Racist text messages invoking slavery raised alarm across the country this week after they were sent to Black men, women and students, including middle schoolers, prompting inquiries by the FBI and other agencies.
The messages, sent anonymously, were reported in several states, including New York, Alabama, California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. They generally used a similar tone but varied in wording.
Some instructed the recipient to show up at an address at a particular time “with your belongings,” while others didn’t include a location. Some of them mentioned the incoming presidential administration.
It wasn’t yet clear who was behind the messages and there was no comprehensive list of where they were sent, but high school and college students were among the recipients.
The FBI said it was in touch with the Justice Department on the messages, and the Federal Communications Commission said it was investigating the texts “alongside federal and state law enforcement.” The Ohio Attorney General’s office also said it was looking into the matter.
Tasha Dunham of Lodi, California, said her 16-year-old daughter showed her one of the messages Wednesday evening before her basketball practice.
The text not only used her daughter’s name, but it directed her to report to a “plantation” in North Carolina, where Dunham said they’ve never lived. When they looked up the address, it was the location of a museum.
“It was very disturbing,” Dunham said. “Everybody’s just trying to figure out what does this all mean for me? So, I definitely had a lot of fear and concern.”
Her daughter initially thought it was a prank, but emotions are high following Tuesday’s presidential election. Dunham and her family thought it could be more nefarious and reported it to local law enforcement.
“I wasn’t in slavery. My mother wasn’t in slavery. But we’re a couple of generations away. So, when you think about how brutal and awful slavery was for our people, it’s awful and concerning,” Dunham said.
About six middle school students in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, received the messages too, said Megan Shafer, acting superintendent of the Lower Merion School District.
“The racist nature of these text messages is extremely disturbing, made even more so by the fact that children have been targeted,” she wrote in a letter to parents.
Students at some major universities, including Clemson in South Carolina and the University of Alabama, said they received the messages. The Clemson Police Department said in a statement that it been notified of the “deplorable racially motivated text and email messages” and encouraged anyone who received one to report it.
University of Alabama freshman Alyse McCall told sister station WVTMM that she was in class when she got the text, and it brought her to tears.
“I can say, ‘Oh, it’s a spoof message, oh, it’s a spam message,’ but that’s truly scary,” McCall said. “These messages are going out to thousands of young African-American students who fought just as hard to get into college as everybody else did and make opportunities for themselves to thrive, and getting those messages and then walking around or not even going to class because you’re scared to walk on your own campus. It’s not fair.”
Fisk University, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, issued a statement calling the messages that targeted some of its students “deeply unsettling.” It urged calm and assured students that the texts likely were from bots or malicious actors with “no real intentions or credibility.”
Nick Ludlum, a senior vice president for the wireless industry trade group CTIA, said “wireless providers are aware of these threatening spam messages and are aggressively working to block them and the numbers that they are coming from.”
David Brody, director of the Digital Justice Initiative at The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that they aren’t sure who is behind the messages but estimated they had been sent to more than 10 states, including most Southern states, Maryland, Oklahoma and even the District of Columbia. The district’s Metropolitan Police force said in a statement that its intelligence unit was investigating the origins of the message.
Brody said a number of civil rights laws can be applied to hate-related incidents. The leaders of several other civil rights organizations condemned the messages, including Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who said, “Hate speech has no place in the South or our nation.”
“The threat — and the mention of slavery in 2024 — is not only deeply disturbing, but perpetuates a legacy of evil that dates back to before the Jim Crow era, and now seeks to prevent Black Americans from enjoying the same freedom to pursue life, liberty, and happiness,” said NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson. “These actions are not normal. And we refuse to let them be normalized.”
Aside from occasionally noting that Russian serfs and American slaves were emancipated within less than two years of each other, historians — especially American historians — have made little effort to compare the development, treatment and status of the two servile labor groups. It apparently has been concluded a priori that there was no solid basis for such a comparison. American slaves were, after all, a race apart — Africans who had been uprooted from their homeland and brought to the New World in chains where they were systematically exploited and degraded in a peculiarly vicious form of involuntary servitude. Conversely, Russian serfdom has been generally accepted as an anachronistic legacy of medieval Europe that had finally run its course by the mid nineteenth century.
Thus the assumption that there was no common ground for a useful comparison of the two labor systems has meant the absence of any such comparative study. What follows is a preliminary and brief attempt to take the first steps toward filling that historical void.
Top: “25 Khromov Street.” Left: “Shaman: Victory!” Right: “We are there where we need to be. Serve as a contract soldier in the Russian Army and get a one-time payment starting at one million rubles.”
Source: Caution, Tver! (Telegram), 1 September 2024. Thanks to Andrey Anissimov for the heads-up. “Basurka” is the faux-Russian nonce word I coined for this distressing post. It was suggested to me by our building’s bilingual garbage bin.||| TRR
Many acquaintances from Russia condemn me for calling for the bombing of Russian factories and supporting the Ukrainian army’s Kursk offensive. They genuinely don’t get how one could wish defeat on one’s own country. Some have quietly unfriended me, while others continue to read my posts but are perplexed and perhaps even offended by them.
They are often the same people who “love (their) country no matter what.” This is where you all and I part ways. You REFUSE to look at reality—you turn away from it in order to love your country without breaking a sweat, as if love were a chain and you’ve been chained to a radiator since childhood. It works differently for me. I make my own decision about whether I like this scene or not. And, if my country jumps from one bloody shitstorm to another like a maniac running in circles, it’s not worthy of my love and I rescind its right to be my country. People are another matter, especially the unborn. It makes sense to fight for them. But it’s secondary to me what the country they’ll live in will be called and how big it will be. If they’ll have a better chance for a decent and safe life in a small country, then we should choose a decent and safe life for them.
Russia is an anti-human phenomenon. It is a threat to the entire world and to the people within the country. Like any rabid macaque with a grenade, it must be stopped. Look reality in the eye at last. Don’t look away. It’s happening right now, and you, with your unadulterated love, are a part of it.
Image number one. A fourteen-year-old girl dressed in white sneakers and a white tank top, sitting on a bench in the yard of her house on an ordinary summer day. It all looks ordinary, but there is one catch: the girl is dead. A fragment of a cluster bomb, which the Russians dropped on Kharkiv on 30 August, tore off the child’s head. Everything happened instantly; no one had time to hide. The girl’s body remained seated on the bench. Perhaps her last thoughts were of her father, who had gone missing in action in the war with Russia. The family knows he was killed, but they can’t get his body back. The worst part is that he gave his life thinking he was protecting his daughter. Russia got to her, though, and so the family’s story is over. Father and daughter are not alive because they were born near Russia. Other Kharkiv residents who were killed in that senseless attack are also “guilty” in this sense.
Image number two. A girl again, but from another city. She is fifteen years old and has come to Novosibirsk from the Altai to enroll in the Olympic reserve school. She is quite beautiful, gentle, kind, and has great hopes. She doesn’t understand why her fellow students call her a “dirty, slant-eyed pig.” They secretly pour waste into her backpack and mock her appearance in public. After two years of this terror, which was encouraged by coaches and school officials, the formerly cheerful girl will come to realize that this life is not for her. In her seventeenth year, she will kill herself and leave a suicide note on her Telegram channel. She will say in the note that the unbearable racist bullying was her reason for leaving this life.
The school will then post a touching obituary on their Vkontakte page. They won’t specify the cause of death, of course. All comments expressing outrage over the bullying will be assiduously deleted. Only the wishes of “soft clouds” and broken heart emojis will be left untouched.
Incitement to suicide is a criminal offense, actually. But no one will answer for the death of Ksenia Cheponova because it is not the custom in Russia to punish one’s own kind for a crime against outsiders. “You’re not my brother, black-ass louse,” says the immortalized Russian movie hero. These words are much more than a mere insult: this is how millions of people in Russia understand justice. Moral rightness is not based on your deeds, but on whether you are an insider or an outsider. It doesn’t matter what you did. What matters is whether you are stronger than me at the moment.
Ksenia Cheponova
Image number three. Beslan. September first marked the twentieth anniversary of the mass murder of children by Russian security forces in that ill-fated school. For twenty years, the perpetrators have never been held accountable for lying about “350 hostages.” There were 1,100 hostages, as we know. No one has been held accountable for firing from a tank at the building where the children were. Three hundred and thirty-four people were killed during the assault, including one hundred and eighty children. This terrorist attack might not have happened if Russia hadn’t started a war in Chechnya. The hostages might have lived if the security forces had actually tried to save them. But they were killed and twenty years on their sacrifices are still covered in lies and impunity.
All of those people could have lived if it weren’t for their country, sick with messianism and aggression. And the “it’s like this everywhere” ploy doesn’t work. No country in the world has 60 million lives lost in wars, gulags, and famines under its belt.
The time for saying “no war” has passed. It is clear that where there is a “great Russia,” there will be perpetual war. That’s why we should say no to Russia, and yes to independent Ukraine, Ichkeria, Buryat-Mongolia, and all free nations.
Or is the idea of a united Russia dearer than the lives of your children?
Two ballistic missiles blasted a military academy and nearby hospital Tuesday in Ukraine, killing more than 50 people and wounding more than 200 others, Ukrainian officials said.
The missiles tore into the heart of the Poltava Military Institute of Communication’s main building, causing several stories to collapse. It didn’t take long for the smell of smoke and word of the deadly strike to spread through the central-eastern town.
The strike appeared to be one of the deadliest carried out by Russian forces since the war began more than 900 days ago, with Russia’s Feb. 24, 2022, full-scale invasion.
“People found themselves under the rubble. Many were saved,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video posted on his Telegram channel. He ordered an investigation.
Shattered bricks were visible inside the closed gates of the institution, which was off-limits to the media, and small pools of blood could be seen just outside hours later. Field communications trucks were parked along the perimeter. Roads were covered in glass from shattered apartment windows.
“I heard explosions … I was at home at that time. When I left the house, I realized that it was something evil and something bad,” said Yevheniy Zemskyy, who arrived to volunteer his help. “I was worried about the children, the residents of Poltava. That’s why we are here today to help our city in any way we can.”
By Tuesday evening, the death toll stood at 51, according to the general prosecutor’s office.
“My deepest condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the Russian missile attack on Poltava,” Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, posted on social media Tuesday. “This is a shocking tragedy for the whole Ukraine.”
Filip Pronin, governor of the region that bears Poltava’s name, announced on Telegram that 219 people were wounded. Up to 18 people may be buried under the rubble, he said.
Ten apartment buildings were damaged, and more than 150 people donated blood, Pronin said.
He called it “a great tragedy” for the region and all of Ukraine, and announced three days of mourning starting Wednesday.
[…]
The academy trains officers in communications and electronics, honing some of the most valued skills in a war where both sides are fighting for control of the electronic battlefield.
“The enemy certainly must answer for all (its) crimes against humanity,” Pronin wrote on Telegram.
The Kremlin offered no immediate comment on the strike. It was not clear whether the dead and wounded were limited to Ukrainian military personnel, such as signal corps cadets, or if they included civilians.
Since it embarked on its full-scale invasion in early 2022, the Russian military has repeatedly used missiles to smash civilian targets, sometimes killing scores of people in a single attack.
Some of the deadliest such assaults included a 2022 airstrike on a theater in Mariupol that killed hundreds of civilians sheltering in the basement and a strike that same year on the train station in Kramatorsk that killed 61. Apartment buildings, markets and shopping centers have also been targeted.
Poltava is about 350 kilometers (200 miles) southeast of Kyiv, on the main highway and rail route between Kyiv and Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, which is close to the Russian border.
The attack happened as Ukrainian forces sought to carve out their holdings in Russia’s Kursk border region after a surprise incursion that began Aug. 6 and as the Russian army hacks its way deeper into eastern Ukraine.
The missiles hit shortly after an air-raid alert sounded, when many people were on their way to a bomb shelter, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said, describing the strike as “barbaric.”
Rescue crews and medics saved 25 people, including 11 who were dug out of the rubble, a Defense Ministry statement said.
The strike came on the day that Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Mongolia. There was no indication that his hosts would heed demands to arrest him on an international warrant for alleged war crimes.
Zelenskyy repeated his appeal for Ukraine’s Western partners to ensure swift delivery of military aid. He has previously chided the U.S. and European countries for being slow to make good on their pledges of help.
He also wants them to ease restrictions on what Ukraine can target on Russian soil with the weapons they provide. Some countries fear that hitting Russia could escalate the war.
“Ukraine needs air defense systems and missiles now, not sitting in storage,” Zelenskyy wrote in English on Telegram.
“Long-range strikes that can protect us from Russian terror are needed now, not later. Every day of delay, unfortunately, means more lost lives,” he said.
Ukraine’s air force said Monday that Russia had launched an overnight barrage of ballistic and cruise missiles and drones at Kyiv as children prepared to return to school. Multiple explosions echoed across the capital early Monday morning as Ukraine’s air defenses shot down many of the weapons, causing damage and fires as the debris fell onto the capital.
Ufa’s Kirov District Court has remanded 20-year-old university student Makar Nikolayev in custody to a pretrial detention center for a month on charges of “promoting terrorism.” The court issued its ruling on 30 August, but it was made public only on Monday, 2 September, as reported by the Telegram channels of Baza and Idel.Realities, who cited sources. The court confirmed Nikolayev’s arrest to news website Ufa1.ru.
In 2020, Nikolayev, then a prep school student, designed an information retrieval method for creating a Russian national archive on the history of the Great Patriotic War. The boy wanted to recover information about his great-grandfather and in the process designed an entire system. His project, “Methodology for Creating a Family Archive,” won the Russian national contest “My Country — My Russia,” one of the projects of the Russia Is a Land of Opportunities presidential platform.
Later, Nikolayev went to Germany to study. According to Idel.Realities, Nikolayev had been studying at a university in Frankfurt am Main in recent years. In August 2024, he came home on holiday to Ufa, where he was detained.
According to police investigators, during his time abroad, Nikolayev wrote comments on social networks supporting Ukraine and urging people to join the Russian Volunteer Corps. The stipulated punishment for violating Russian Federal Criminal Code Article 205.2.2 (“Public calls to carry out terrorist activities; public justification of terrorism or promotion of terrorism, committed using mass media or electronic or telecommunication networks”) is five to seven years in prison.
Nikolai Davydov, successful Russian immigrant Silicon Valley businessman whose life has (not) been ruined by “hysterical Russophobia.” Image courtesy of RBC
Yet another victim of the “hysterical Russophobia” sweeping the US and Europe has been identified.
If “hysterical Russophobia” were a real thing, instead of a talking point for crypto-Putinists and just plain Russians who don’t know how to explain to their non-Russian neighbors why their homeland has become so “odd” in the past several years, you would have heard about Russian immigrants to the EU and US suffering the same main violence and putrid discrimination that Muslim, Asian, and African immigrants and asylum seekers suffer there, not to mention the relentless violence and staggering discrimination suffered by such absolutely 100% native Americans as Aboriginal Americans (i.e., Native Americans), African Americans, and Hispanic Americans in a land their peoples have been inhabiting from several centuries to several thousands of years.
But no, you never hear of such violence and discrimination against Russian immigrants, and the fact there is no such violence and discrimination against Russians (at least, not enough to show up on anyone’s radars) is a good thing, of course.
It does, however make you wonder what exactly this “hysterical Russophobia” is that has so many tongues wagging, but has absolutely no negative effect on the ability of actual, individual Russians to lead happy, productive, and violence- and discrimination-free lives in the countries where they have chosen to settle.
That’s an easy riddle to solve, however. “Hysterical Russophobia” is a non-phenomenon invented by a motley coalition of people with various political axes to grind, including sections of the mostly hilarious current western left, who for some reason have not heard the news about what has been happening in the Socialist Motherland the last twenty-five years or so or feign not to have heard it. They’re still defending Russia long after it became the world center of the blackest social and political reaction. That is, they’re defending a corrupt, oligarchic capitalist tyranny.
Why actual Russian immigrants might feel defensive about the old homeland is understandable, but they should figure out what’s worth defending and what’s not. The Putin regime, for example, literally has no redeeming features whatsoever, as a perusal of this blog, for example, and its predecessor, Chtodelat News, should persuade you, although there are thousands and millions of more credible sources of information out there that are even more persuasive than my occasional, half-baked efforts to knock some sense into your heads.
People who nevertheless hotly defend the Putin regime, wherever they’re from, immediately strike me as suspicious or hopelessly naive. And I’m not alone.
Well, you’ve probably guessed I’m just being facetious.
I think it’s great that Russians can go anywhere and make new, happy, productive lives for themselves. It should be that way for everyone, of course. No one is illegal, and all that.
Yet, simultaneously, the Russian government has been working overtime over the last year to exacerbate the Syrian refugee crisis. But you’d be hard pressed to hear any of the nattily dressed émigrés, described in the Financial Times article, quoted above, or their countrymen saying anything whatsoever about that nasty business and their country’s role in it. Mum’s the word, I’ve got my life to live, and all that.
However, a fair number of Russians, in my experience (and not only mine), have had lots to say, paradoxically, about Germany and other European countries being “overrun” by refugees from Syria and other war zones. It turns out these “black” unfortunates, who come from completely other galaxies, apparently, don’t have the same right so seek a safe place to live and work in Berlin, Paris, London et al., as the now-“white” (as opposed to White) Russians do.
