Courtesy of Olena Lennon
On Friday, independent journalist Terrell Jermaine Starr visited Yale to talk about his reporting on the war in Ukraine.
In a conversation moderated by history professor Marci Shore, Starr talked about his experience as a Black independent journalist in Ukraine and colonialism and race in Eastern Europe. He also discussed how he believes the United States should support Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia.
“The genesis of my work is really predicated on us better understanding each other, and that we all have to be invested in each others’ safety and security,” Starr said. “The safest, the most progressive thing that we can do for Ukraine is give them guns to fight, because there’s no point of talking about a peaceful Ukraine if they are dead.”
Starr, who grew up in a majority-Black community in Detroit and went to Philander Smith University, an HBCU, said that when he applied for summer abroad programs before his senior year, he picked only African countries as destinations. Nevertheless, he was placed on a trip to Russia.
That new experience shaped him, he said, and after graduation, he spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small Georgian village. There, he said, he started understanding colonialism and race outside of the United States through conversations with Georgians, who shared their experiences of being discriminated against by Russians as “the Black people of the Caucasus.” Inspired by his time abroad, Starr also did a Fulbright exchange scholarship in Ukraine in 2009. Living in the region, Starr learned about Russian colonialism.
“Western hegemony and Western colonialism [are] not the only hegemony … and colonialism that exist,” Starr recalled realizing.
After returning to America, Starr worked as a national political correspondent for various American outlets, covering both the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections, but traveled to Ukraine every year. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, Starr said he was in Ukraine, staying with his friend, who then enlisted in the army.
He followed his friend and started covering the war from the ground in Ukraine, where he currently resides most of the time. He conducts his reporting from the war’s front lines and writes about Ukrainian civilians.
“He is here as somebody who is working outside of an academy and outside of a corporate news agency and has been making his own way with a very creative kind of journalism,” Shore said of Starr.
His mission, he says, has become to help cross the bridges between Black and Ukrainian communities with just a selfie stick, a phone camera, “language skills, street smarts and Black Jesus.”
Experiences away from home have shaped Starr into an advocate for shrinking the empathy gap across cultures and promoting the idea that the Black community in the United States is in many ways similar to the Ukrainian community in Eastern Europe, he said.
“White nationalism is putting Ukraine’s security at risk,” Starr said, reflecting on the federal bill that would provide aid to Ukraine currently stalled by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. “This racism that’s targeting us is now being used to weaponize support for Ukraine. Everybody is in this together. So we’re going to have to make a decision about how much care we have for one another.”
Although Starr said that he does not know if his work will inspire people to take political action, he knows that some will trust him better because “he looks like them.”
He added that he also believes Ukrainians feel that he, as a Black man, can understand them better than foreign white correspondents. He said that he does not operate on the idea of “objectivity,” trying to balance opinions as traditional news media outlets do. He described himself as, instead, committed to being truthful and fair.
“The voice that I’m speaking with … that I communicate with and the honesty and the moral consistency that I bring to the conversation is not something that would pass a lot of editors,” Starr said. “So I don’t need them.”
Claudia Nunes, a visiting fellow in the School of Environment who attended the event, believes that Starr’s reporting brings the aspect of the physicality of the war to communities across the ocean — and across racial, linguistic and cultural barriers.
“Because he takes the truth this seriously, his reporting appeals to hearts,” Nunes noted. “Our interpretations of what is happening in Ukraine would vary only slightly, not as much as they used to, if we all had access to unfiltered truth. And Terrell gives it to us.”
The event was sponsored by the Poynter Fellowship; the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program and the European Studies Council.