What are the Racial and Ethnic Politics of the Ukraine-Russia Crisis?

Is Niall Ferguson correct? Are the 20th and 21st centuries really a story of unending ethnic conflict?

Hutus and Tutsis. They all look alike to me. Apparently, the various black and brown people of the Caribbean are also different from one another. Again, they all more or less look alike to me. There are also different ethnic groups in China. Again, they all more or less look "Chinese" to me.

The developing crisis between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimean region has introduced all sorts of "strange" and "alien" "white" people to the American vocabulary. Apparently, those white people over there are not all the same: there are Tatars, "ethnic Russians", Russians, Cossacks, Turkmen, and others.


For example, the Atlantic offered up this observation of the Tatar people in Ukraine:

As the Soviet Union collapsed, they began returning. Now they make up some 12 percent of the population. But they have had to claw their way back among a Russian population that largely denies they suffered particularly under the Soviet government and that still believes in the Stalin-created myth that the entire Tatar nation collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

Analyst Semivolos says the Crimean Tatars, as a nation, have a "post-genocidal mentality." "Crimean Tatars in many ways are still living through the experience of genocide to the present day. For them, in many ways, it isn't over, the process of returning, in many ways it is continuing," he explains. "That is why there is this perception of threats, of existential threats, threats to their lives, their physical existence. And they view all sorts of actions, even ones that Russians themselves consider defensive, but for Crimean Tatars, they are attacks."

Officials in the Russian-dominated local administrations have resisted the returning Tatars ever since they began coming back. Tatars have had to fight to get land and build homes, to open schools, and to build mosques.

Perhaps the most eloquent symbol of official resistance is an open field on the outskirts of Simferopol. It is surrounded by a high wall of rough blocks—the same blocks the Tatar squatter huts are made of. The land will be the site of Simferopol's future central mosque, the biggest one in Crimea, that will serve the 60,000 Muslims in the surrounding area. Although under Ukrainian law, the government is supposed to provide free land for houses of worship, the Tatar community struggled for about a decade before securing this site in 2011.

As race provincial Americans were forced to learn about "Caucasians" in the aftermath of the Boston Shooting Massacre, there are in fact multitudes of ethnic Eastern European and Slavic white people...and many of them do not get along with one another very well.

But that is the genius of whiteness and racial formation in the United States. Those ethnic Europeans can come to the United States and magically become "white" through two moves. First, discriminate against black people. Second, learn the word "nigger".

As an American, I have socialized by a society built upon the black-white binary and the "one drop rule". Like most Americans, this has left me poorly trained and situated as I try to understand how the racial hierarchy in the United States is different--while in many important ways being fundamentally the same--from that of other societies.

Racism and white supremacy are based on an understanding that some racial groups are situated "higher" than others. Race as a social and historical system is also a way of describing the world while naturalizing and advocating how some groups should have access to more and superior resources than those held by other groups. Ultimately, in group and out group distinctions are really ways of justifying "who gets what, when, how, and why?"

Based on some preliminary, and by my own admission very superficial reading, the narrative for mass public consumption which is being spun by the mainstream American media is that the Ukraine crisis is about access to resources, a generational split regarding Westernization and "liberalization" of the economy and Ukrainian society at large, and Russia proper reasserting itself over its former territories.

Do teach me something if would. What is the deeper game between Russia and Ukraine? And how are ethnic and racial politics part of (or not) what is unfolding there?