A BBC panelist got emotional when commenting on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because it broke his heart to see people with blonde hair and blue eyes crossing the border to take refuge in another European country. Another white NBC reporter blatantly said on live TV that the refugees coming from Ukraine are not like the ones from Syria; they are Christian, white, and similar to themselves.
All these experts were more appalled by seeing people with blond hair and blue eyes turning into refugees overnight than by the destruction, displacement, deaths, and devastation caused by the invasion.
Involuntary human movement has been around for generations since the earliest civilizations across the globe. If you Google Image "refugee," you will see predominantly non-white persons crowded in boats and dilapidated housing structures. Why is that?
Contemporary forced migration looks quite different from the past as we encounter incredibly complex sociopolitical institutions and the effects of globalization on international conflict. However, if you were to review media sources, they would not appear as diverse as it seems.
These authors' position is not to de-sentimentalize the plight of white Ukrainian refugees caused by the invasion, but to point out that the refugee label has been previously given to the non-white people from war-torn and least-developed countries who need to be saved by the predominantly white majority country.
Under the western lens, the issue of giving refuge to this kind of people has always been debated. One faction assumes they will be the saviors of all these "boat-people" by giving them shelter in their land. The other believes these refugees are from "uncivilized" countries taking up their lands and government funds. However, both camps were shaken to see that people who looked like them were going through the same turmoil as the people they used to see as refugees.
The refugee label has changed in the face of the regime itself. The violations of human rights and war conflict are not limited to the "south." Unfortunately, many of the global "north" mass media outlets depict non-white refugees as people without anything, including their ability to contribute meaningfully to host nations.
European countries welcomed the Ukrainian refugees with wide arms, as any neighbouring country should when there is a humanitarian crisis and people have to flee their own country. The European Council unanimously adopted an implementing decision introducing temporary protection due to the mass influx of persons fleeing Ukraine. Ukrainian nationals were given visa-free access to any European Union and Schengen Area countries.
However, the picture was totally different when more than one million people were displaced from Syria and many other countries because of political unrest and war.
The words centering around that refugee crisis were deportation, tightening border security, and so on. There was a blatant racial bias against the non-white Ukrainian refugees too. Non-white Ukrainian refugees were not as welcomed as white Ukrainian refugees. In a statement, UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi said, "We also bore witness to the ugly reality that some black and brown people fleeing Ukraine -- and other wars and conflicts around the world -- have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian refugees."
Clearly, some refugees are more privileged and welcomed in western countries for their whiteness, although refugees around the globe go through similar trauma of displacement.
Racism permeates all spaces, but in the face of human tragedy and forced displacement, there can be no hierarchy between vulnerability and deservingness. Media outlets are said to reflect the masses' interests. Still, when Western production reports on Eastern realities, we reach a rift in the logic. It is as if refugees outside of the Western hemisphere are less affected by the conflict as it is "normal" and somehow "expected." We are not seeing an "interest" in global fellow human security and wellbeing.
Although Western journalism has technologically evolved over the generations, we are lacking an evolution in removing racial bias from its production and ultimate viewership. Training correspondents to not rely on American and Eurocentric biases must be at the core of future broadcast communications.
If not, we risk the lives both within and without the boundaries of displacement crises, and lose precious data and anecdotal reflection on the worst that global conflict has to offer.
Aurora Burgos and Kohinur Khyum Tithila are graduate students in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development at University of Massachusetts Boston with backgrounds in anthropology and criminology, and journalism respectively.
