4. Not everybody in the whole world is an American. Russia has enough problems of its own without Westerners reading their own pathologies into it. ___________________________________ http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Race%22+in+Russia http://condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/aeer13_2/Lemon.html "WHAT ARE THEY WRITING ABOUT US BLACKS?" ROMA AND "RACE" IN RUSSIA. Alaina Lemon University of Michigan
What does it mean to be "black" (chernyi) in Russia? Here I will not attempt a history or genealogy of Russian ideas about blackness; instead, I analyze Romani accounts that reveal various ways "blackness" can be constructed in Russia. This essay turns upon Romani (Gypsy)1 accounts of social interactions with Russians in which being "black" was an issue. Roma, besides themselves subscribing to and negotiating within many of the prevalent categories, also reverse the valence of blackness or make shifting alignments with other groups also defined as "black."
A "black" complexion marks "race" in Russia in the sense that it externally marks biologically essentialized identities. What complicates matters for racial purists is that color can not always serve as a criteria of boundaries crucial to them: not all Roma, for instance, are actually very dark. "Blackness," as many writers have already argued,2 is constructed culturally. The lines of race, with "blackness" as its cipher, are drawn with reference to many standards, cultural concerns, and political agendas.3
In Russia, a "black" is, among other meanings, a person whom many North Americans probably would describe as "ethniclooking" people with "olive" skin and dark eyes and hair.4 However, in Russia as in many other places, "race" also is linked to categories that can be connected via tropes of generation or "blood" and thus mobilized in political arguments, as in this recent issue of one of the many nationalist newspapers in the capital: "The highest goal of the government must be to preserve that racial nucleus which alone can create culture, beauty and all the highest values."5 The Russian words natsiya ("nation" and "nationality") and natsionalnost' ("nationality" or "ethnicity") indeed often substitute for "race."6 These concerns with race and nation also often are layered with economic and moral statements about the poverty of the Russian people, who are said to inhabit a vast country rich in natural resources but tapped by foreigners.
The issue of "blackness" first emerged as significant to my research in 1990. I had been riding the Moscow metro with a Romani man, the husband of a Romani ethnographer, and had asked him why people were looking at us in a hostile way. He replied, "because you are white and I am black." His wife later denied that this was the reason, stating that categories of race or racism did not apply in the Soviet Union: "Racism is something you have in America." This was several years after glasnost had begun, but the Soviet press for so long had depicted the evil colonial forces of capitalist countries and commonwealths as racist, it was still difficult to deal with the issue at home. Four years later, another Russian scholar told me that the term "race" imposed a foreign category upon Russian social life. It is not my intent to transpose histories of slavery and repression on the American continents to Eurasia but to untangle how signs of "blood," "blackness," are used in Russia in specific ways to explain behavior, culture, and social position as biologically determined. Even relations of exchange thus become a matter of race. <SNIP>
Michael Pugliese