There is a war in Eastern Europe. The people are in awe. In the past 96 hours I have witnessed the talking heads that assault cable news unable to fathom the collapse of a “civilized” nation. It does not take much for one to realize they use “civilized” as a synonym for whiteness. There is war and death and throughout our world at this very moment. The United States is giving weapons to the Saudi’s to bomb Yemen. The United States is bombing Somalia. Israel is bombing Syria. And the talking heads stay silent.
We have collectively accepted that they stay silent because the many masses underneath those missiles are brown. The whiteness of Ukraine, the very skin color of this conflict confounds them. They see refugees and rubble with white faces, tear stained and terrified. And they weep, because they can finally start to see themselves in the victims this time. In an interview the president of Bulgaria said, and I paraphrase, “we do not have to worry about these refugees, their backgrounds, none of them are terrorists”. Statements like these are often referred to using the term, “saying the quiet part out loud.” There is no quiet part.
The white world, in the west and in the east, only sees itself as civilization. The global south, as always, is the backwoods, backwater, backwards cousin they hold at arms length. You see it when you see Africans in Ukraine kept from escaping, when you see an American politician proclaim America First, when you see a black man in the company of Donald Trump. Global whiteness will always be like this and it is not quiet at all. It grows louder by the day. We have accepted outright nazis marching through our streets because they are not too far on the fringes. Look at how easy we’ve made it to cut people, even whole countries out of society. If they wanted to, they would. There is a war in Eastern Europe. The people are in awe. You’d think the world was at war. Unless you are brown. The world was already at war with you.
