Sidebar: Navalny and the whole situation with him is very complex. He’s a well-known activist who is also a top-rated investigate journalist. He also says racist things about Central Asians/Caucasians and believes in annexation of Crimea.

Lots to unpack. https://twitter.com/russian_starr/status/1353138782736887810

Navalny is being abused by the police state that is Russia, but his nationalist views makes you wonder if he’d ignore that same abuse if it were done to Russia’s ethnic minorities.

What do ethnic minorities/minority reporters think of Navalny?

That’s a story I’d wanna see.

I also find that many western educated Slavic peoples have had very little/meaningful interactions with Black people and have racist views of them and don’t have sympathy for the police violence they face because they “destroy their own communities.”

If there were a decent number of Black reporters in Russia, these Navalny protests would be covered differently. I don’t think we’re getting enough nuance out of what’s happening.

Western Coverage feels very vanilla, dry.

I also think western media are slow to call out the irony of Navalny’s racism because of his relatively attractive youth and capacity to speak English to media. His “whiteness” is literally whitewashing his racism out of international coverage.

The main problem with Navalny coverage is that, because he is anti-Putin, he fits into Western media's hegemonic, Cold War framework of good vs evil towards Russia. Navalny is a hero (blonde, blue-eye, basically white). His whiteness whitewashes his racism.

Being anti-Putin does not equal pro-democracy *for all.* Navalny has echoed anti-immigrant things about ethnic minorities that Trump has said during his political run. You can't cover Navalny without discussing his racism.

But white western media usually drop the ball on this.

People can try and gate keep me out of having these dialogues (you can't), but I stand by every word I say. Navalny is not the person most people in the West think he is. He needs to be freed and he is treated horribly, but the complete story isn't being told about him.

White American/western storytelling requires heroes and villains. It’s very simple and lacks nuance because whiteness doesn’t require it to exist. Navalny is the white, English-speaking hero many here need to fight Putin in its hegemonic/Cold War view of Russia.

The US coverage of Navalny is as simplistic as its coverage of 2016 Russia-gate that blamed “the Russians” for attacking American democracy instead of focusing on racist white people who were primed to overthrow the government.