Black Americans Should Stand In Solidarity With Ukraine Against Putin
Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
“In short, Putin and much of the Russian population that supports him are pretty much like white folks in the South who are still pissed that the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Ever since the Confederacy fell, the South has been trying to suppress Black voters from gaining political power while their economies remain in the toilet because they haven’t thought of better ways to create income since negroes ain’t picking their cotton anymore. That’s Russia in a nutshell, folks.” -- Terrell J. Starr
Though we are separated by five thousand miles and the barriers of different languages and cultures, Black Americans share a deep and significant bond with the people of Ukraine. As defenders of democracy, we are united against a common enemy: Vladmir Putin.
Putin invaded Ukraine in violation of international law for the same reason he directed Russian spy agencies to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election: he fears democracy.
“Because the primary threat to Putin and his autocratic regime is democracy … As long as citizens in free countries exercise their democratic rights to elect their own leaders and set their own course in domestic and foreign politics, Putin will keep them in his crosshairs,” Robert Person and Michael McFaul wrote in Journal of Democracy last month.
No Americans were more squarely in Putin’s crosshairs in 2016 than Black voters. The National Urban League was the first to highlight the extent of Russian efforts to deceive, manipulate and exploit Black voters in our 2019 State of Black America® report. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released a few months later confirmed our findings: “No single group of Americans was targeted by [Internet Research Agency] information operatives more than African Americans. By far, race and related issues were the preferred target of the information warfare campaign designed to divide the country in 2016.”
Exploiting righteous anger over against structural inequalities such as police violence, poverty and mass incarceration, Putin’s disinformation machine preyed on Black Americans, urging them to tweet or text rather than vote, to “avoid the line” and “vote from home,” or to boycott the election altogether. Putin’s machinations dovetailed with a surge of racially-motivated voter suppression laws that continues at an escalating pace today.
Putin also has used cyberattacks and online disinformation campaigns in efforts to manipulate elections in France, Poland, Germany, Finland, the U.K., Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden.
As ominous as Putin finds the free exercise of democracy in the United States and Western Europe, the rise of democracy on Russia’s very borders is an existential threat. And just as he exploited American racism in the 2016 U.S. election, he is exploiting long-standing ethnic tensions to whip up anti-Ukrainian sentiment. He used false claims of persecution against ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking citizens to justify his 2014 annexation of Crimea and refers to Ukraine’s democratically elected leaders as "Banderites,” an anti-Ukrainian slur invoking far-right nationalist politician Stepan Bandera remembered as a Nazi collaborator.
As Black Americans, whose parents and grandparents bled and died for democracy, must stand in solidarity with the people of Ukraine against the greatest enemy of democracy in the modern world. As President Biden said, "It's about standing for what we believe in, for the future that we want for our world, for liberty, the right of countless countries to choose their own destiny.”
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