I’m sorry but this isn’t about you.
It also has nothing to do with pitting people against each other, or for that matter, with Putin. Not for me and not for every single POC I know.
(In fact, do you not realize how much worse it sounds, to say, essentially, “Sorry it might look to you like we care more about some humans than others, but we have to do it this way because if we stop to consider nuance and humanity and all that, then that will help Putin, and we can’t do what will help Putin, even if it might be, in itself, the right thing to do…”? To make us feel like it’s not even that you like us less, but that you see us as mere pawns in this whole stance against Putin…?)
What this is about, for me and for people like me, is double standards and selective empathy, which aren’t excused or erased by Putin’s awfulness, by your “crimes committed by the West,” or by any of the other things you mention. The double standards and selective empathy exist, and that’s bad enough. Please let’s not insist/pretend that they don’t, just to save face / feel good about ourselves.
To paraphrase Amanda Seales, to be a nonwhite person watching the ways in which the world is responding to all this (and I’m not even talking about the media and governmental/institutional responses, but also and far more intimately, about the responses I am seeing among friends, acquaintances, friends-of-friends, and groups/people on my social media feed), feels like a minefield of dissonance and microaggression right now.
Maybe you do hear me, and I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you do, because you say you do. But I confess that nothing in what you’ve written, how you’ve written it, and how much of it you’ve written, actually suggests to me that you have understood what I am trying to tell you…
POC have been talking about this for a long time now. If you listen, really listen (without wanting to immediately respond with your own experiences and thoughts and expert opinions), you might actually hear us.
For example, if you stopped whitesplaining on decolonization discourse, and if you stopped to realize that when you talk about all the refugees your “home country” has had to take in over these last months, you’re talking to someone whose “home country” is Pakistan (FFS, we’ve been among the top three or so countries for hosting refugees for the last thirty years…), then maybe you’d actually understand what I’m trying to tell you.
We are not asking you to pit anyone against anyone else. (Every single brown person I know absolutely feels and wants what is best for Ukrainian refugees—wants them to get every single thing they need and deserve.) Most of us are not even asking you to change your behaviour. We are not even asking you to “apologize,” really. And we certainly aren’t asking for your spurious, gaslighty and ultimately insulting justifications and rationalizations.
We are simply asking that you acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, from our perspective, all this might look pretty shameful.
We are simply asking you to acknowledge it, and sit with it.
Just sit with it.