EDIT: Nigeria has called upon the governments of Poland and Ukraine to stop discriminating against black people trying to flee the Ukraine.
The past few days saw footage and messages online of black people complaining about racism during their attempt to exit the Ukraine.
Whether this footage and messaging is real or just more Russian fake news trying to paint us as nazis is unknown, but at least the Nigerian government is taking it seriously.
I would be very surprised if this weren't true. Surely you remember, just a few months ago we've had this massive clusterfuck with Belarus intentionally shipping in middle eastern refugees and literally pushing them across the border to Poland. Which dug its heels and went full Trump on the idea of accepting brown-skinned asylum seekers. While the situation was clearly and maliciously manufactured by Belarus, there was a whole set of humanitarian nasties going on on our side in response, from pushing families back across the border, to not allowing journalists to report from the site or humanitarian aid be provided (the affected border area was cordoned off and only accessible to local residents). The end result was a number of people freezing to death and a massive trauma for many more. Politically, the ruling party was demonising the immigrants on public television (including, I kid you no, our ministers implying that the migrants were morally bankrupt zoophiles and paedophiles), while the opposition smeared shit on the border guards on social media - justifiably or not, it could only make them more inclined to buy into the government propaganda.
Now you have many of these same border guards - as well as a large part of the general populace who did agree with the government on this - with hardened stances, fresh memories, and internal justifications for treating immigrants inhumanely, seeing more non-whites arrive. It'd take some mental gymnastics to resolve the obvious cognitive dissonance without falling back on race.
And god damn, it's not like there wasn't a fertile ground for racism to bloom here before. Nigerians, and Kenyans, and Angolans, who for some reason have found this part of the world attractive as a destination for exchange students, have it tough here. Even in the largest Polish cities a black person provokes stares, racist jokes go unchecked, and incidents are hardly isolated.
I can only assume the attitudes in Ukraine are very similar.
I look at the across-the-board readiness of my fellow Poles to accept Ukrainian refugees with admiration. But at the same time, it's hard not to see the stark contrast with the treatment the refugees from more sun-touched countries have received so very recently.