On Monday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid stated that the only reason the world is paying so much attention to the war in Ukraine is that it’s a European nation consisting largely of white people and Christians. Reid suggests that should this war have been waged on a country elsewhere in the world, where citizens are not largely White and/or Christian, there would be less of an international response.
In the closing segment of her show, Reid claimed there is a “racial disparity” in how Western media portrays the suffering of the Ukrainian people versus how their “Browner and Blacker” counterparts across the globe are portrayed.
“As the world watches the devastation unfold in Ukraine, nearly 4,000 miles away, another crisis is deepening that we don’t hear much about in the U.S., and that is the war in Yemen,” Reid said.
She then talks about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen that began in 2015, which has yielded widespread hunger and disease throughout the nation, as well as the significant displacement of Yemenese people. She argues that those who have suffered in Yemen don’t receive as much media coverage or global attention because of their race.
“What we’re seeing in Ukraine is absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis that Europe has seen in decades,” said Reid. “But we haven’t witnessed the same type of solidarity for the Yemenese as we do for the Ukrainians. We don’t see historic sanctions or global campaigns or corporations like Airbnb and Netflix taking a stand.”
Joy Reid makes everything about race again…Claims people are more compassionate towards Ukraine because it’s ‘White And Christian’ pic.twitter.com/6y7Tsrtx4B
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) March 8, 2022
“The coverage of Ukraine has revealed a pretty radical disparity in how human Ukrainians look and feel to Western media, compared to their Browner and Blacker counterparts,” continued Reid. “With some reporters using very telling comparisons in their analyses of the war.”
“But we don’t need to ask ourselves if the international response would be the same if Russia unleashed their horror on a country that wasn’t White and largely Christian, because Russia has already done it,” argued the left-wing host.
Well, no, the response wouldn’t be the same because the humanitarian crisis in, say, Yemen, won’t be escalating into a nuclear war that would affect everyone across the globe. The international attention gained by the war in Ukraine is less about race and more about the involvement of other countries.
The war in Ukraine is not only capturing the attention of the world because of the massive humanitarian crisis, but also because of the pressure being put on other countries. For example, Russia is an important supplier of oil and natural gas, and Europe’s economy faces great risk as it is very dependent on energy from Russia.
Maybe the majority of Ukrainians are Christians and White, but the crises that Reid is referring to will not impact the global economy, nor does it threaten the world with the potential of nuclear war.
Not everything can – or should – be turned into an issue of race, although Joy Reid sure seems to try.
