When Caucasian Doesn’t Mean White

What a group of Georgian teenagers taught a Detroit-raised Volunteer about race, hierarchy, and the long shadow of Russian domination.

I was three months into my Peace Corps assignment in Georgia in 2003 when I first learned white folks back home were not, in fact, the real Caucasians. 

I was sitting in a small classroom in the village of Vale with some older teenagers who had recently traveled to Russia. During their time working in construction there they told me they were often called “Chorniy,” the Russian word for the color black. Contextually, the phrase can also be deployed as a slur against people from the Caucasus region. Every day, these young men told me they were racially harassed and barred from renting housing in certain places in Russia because of how they looked. Fighting skinheads who verbally abused them was common.

In Russia, Caucasus peoples are often called even worse names, like “black ass” and “mountain monkeys,”simply because they have darker skin and non-Slavic phenotypical features.

“In Russia, we’re black—just like you,” the young man said, brushing the back of his hand across his wrist, comparing his skin color to mine.

I was as thrown off by the comparison as I was intrigued.

Did this white boy just say he was Black like me? 

Did he just insult me?

At first, I was slightly offended until I put myself in his shoes and began to appreciate his story.

Throughout my life, I had always assumed that if you looked white, you were white. That, I later realized, is the American way of understanding race. These young men had broken down what race means to them in their society, and inspired in me a lifelong journey to use journalism to explore our shared humanity. That moment of confusion and discomfort has informed the kind of work I produce each week from Ukraine, covering a war in which understanding race has become essential to my storytelling.

When I was accepted to the Peace Corps and undertook two months of cross-cultural training before beginning my two-year assignment as an English teacher, I assumed I’d just be helping kids speak American English and learn a little about them along the way. 

But those two years in a small village helped open my mind to other people’s life journeys. Many of the stereotypes I held were dispelled over those two years. I ended up gaining the cross-cultural tools needed to help inform millions of people around the world about how the Russian neo-colonialism that harms Georgians also inspires Moscow’s imperial ambitions here in Ukraine, where I’ve been covering the full-scale invasion and subsequent war since 2022.

I was born and raised in Detroit, the biggest Black city in the United States run by a Black Power-era mayor. I attended all Black public schools and was educated by mostly Black teachers.  A Different World, the popular television series of the late 1980s and early 1990s, inspired me to attend and eventually graduate from an HBCU, Philander Smith University. My life was as culturally Black as Black can get. 

To my surprise, that Black experience gave me the cultural appreciation to receive Georgians’ stories about feeling marginalized by a dominant power. I gained the intellectual dexterity to explain to Black media outlets decades later my view that Vladimir Putin’s conquest in Ukraine wasn’t a mere territorial dispute, nor was it some defense against made-up accusations that Ukraine was some NATO proxy zone from which to threaten its sovereignty. 

I drew on years of lived experiences in Ukraine as a Fulbright grantee in which Ukrainians, like the Georgians I met years earlier during my Peace Corps service and subsequent visits thereafter, shared their personal stories of being colonized because they refused to accept Russian tyranny that threatened their right to speak their own language and chart their national sovereignty. 

During TV appearances, I was able to recall a story of an old man who stopped me on the street in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in 2010 and shared his own fears about Russia one day trying to take over his country by force. 

“They want us to be their slaves and return us back to colonial times,” the old man told me. 

I have heard many stories like that, but this one stands out. I believe he approached me because I was Black and he thought I’d better understand him. I believe he saw our shared history of surviving supremacist governance and wanted me to understand his own story so that I could explain it to the rest of the world.

That old man’s fears turn out to be true. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, after Ukrainians determined they wanted to move towards Europe and away from Moscow. And when Ukrainians refused to buckle under Russian threats of military violence, Moscow invaded again in 2022.

Starr is a regular commentator on U.S. news outlets, including CNN (shown here in 2022), where he informs viewers about developments in Ukraine.

I would not have received that old man’s words had I not first opened my mind to the experience of those young men back in Vale years earlier. 

I’m an independent journalist with strong opinions, and I don’t shy away from that. I lean into my voice, in fact. So often, Black people are encouraged to shy away from their experiences, lest we be viewed as biased. I think the more I tap into my life story, the more options I have to create a narrative that helps the world better understand how connected our traumas and life journeys are. 

When people see my Black face reporting from Ukraine today, they aren’t just interested in the facts I’m presenting. They want to know why I am here and why I care. For me, it isn’t just about crafting the same news that The New York Times, CNN, and the BBC report. My goal is to connect audiences with Ukraine on a human level so that they can see the toll of Russian colonial violence I have witnessed with my own eyes.

I wanted the world to know that, yes, white people can be opposed to supremacy. Before I could pull off such storytelling from the frontlines of Ukraine for a global audience, I had to first sit in that small classroom in that tiny village in southwest Georgia and take in those young teenagers’ stories of oppression. I had to close my mouth and open up my mind. 

Terrel Jermaine Starr (Georgia 2003–05) is an independent journalist based in Ukraine.