Iryna Zarutska Was Not A ‘White Woman’, by Terrell Jermaine Starr – 18 September 2025

From Terrell J Starr Official

Donald Trump and his MAGA followers are outraged over Iryna Zarutska’s murder, but not because they cared about her as a vulnerable, Ukrainian refugee.

Their attention was drawn to a face they could exploit to advance narratives rooted in racism and patriarchy, which is why they repeatedly label her as a “white woman.” Racist commentator Lilly Gaddis called her death “another senseless murder of a white woman by a black man” in a tweet on her-now suspended Twitter account. Conservative Scott Greer tweeted that a “white woman is fatally stabbed and black passengers don’t care at all,” despite evidence that fellow passengers intervened. One America News tweeted to its 2.3 million followers: “A young white woman was murdered by a black repeat offender.”

MAGA extremist Joey Mannarino drew grotesque and historically fraught comparisons, tweeting that Iryna’s story “needs to radicalize White people in America in the same way George Floyd radicalized Black people in America,” adding: “So many whites have been cucked into thinking a Black man killing a White woman on public transit is just another part of life in America… and are too afraid to say anything because we had slavery 200 years ago. FUCK THAT!”

There are many more examples across social media, but these tweets aren’t particularly remarkable for a base of racists, sexists and xenophobes.

Iryna’s killing, captured on CCTV, was horrific. The mentally ill man responsible for her murder has been arrested and remains in jail without bond. No one with a sense of decency would argue that people who harm others should be walking the streets. His actions reveal not just a personal tragedy, but the failures of the United States’ mental health system.

But MAGA would rather frame her death through the lens of long-standing taboos about predatory Black men threatening white women. They transformed a senseless tragedy into a political tool, stoking fear and advancing their agenda. This is the lens through which we must understand their response: not as mourning or a call for better public health policy, but as an opportunity to agitate white fear at the expense of erasing Iryna’s humanity. In rushing to capitalize on her murder, they revealed their own deep-seated patriarchal racism.

Since the nation’s founding, myths about Black men’s sexual danger to white women have justified mob violence against Black communities. Today, MAGA cannot organize lynch mobs to burn Black neighborhoods, but they weaponize social media to resurrect ghosts of history: the 1906 Atlanta race riots ignited by false reports of Black men assaulting white women; the Scottsboro Boys, nine teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Alabama (which the USSR exploited in anti-American propaganda) and were exonerated decades later. And then we have the Groveland Four, framed in 1949 and exonerated only seventy years later. These episodes are not anomalies—they are woven into American history and far more numerous than not.

Trump has long exploited this pattern. In the late 1980s, he ran full-page ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino boys falsely accused of assaulting a white woman in Central Park. Even after their exoneration more than a decade later, he continues to insist on their guilt to this day. One of those men is now a New York City councilman, and all have sued Trump for defamation.

Just as he used the Central Park Five to inflame racist panic, Trump and his MAGA base are exploiting Iryna’s murder to insinuate all Black men pose the same threat to white women as the one who killed Iryna. The reason MAGA uses these centuries-old stereotypes is because they know much of white America believes them to be true.

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Terrell Jermaine Starr is a foreign correspondent who reports and speaks on the intersection of authoritarianism in the U.S. and abroad, connecting race, democracy, and freedom. His website is at https://terrellstarr.com/

Iryna Zarutska Was Not A ‘White Woman’, by Terrell Jermaine Starr – 18 September 2025

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