To start the activity, I shared a picture I had found on social media of African students from Sumy State University, in north-eastern Ukraine, close to the Russian border. Forced to flee the fighting, they joined the flow of migrants moving slowly from Sumy to Kiev, then to L’viv in the west of the country, after that across the Polish border into the European Union, and eventually to Belgium.
These students were treated in a racist way all along their peregrination from East to West: they were the last permitted to board already overcrowded trains and had to stand in a different line waiting to cross the border into Poland. In Belgium, they were not allowed to apply for residence, work, and housing permits at the Brussels Heysel complex, but, instead, were sent to Petit Château, a refugee shelter in the city centre, to apply for asylum, which they did not want. They did not want to be treated like “second-class refugees.”
In class, I asked my students to debate and write about this issue, which had been under-reported, remaining under the radar of mainstream media outlets...
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