We are told that todays historic moment of racial reckoning necessitates a collective Ukrainian response. Though no other American ethnic group has put itself out to similar self-castigation, a Call to Action for Racial Justice with sharp criticisms of the Ukrainian community has been drawn up and published in Ukrainian newspapers.

Alongside fleeting expressions of solidarity, this manifesto of sorts pushes a historical narrative about Ukrainians in North America that is not only largely unhistoric but does a great injustice to the memory of past generations.

Casting Ukrainian immigrants as covert beneficiaries and co-perpetuators of a racist order may fit a neo-Marxist ideological dichotomy of oppressive whites-oppressed racial minorities, with Ukrainians positioned alongside other white oppressors, but it distorts the reality of the Ukrainian immigrant experience. An abundance of accounts attest that it was an experience characterized by constant battles with extreme hardships, biased attitudes and discrimination camouflaged under various guises, much of it stemming from malicious stereotyping of Ukrainians (many have wondered if there isnt a glass ceiling for Ukrainian Americans when it comes to high-level government appointments).

For most Ukrainian immigrants to Canada, life there began with placement on inferior virgin lands and the unenviable, unaided task of bringing the prairie bush to cultivation on which their survival depended. In the U.S., immigrants had little choice but to labor cheaply in the debilitating and dangerous conditions of coal mines and sweatshops. Even many post-war Ukrainian intellectuals could find employment only in menial jobs. Its quite a stretch to find in their story much advantage for being part of a racial system that recognizes us as white people.

There are no records of Ukrainian slaveowners in America or of Ukrainians living in the south during Jim Crow to talk about Ukrainians playing a role in slavery or segregation as this declaration contends (aside from soldiers who fought on the Union side in the Civil War such as the abolitionist general Ivan Turchin). It would be interesting to learn of examples for the claim that some Ukrainian community buildings displaced minority dwellers in a process of settler colonialism. In most cities, Ukrainians were among the last to join white flight. The application of Marxist analysis should not replace the need for disturbing claims to be substantiated.

Lastly, who are those Ukrainians that have been dismissing others experiences of oppression? Through the decades, Svoboda carried many articles sympathetic to the plight and struggle of groups such as the Biafrans, Kurds, Bengalis, etc. with authors customarily noting Ukrainian analogies.

Few would deny that Ukrainians, like everyone, can learn to exercise greater racial sensitivity. But its sad that a declaration of solidarity with a group battered by a painful history has to be coupled with disparagement of another group that itself has been traumatized by 400 years of dehumanizing oppression in the forms of serfdom and Crimean-Ottoman slavery, into which an estimated 2.5 million of its children were snatched. And, lest we forget, the genocidal Holodomor also left a devastating legacy with wide-ranging, lasting effects.

Dr. Ihor Mirchuk of Easton, Pa., taught a course titled Ethnicity, Race and Culture in American History at Manor College (Jenkintown, Pa.) in the mid-1980s; Manor was one of the first colleges in the country to offer such a course. Manor College is sponsored and administered by the Ukrainian Catholic Order of Sisters of St. Basil the Great.

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Responding to racial reckoning - The Ukrainian Weekly