You don’t have to read much beyond the headlines from Ukraine to know how this story goes: There are bad guys, stooges of a dictator, and good guys, fighting for freedom. The good guys are the underdogs, which is great for the narrative. But the refugees are not as they should be — or, rather, they are not who they should be. And the Western world loses the plot when refugees are white.

Bulgaria’s foreign minister reassured Europeans, “These are not the refugees we are used to.” They are, he insisted, “Europeans…intelligent people, educated people.” Ukraine’s former deputy prosecutor affirmed their “blue eyes and blond hair.” These are, we are told, people like us, with things like ours — “cars that look like our cars,” as a seasoned French correspondent put it; “people [who] watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts,” as a British baron wrote. This entitles them, unlike the Syrians and Afghans before them, to move and work freely in Europe, to shelter in locals’ homes, and yes, even to keep their jewelry — all while skipping the humiliating process of prolonged begging for one’s life, which immigration officials call “claiming asylum.”

The bias at work here was made plain early on, most famously in a live report by CBS News’s Charlie D’Agata. In a clip that’s since been watched millions of times, he told viewers from Kyiv the day after the invasion began: “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully too — city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.” He apologized a day later for his “poor choice of words” — and yet he made clear at the time just how carefully he chose them.

The problem is not, of course, that he was careless. The problem is that he was telling the truth: there are people who are supposed to die, and people who are not.

As D’Agata and his colleagues intoned about the remarkable whiteness of Ukraine’s refugees, scores of African students trying to flee the country reported being blocked at the border with Poland, sometimes by Ukrainian border guards, sometimes by Poles; sometimes outright, sometimes by being forced to the back of a daylong line after already walking for days, in the Ukrainian winter, from cities where they couldn’t find seats on the bus, or afford the newly extortionate prices. They tried to coordinate among themselves in Telegram groups, where the scale and gravity of the problem were palpable. But as they did, none of the reporters at the border, stuttering live through their shock over how relatable the Ukrainians seemed, spoke about these African students — let alone to them.

As journalists anoint themselves to bear witness to suffering, reporters and viewers collectively affirm not only who is supposed to suffer, but who is worthy of witness. I know the rules that guide these choices intimately. For the last fifteen years, I’ve been a foreign correspondent in Africa, a place that exists in the Western media imagination largely as a site of suffering. You might trust that as a reflection of what’s happening; I know from making the stories you read that it’s even more powerfully a reflection of what media gatekeepers, most of them white, expect from and deem important in places we “politely” call “the developing world.”

The media does not do well when these expectations are confounded. In the spring of 2020, in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Europe and the United States were overrun with disease and death. In Africa, there were very few cases. How could it be that, while New York City was overflowing with bodies, the total number of dead in Africa was hardly half the number of dead, in one day, in New York State? How could a continent with few health facilities and even fewer doctors possibly cope better than the richest country on earth?

Perhaps, it was suggested in important newspapers, Africa wasn’t counting correctly, or lacked tests, or was unexpectedly protected by diseases still endemic in its exotic locales but long since eliminated in developed countries. Perhaps it was the excessive heat and sun. Whether African governments and scientists responded more efficiently than their Western counterparts was barely considered. It felt, as the Kenyan journalist Christine Mungai put it to me in a conversation hosted by Nairobi’s Baraza Media Lab, “as if the Western media is waiting for us to die.”

If suffering is for other people, it also belongs in other places. In 2015, when Syrians and Afghans swelled into Europe, I was there, reporting on risks of gender violence they were likely to face. These risks were rather obvious: border guards, taxi drivers, hotel owners, and shopkeepers demanding sex for safe passage or a child’s next meal; waits in long lines, often alone, to use the toilet or receive charity; everywhere, legions of men who were, in such a setting, unaccountable.

This was not a particularly novel line of inquiry. For decades, humanitarians have been trained to mitigate gender violence in the ways they build, staff, and run humanitarian interventions in Africa and the Middle East. But when those same professionals were working in Europe, they seemed to believe the risks disappeared. “[T]hese issues happen when you register women in refugee camps,” one official told me. “I don’t see how there’s a gender issue here.”

In one tiny word, the logic of violence: here. In “civilized Europe,” there is whiteness, and in civilized Europe, whiteness means safety. Suffering belongs over there, where white Westerners are rescued from being its victims — and simultaneously acquitted as its perpetrators.

Perhaps this is the real threat of the Russian invasion to the world as “we” know it: it violates the most basic rule of white privilege. Indeed, Putin broke the deal — not the Minsk II Protocol, or the United Nations Charter, or the gentleman’s agreement about post–Cold War peace and prosperity. The invasion of Ukraine broke the Faustian bargain underpinning it all: the white world (Russia included) reaps the material rewards of extraction while outsourcing its human costs. Like the environmental degradation and human rights abuses Congolese suffer for our cell phone and car batteries; like the water pollution and marine poisoning our “recycled” plastic bottles create in Vietnam; like the crop and community costs of erosion that Indonesians pay for our palm-oil-filled junk food, the violence and suffering we wreak are supposed to stay over there.

That’s why it felt like Charlie D’Agata had stumbled — at last, at least — into telling the truth. It’s not just that we expect violence in Darkest Africa or the War-Torn Middle East. It’s that, as he said, “we hope” it stays where we believe it belongs.