the Ukrainian people, I think it's really important for us to have these tough conversations, I don't want people to perceive this as anti freedom or anti-freedom for Ukrainian, but freedom has always been allocated in different measures to different types of people. Americans feel many different kinds of ways about what it means for Americans to engage in the world, and on that point Dr. Greer, coming back to you, vice president Kamala Harris traveled to Poland this week, and in addition to these reports about racism at the Polish-Ukrainian border, she also arrived days after the US rejected Poland's proposal to send fighter jets to Ukraine. Since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, how have we seen the vice president's role in foreign relations evolve?
Christina Greer:
I wrote a piece over this last summer, about Kamala Harris, and part of the difficulty of her job is that we've never defined what a vice president is or should be. And so, we all know, on this call as a black woman, no matter what she does she'll be critiqued. And so, my issue with her portfolio was, as of last year, her portfolio was essentially everything but world peace, it was voting rights, it was policing, it was immigration, it was the Southern border, and so now let's just throw in Poland. And I admire the fact that a, she's up for the task and b, Biden trusts her with these very important issues. But you know, the crux of my op-ed in the times was, "Well, is this a trap?", because it's somewhat of a knowing situation, because no one's been able to figure these issues out. We have Republicans who will cut off their own noses just to make sure that Democrats don't get a win, and they'll really hurt themselves to make sure Kamala Harris doesn't get a win.
Christina Greer:
So, although it's commendable that she is there and she's making speeches and she's trying to move this country and many other countries forward, I really do wonder if she'll be able to do much, because of, not just the US racism but the global racism and sexism where whatever great ideas she might put forth, she and her team, they'll be met with a no, just because of the messenger, not even the message.
Farai Chideya:
So, Kimberly, I'm going to end with you. Where are your eyes? Where is your attention going now, as you look ahead to this evolving crisis? And frankly, quite a bit of analysis starting to emerge about the need to value Ukrainians of all races and refugees who are international students in Ukraine, it got off to a slow start, but there has been some growing attention to this. So, where is your attention going, as you look at the evolution of the crisis in Ukraine?
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
A key thing I'm looking at is not just getting students... The Sumy students, they were evacuated, but I'm trying to also make sure that they are taken care of once they get to the Ukrainian border and they're getting into Poland and Hungary. So, I think what a lot of people don't understand, the lines are long but it's also there is no guarantee you have food and shelter once you cross into the border. So, that's a key thing for me, is to watch. But also, I think we have to maintain our pressure on the world to keep paying attention, because in 2014, people cared about Ukraine for two weeks and then it fell apart and people stopped caring. So, just remember that there are 1000s of African and Indians and Middle Eastern residents of Ukraine who are leaving, but there are also many who can't leave, I think that's what I'm focusing on, is people inside Ukraine who can't get out but also taking care of those students and foreign residents who were able to get out.
Farai Chideya:
Well, that is it for today. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining us.
Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon:
Thank you for having me.
Farai Chideya:
And Dr. Greer, thank you for joining us.
Christina Greer:
Thank you so much for having me.
Farai Chideya:
That was Kimberly St. Julian Varnon, PhD student in history at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Christina Greer, associate professor at Fordham University.
Farai Chideya:
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week -- and everywhere you listen to podcasts.
Farai Chideya:
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms. I'm the executive producer and host, Farai Chideya. Our Co-executive producer is Jonathan Blakely. Bianca Martin is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booker and producer. Emily J. Daly is our producer. Our associate producer is Natyna Bean.
Farai Chideya:
Production and editing services are by Clean Cuts at Three Seas. Today's episode was produced by Steve Lack and Lauren Schild. And engineered by Harry Evans, Archie Moore, and Adam Rooner.
Farai Chideya:
This program is produced with support from the Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.