© Gleb Garanich / Reuters
Terrell J. Starr, a reporter for The Root, took to Twitter to explain the "challenges of being black" in Ukraine. The US journalist noted that he rarely shares the "f*cked up sh*t" he experiences while working in Ukraine because his encounters with race issues in the country have been "mostly positive" and therefore "the bad ones don't always register." Starr said that 90 percent of the attention he gets for being black in Ukraine is positive, but "the 10 percent is very, very bad. And recently, I have felt some bad vibes during my travels to Ukraine."
He recounted several run-ins with this unsavory minority, including one instance in the western Ukrainian city of Yaremche, in which a man "drove by and spit at me as he threw up the Heil Hitler salute." In a similarly unpleasant encounter in downtown Kiev, Starr said that he was threatened by "right-wing extremists" who claimed to be members of the Azov Battalion - a right-wing, Nazi-rune-bedazzled punitive battalion which was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine in 2014.
Comment: Most Ukrainians aren't Nazis or even sympathetic to the demented ideology. But 'most Ukrainians' aren't in positions of power working to ethnically cleanse the populations of Donbass and Luhansk. It's telling how The Root rants over 'microagressions' in the US but has such a hard time calling out blatant extremism in Ukraine.