no, this isn’t some weird rant about “reverse racism”
In February 2022, millions of Ukrainians were forced from their homes almost overnight. Before many had even made it across the Polish border, a rather ghoulish commentary had already started circulating. People who had never shown much interest in Ukraine, and often seemed to know very little about the invasion itself, were suddenly very interested in explaining that the sympathy Ukrainians were receiving was because they were white.
And if we’re going to be real about it, there was some uncomfortable truth in that accusation, at least when it came to the response from European governments and institutions. Ukrainians were given much faster access to legal status, work, freedom of movement and public services than Syrians, Afghans and many other refugees from the Middle East, Asia and Africa had received. Those refugees have spent years dealing with asylum backlogs, camps, border pushbacks, hostile press coverage and politicians treating them as a security problem or demographic threat. Human Rights Watch pointed out at the time that Europe’s response to Ukrainians showed a more humane system had been possible all along. Governments that had spent years insisting harsh border policy was simply unavoidable somehow discovered an impressive amount of administrative flexibility within a matter of days.
The difference was obvious in the media coverage too. One comparative study of European news found Ukrainian refugees were portrayed much more sympathetically than Syrian refugees or refugees in general. Sometimes the distinction was made in softer veiled language about culture or “compatibility.” Sometimes reporters didn’t even bother and dove headfirst into racist framing. CBS correspondent Charlie D’Agata described Kyiv as “relatively civilized, relatively European.” ITV’s Lucy Watson stressed that Ukraine was “not a developing, third world nation. This is Europe.” Al Jazeera’s Peter Dobbie talked about “prosperous, middle-class people” who looked like families you might live next to, while Daniel Hannan wrote in the Telegraph that Ukrainians “seem so like us.”
Ukrainians looked like ordinary people whose lives had suddenly been destroyed by war because that’s exactly what they were. But so were Syrians, Afghans and other refugees. What made those remarks particularly gross was the apparent surprise that educated, middle-class Europeans could be bombed, displaced and sent running across borders, as though the same thing happening elsewhere were somehow less shocking or more acceptable. Ukrainians were being humanized partly by contrast with people Western audiences had already been encouraged to see as distant, foreign and permanently associated with violence.
So yes, race clearly shaped the welcome Ukrainians received. So did religion, geography, class and the broader idea of who counts as recognizably “European.” There’s no point pretending otherwise. But Ukrainian refugees did not create those hierarchies. They did not build Europe’s detention camps, order pushbacks at the border or decide that one displaced family should be treated like a neighbor while another gets discussed as an existential demographic threat.
What happened in 2022 simply made the double standard much harder to ignore. Paperwork suddenly moved quickly. People could work, find housing and put their children in school without spending years trapped in Kafka-esque asylum limbo waiting for some exhausted bureaucracy to decide whether their hometown had been destroyed convincingly enough. Europe had spent years presenting this kind of treatment as unrealistic, only to demonstrate almost overnight that it was perfectly possible when governments decided the refugees in question were worth the effort.
That tells us something real about race and belonging in Europe, but it doesn’t tell us everything.
Quick note: Before going any further, I need to be clear that speaking about conditional whiteness does not mean pretending that racism against people of color in Western societies is somehow minor, occasional or directly comparable to what Eastern Europeans experience. It is deeply systemic. It shapes policing, housing, employment, education, healthcare outcomes, immigration enforcement and everyday social treatment. You do not have to minimize racism against people of color to recognize that whiteness is internally uneven, that nationality and class still matter, or that being white does not automatically place every European in the same social, economic or political position.
white, until somebody notices what kind
The phrase “you only care because they’re white” makes whiteness sound like a permanent membership card to one big, internally equal European club. Ukrainians were white, so they were “like us.” Syrians weren’t, so they weren’t. There’s a valid argument somewhere in there, but if you know much about the way Western Europe has historically talked about its eastern half, you know how flawed this framing is.
The same Eastern Europeans who were sentimentally described as “people like us” on the evening news in 2022 have also spent decades being described by Western Europeans as backward, poor, criminal, politically unserious, or conveniently suited to cleaning houses, picking fruit and pouring concrete for people further west. A Ukrainian could be “just like us” on television while fleeing Russian bombs and then enter a labor market where being Ukrainian suddenly meant something very different. European enough to deserve sympathy, but still from the part of Europe whose judgment, politics and even sovereignty are treated as vaguely negotiable whenever the subject comes up.
So yes, Ukrainians benefited from being white. But what exactly happens once somebody notices what kind of white European they’re dealing with?
For a lot of Eastern Europeans living in Western Europe, nationality stays invisible until some small detail gives it away. An accent, a surname, a passport slid across a desk, a quick phone call in a foreign language, or sometimes the job itself. Someone can pass as an entirely ordinary member of the white majority until they open their mouth, at which point they can be socially recategorized almost instantly as “Eastern European,” and a whole collection of stereotypes comes to the surface. Poor, stupid, uneducated, criminal, cleaner, builder, sex worker, villager, suspiciously devoted to tracksuits, alcoholic. The details can vary by country but the basic premise usually stays the same.
This isn’t exactly unique to Eastern Europeans. Research on hiring discrimination has repeatedly shown that people with foreign or nonstandard accents are often judged as less competent even when they’re giving the same answers as everyone else. An accent can have an absurd impact on things before a person has had the chance to demonstrate anything about themselves.
There’s also an asymmetry that’s worth mentioning about accents and appearances. An Eastern European who loses the accent, changes the surname or moves into a social setting where nobody thinks to ask can often disappear into the white majority fairly easily. Someone whose racial difference is visible on sight simply can’t do that. That’s a real privilege attached to whiteness, and acknowledging it doesn’t mean citizenship, class or migration status suddenly stop mattering.
The recent case of Ukrainian photographer Iryna Gorb, is an unfortunately concrete example of the conditionality of the privileges attached to Eastern European whiteness. Iryna had lived in the United States for sixteen years, built a life and community in San Francisco, and by any ordinary social measure was deeply embedded in the place she called home. None of that prevented ICE from detaining her at San Francisco International Airport in July 2026. Before I go further let me be clear and this is not some neoliberal reactionary “omg see! they detained a white European!” gotcha point. ICE ruins people’s lives every single day from all corners of the globe, and Iryna’s case is not uniquely outrageous because she’s Ukrainian or white. What makes her story useful to mention is that it exposes how conditional those privileges can be. Someone can be perceived as white, assimilate, build a life for sixteen years and still find that the moment the state decides her foreignness matters, all of that becomes secondary to a system designed around detention, exclusion and removal.
What Iryna has done with the experience speaks volumes. She remains in detention but she doesn’t insist on making a case for herself by arguing that she’s different from the other women being held there, or that someone like her should have be exempt from such treatment. She has built relationships with other detained women and has asked friends on the outside to get the word out to undocumented people about the risks of traveling through SFO. The lesson is not that a Ukrainian woman should have been spared while somebody else was detained in her place, but that a system capable of reducing years of residence, community and ordinary human life to the wrong immigration category is the problem.
Her detention also left very real financial consequences, so I’m linking Iryna Gorb’s GoFundMe here for anyone who wants to support her directly. If I’m going to use her story to make a point, the least I can do is call attention to her immediate needs. Her contacts also plan to put together GoFundMe campaigns for other detained women, and I’ll update this post once those links are available.
Along with immigration status, class is another variable that must be considered when discussing privileges. Central and Eastern European workers are deeply embedded in agriculture, construction, food processing, cleaning, hospitality, logistics and care work across wealthier parts of Europe. There’s obviously no single migrant experience here as doctors, engineers, academics and tech workers move west too. And it’s a fact that migrants without EU citizenship face much more precarious legal conditions than people holding an EU passport.
Still, the basic economics of it all isn’t complicated. The wealth gap between Europe’s richer core and its eastern edge creates a large pool of workers who are attractive precisely because they’re cheaper, more mobile and easier to treat as disposable. “Flexible” is one of those pleasant labor-market words that often means the worker is expected to absorb most of the risk.
EU citizens from Central and Eastern member states do have the legal right to work across the union, and that right matters. But the right to work doesn’t keep an employer from exploiting someone who also depends on that job for housing, transport or access to a wage far higher than what they could earn back home. Hours disappear, wages get withheld, and complaints are discouraged under threat of severe consequences. Nobody needs to explicitly say “there are ten more where you came from” for everyone involved to understand the arrangement.
Czech journalist Saša Uhlová documented exactly this by going undercover in the jobs Western Europe increasingly leaves to workers from its poorer eastern half. She spent time working at a German fruit and vegetable farm, an Irish hotel and the French care sector. She worked alongside migrants working fourteen-hour shifts, sometimes seven days a week, with legally dubious hours left off the books, little time to sleep and few realistic opportunities to find something better.
On the German farm, workers returned voluntarily to conditions they themselves described as hell because even those wages could support children or relatives back home while in Ireland, agency workers were housed in such a remote location and worked such punishing hours that changing jobs was virtually impossible. Uhlová also documented the wider damage this arrangement produces in the form of prolonged family separation, physical exhaustion, alcohol used to cope and workers returning home for medical treatment after their bodies had absorbed the cost of such a “lifestyle.” These people were formally free to move and, in the case of EU citizens, legally entitled to the same employment rights as western Europeans. Their economic usefulness nevertheless depended heavily on the fact that the wage gap between east and west remained enormous enough to make conditions local workers would reject still worth enduring.
Ukrainian refugee women after 2022 encountered an equally ugly yet slightly different version of this. Suspiciously generous offers of transport, housing and work began circulating almost immediately, and later research from the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights documented informal employment, withheld wages, harassment and outright exploitation by people who had presented themselves as “helpers.” The sympathetic image of the Ukrainian refugee mother sat quite comfortably beside a much older stereotype of the poor Eastern European woman as desperate, pliable and sexually available. Publicly she could be embraced as a familiar European face. Privately, the same displacement that made her worthy of sympathy could also make her easier to exploit.
europe has always ranked european-ness
The idea that European populations have been ranked against each other, both inside Europe and after migration elsewhere, is hardly new. Europeans have spent centuries describing their neighbors as backward, dangerous, inferior or incapable of governing themselves, and a lot of those hierarchies crossed the Atlantic with them.
You can see that clearly in the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924. Southern and Eastern Europeans were legally white, but the quota system was built to favor immigrants from northern and western Europe while restricting groups American eugenicists considered less desirable or less capable of assimilation. They counted as white, but they were obviously not being treated as equally desirable members of that category.
Nazi racial ideology pushed these hierarchies into something far more murderous. In Poland and the occupied Soviet territories, German plans involved forced labor, starvation, mass displacement and huge population losses to make room for German settlement. Slavic populations were routinely described as biologically and culturally inferior.
I don’t think it makes sense to take modern American racial categories and simply relabel Slavs under Nazism as “non-white.” Nazi ideas about Aryanism, conquest and racial hierarchy came out of a very different political context. But it makes just as little sense to look backward and assume that everyone we would now call white occupied roughly the same social position.
Eastern Europe has repeatedly sat in an awkward place within these hierarchies. It’s unquestionably European, but still described as backward and it’s white in relation to colonized populations elsewhere, but also treated as a source of cheap labor, exploitable territory and people supposedly in need of guidance from a more “advanced” West.
That position can lead people in very different ideological directions. Some recognize how conditional their own acceptance can be and extend that understanding to others whose belonging is unstable and build pathways to solidarity. Others try to move themselves higher up the hierarchy by identifying with the people above them and kicking downward at whoever has been placed below.
the second-hand embarrassment of eastern european white supremacy
Eastern European white nationalism is embarrassing in a very specific way, because so much of it amounts to accepting the whole racial hierarchy at face value and then desperately lobbying for a better position within it. Instead of objecting to the idea that people should be sorted into civilized and uncivilized tiers at all, the argument becomes “you’ve made a mistake, we belong with the civilized Europeans, please redirect the contempt toward somebody browner.”
Roma people, Muslims, Black people, migrants, queer people, or whoever else has been cast as this week’s threat to Western civilization become useful targets to punch down at. Nobody’s actually challenging the marginalization itself, either out of laziness, cowardice, or an awkward lack of self awareness. Instead, they’d rather turn into a pick-me for the white supremacist racial order, desperately trying to prove they belong by being horrible to others they’ve convinced themselves they’re above.
And then, with grim predictability, some of these idiots put on Nazi symbols.
There’s something almost too stupid to properly criticize about an Eastern European draping himself in SS-derived imagery or fascist runes in the name of “national pride.” The historical project attached to those symbols represent violence, suffering and conquest across Eastern Europe. Nothing says devotion to the homeland quite like borrowing the visual merchandising of the people who considered much of it as nothing more than future real estate currently occupied by an inferior human scourge.
And I’m honestly tired of people downplaying this embarrassing practice. It shouldn’t get romanticized as edgy rebellion or some uniquely Eastern European trauma response. It’s loser politics. You don’t avenge your ancestors’ subjugation and annihilation by cosplaying as the movement that wanted them displaced, enslaved or dead.
Eastern Europe didn’t invent any of this. Fascism, scientific racism, antisemitic conspiracy theories and modern white nationalism all have deep roots in Western Europe and North America, and today’s far right is incredibly international for a movement that never shuts up about the evils of internationalism. The same memes, influencers, symbols and conspiracy theories cross borders constantly, and Eastern European reactionaries are more than capable of importing them while insisting they are defending some pure national tradition.
The hypocrisy gets especially ridiculous when it comes from people who have experienced this kind of contempt themselves. A Polish or Romanian migrant can complain, quite reasonably, about being treated as stupid, backward or useful mainly as cheap labor in Britain or Germany, then turn around and apply the same logic to Muslim or African migrants. They clearly understood how degrading the hierarchy was when they were the ones being judged by it. The problem is that some of them respond by turning into a pick-me for the same system and trying to prove they deserve a better position within it.
And historical suffering doesn’t grant anyone political innocence. A society can carry completely real memories of occupation, deportation and persecution while still reproducing racism against Roma communities, hostility toward migrants or prejudice against its own minority groups. Suffering can produce solidarity, but there’s often nothing automatic about that process. Sometimes people learn to recognize the structure that harmed them, but other times they just learn that they would rather be on the side doing the humiliating next time.
And Western reactionaries love encouraging this braindead behavior. Parts of the Western far right have basically invented a fantasy of Eastern Europe made entirely of church spires, Aryan-looking heterosexual couples, whimsical embroidered blouses, quiet women, and stern men chopping wood. For them, this region is essentially a civilizational Pinterest board, proof that somewhere east of Berlin the “real” Europe survived feminism and secularism and gay people. But the actual inhabitants are an inconvenience to this fantasy. Eastern European countries are full of feminists, socialists, anarchists, queer people, Roma communities, Muslims, Jews, immigrants, mixed families, atheists, and millions of ordinary people who are not, in fact, spending their days contemplating the defense of Western civilization.
Ukraine has become especially attractive for this type of thinking. Some Western reactionaries picture it as a white European homeland worth defending purely on those grounds, though others gaze longingly at Russia as the last fortress of Christian authoritarianism that’s going to rescue civilization from a decadent liberal West. The contradiction stops feeling like a contradiction once you notice neither fantasy actually requires any knowledge about the reality of Ukraine or Russia.
Real societies keep getting turned into fuel for somebody else’s anxieties and culture wars. White nationalism talks endlessly about defending nations while showing remarkably little interest in the actual human beings who live in them.
russia plays a role in conditionality
There’s an even more obvious limit to what whiteness can protect an Eastern European from when it comes to military action and imperial power. Whiteness may shape how a Ukrainian is treated at an EU border crossing or in an asylum system, but it does absolutely nothing to stop a Russian missile from hitting their apartment building.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, has maintained troops in Moldova’s separatist Transnistria region for decades, annexed Crimea in 2014, and then launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. None of the people living in those places suddenly stop being “white Europeans” when Russian troops cross the border. Their whiteness tells us virtually nothing about the power relationship that actually matters in that moment.
And in Ukraine’s case, Russian imperial thinking often doesn’t even depend on portraying Ukrainians as some totally foreign racial enemy. Quite often it does the opposite. Ukrainians are told they’re really part of the same people, their national identity is artificial, their statehood is historically suspect, and their political choices become unacceptable once they move too far outside Moscow’s sphere of influence. That kind of domination can coexist perfectly well with cultural and ethnic proximity. You don’t have to see a population as racially alien to decide that it shouldn’t be fully sovereign.
This is why “they’re white Europeans” can only take you so far as an explanation. It helps explain some of the very real advantages Ukrainian refugees received compared with refugees from the global south, but it doesn’t explain why Ukrainians can still be invaded, occupied, deported, tortured or killed by a more powerful neighboring state, any more than whiteness erases the economic hierarchy between eastern and western Europe. A person can benefit from racial privilege in one setting and still be extremely vulnerable to another form of power somewhere else.
That’s the part that gets lost when privilege is treated like a permanent status rather than something that depends heavily on context. Whiteness matters. So does the state next door if it has decided your country’s independence is unacceptable.
So where does all of this leave the original “you only care because they’re white” accusation? With a piece of the truth, but nowhere near the whole picture. Ukrainians absolutely benefited from racial hierarchies and racism that made European governments and media more willing to see them as human, sympathetic and worth protecting. But whiteness doesn’t explain every power relationship they or other Eastern Europeans move through. The same person can be welcomed at one border because they’re white, exploited at work because they’re cheap and disposable Eastern European labor, detained because of immigration status, and endangered by a neighboring imperial state that regards their country’s sovereignty as conditional. “White European” alone tells you very little about who has money, citizenship, political power, whose accent gets mocked, whose labor is treated as disposable, whose passport becomes a problem, or whose country a larger state thinks it has the right to invade. Race matters enormously, but so do class, nationality, migration status, geography and power, and treating any one of those as the master explanation for everything makes for very bad analysis.
And there’s a political choice in how people respond to that complexity. Eastern Europeans can use their own experience of conditional belonging to recognize the same logic when it’s turned against migrants, Roma, Muslims, Black people or anyone else marked as less deserving. Or they can become pick-mes for the hierarchy and spend their energy proving that somebody else belongs below them. I have no interest in pretending the second option is anything other than pathetic.
Solidarity gets more useful once we stop treating privilege like a competition where acknowledging somebody else’s advantage means denying their vulnerability. Ukrainians did not need to be the most oppressed people in Europe to deserve refuge in 2022, and other migrants did not need Ukrainians to be treated worse in order for Europe’s treatment of them to have been racist and indefensible. The obvious lesson is that the humane response Europe managed to produce for Ukrainians should have been the standard all along, and that nobody’s safety, dignity or right to belong should depend on being the right kind of white, the right kind of European, or useful to the right people at the right moment.
radical dumpling: screaming into the void about anti-fascism and anti-imperial consistency, from somewhere between east and west.
This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.
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