# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
My painting illustrates media bias and how they can control the emotions and interest of viewers. (Abdelrahman Zein)

# data[].attributes.body
I believe that my artwork captures the unsettling reality of today's media. The bias is clear and the people remain in shadows just observing what is being portrayed in front of them similar to Plato's allegory of the cave.

# data[].attributes.body
International migration has disrupted families for decades. This story brings to light some of the issues that arise in the mother-daughter relationship when they are torn apart by migration.

# data[].attributes.body
The focus of this artwork is to highlight that not solely the refugee is stuck in a two class system but the volunteers helping those in distress as well. To emphasis on this matter, I chose harsh visual contrasts since the public opinion on this group has differed as severely as on the refugees. While in 2015 volunteers or NGO memebers had been depicted as "human traffickers" or "smugglers", and even have ended up on trial for saving people from drowning, they are currently viewed as "heros" and "life safers" when providing aid at the Ukrainian-Polish border.

# data[].attributes.body
"I’m not X, but …" is an online collection aimed at showcasing the dehumanization and instances of the staggering different treatment of migrants in the online world by the audience present on Facebook in Czech Republic.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"I'm not X but ..." is an online collection of racist, xenophobic, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic fragments of the internet discourse which relate to the migration wave induced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Its aim is to showcase the dehumanization and instances of the staggering different treatment of migrants in the online world based on the way how they are perceived by the audience present on Facebook in Czech Republic - as the image of the ungrateful, dangerous and opportunity-seeking migrant from Middle East or Africa, or the large Romani family who is going to be living off the social benefits, or the transgender person not fitting into heteronormativity and binary gender norms who disrupts the cultural and social order of things. All of these conceptions of bad migrants not worthy of our respect, help and solidarity have in common the fact that these marginalised groups are unfortunately targets of hate speech, racial and gender discrimination and violent attacks on a normal basis in Czechia, and them not being aligned with the stereotype of a nice, caring, non-problematic, hard-working, and most importantly white fleeing Ukrainian single woman or a mother with her kids.

Since 24th February 2022, i.e., the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, over 6.5 million refugees have fled the country, while more than 7 million people is estimated to be internally displaced in Ukraine (UNHCR, 2022). Since then, neighbouring and close European countries to Ukraine have take hundreds of thousands or even millions of Ukrainian refugees with "open arms". Anyone who has been somehow involved in or just watched other cases of refugees trying to get into safety and in Europe is now probably observing this sudden switch in national migration politics in disbelief - myself included. Even now, we are witnessing unequal treatment of migrants - while Poland has welcomed 3.5 million people fleeing Ukraine, it has been unlawfully and violently pushing back asylum seekers coming from other countries than Ukraine - Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, or Afghanistan who are trapped in the dangerous forested area of the Poland-Belarus border, where a humanitarian crisis has begun since 2021 and many people lost their lives. Nowadays, the media is awfully silent on this dehumanizing crisis as the attention is now turned towards Ukraine (Human Rights Watch, 2022; Relief Web, 2022).

Another level of unequal treatment of migrants and asylum seekers however also concerns some people fleeing Ukraine who experience difficulties when both leaving Ukraine or entering other countries and seeking shelter. For example, people of colour who are fleeing the war in Ukraine have been experiencing racial discrimination at the borders, being pushed away or forced to walk long distances by foot, while white Ukrainians were being allowed to leave the country first before them (The New York Times, 2022). Transgender and non-binary people who are fearing or having difficulties to safely leave Ukraine because of transphobic attacks and their legal identification documents not matching, as such they are stranded in a country and being forced to join the Ukrainian army as males (The Guardian, 2022). Or Romani refugees from Ukraine who are being denied help or a shelter of good conditions in Czech Republic, and after being stuck and living in undignified conditions at the at Prague's main railway station they were relocated to a new camp site at Troja (now the same pattern of racial discrimination is happening also in the city of Brno). Therefore, we cannot say that every person fleeing the war in Ukraine is receiving the overwhelming support and a sense of solidarity which swept through the European countries. Fortunately, these cases of discrimination are being documented and the people experiencing such treatment are speaking up and their stories are being heard.

For my final assignment I have decided to focus on the latter type of discrimination towards migrants, and I am interested specifically at the reaction of Czech population towards marginalized people fleeing Ukraine. I have chosen to create an online collection of hate speech towards marginalized refugees - trans*people from Ukraine, people of colour who ended up in Ukraine as international students or refugees fleeing other preceding conflicts, and finally the Ukrainian Roma people fleeing Ukraine and seeking shelter in European countries like the rest of Ukrainian refugees (Romea, 2022).

This online collection of pieces of racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic sentiments was inspired by similar projects such as Everyday Sexism Project by Laura Bates, an activist and a writer who started an online blog showcasing the everyday instances of sexism experienced by ordinary people on everyday basis. Another inspiration was the project Mlč zlato by Veronika Králová, an Instagram account collecting sexist, misogynist and anti-feminist fragments of online discours. Lastly, as a source of inspiration were conversations with my colleague Jana Sosnova, who is analysing the changes in public discourse in Czechia on refugees fleeing war in Ukraine and mapping the evolution of this discourse and sentiments related to previous migration waves.

For the purpose of this project, I have decided to shortly monitor social media conversations on Facebook pages of Aktuálně.cz, Alarm, ČT24 and Radio Wave, which covered the three marginalized group of my interest - people of colour generally, transgender people and Romani people. I have then made screenshots of some of the most offensive comments under the posts which shared articles from these media news outlets. Afterwards, I have created a website where I portrayed the screenshots, accompanied by photos which were taken since the start of Russian invasion. I have decided to keep the list of the screenshots short as I have found it to be too overwhelming and I did not want this project to feel like an endless scrolling of hate comments that we sometimes experience on platforms such as Facebook. My intention is to showcase the instances of the staggering different treatment of migrants in the online world based on the way how they are perceived by the audience - as the image of the ungrateful, dangerous and opportunity-seeking migrant from Middle East or Africa, or the large Romani family who is going to be living off the social benefits, or the transgender person not fitting into heteronormativity and binary gender norms who disrupts the cultural and social order of things. All of these conceptions of bad migrants not worthy of our respect, help and solidarity have in common the fact that these marginalised groups are unfortunately targets of hate speech, racial and gender discrimination and violent attacks on a normal basis in Czechia, and them not being aligned with the stereotype of a nice, caring, non-problematic, hard-working, and most importantly white fleeing Ukrainian single woman or a mother with her kids.

I have decided to name my project "I'm not X, but ... " as a reference to the (often used by Czech people) rhetorical fallacy (Krobová and Zápotocký, 2021) of people saying phrase which begins with I'm not racist, but ... which is ten followed by obviously racist comment. I have put the X instead of racist because I have included instances of hate speech which is based not only on race (however in several cases an intersectional approach would be useful). Unfortunately, only after finishing the entire website dedicated to the online collection, I have found out that a project from 2018 with a similar intention was already created under the same name, however it was much larger project - a theatre show #nejsemrasista_ale (#I'mnotracist_but) premiered at Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava, which consisted of transcripts from Internet discussions. For the reasons of being short on time, the fact that I truly did not know about such project, and my argument that both projects are similar but do not have the same intention, scale, nor audience, I have respectfully decided to keep my website as it is.

Sources:

Human Rights Watch (2022). ‚Violence and Pushbacks at Poland-Belarus Border'. 7 June [Online]. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/06/07/violence-and-pushbacks-poland-belarus-border (Accessed: 14 June 2022).

Krobová and Zápotocký (2021). ‚"I Am Not Racist, But ...": Rhetorical Fallacies in Arguments about the Refugee Crisis on Czech Facebook', Journal of Intercultural Communication, 21(2), pp. 58-69. Available at: http://immi.se/intercultural/21-2-56/ (Accessed 15 June 2022).

Relief Web (2022). ‚Out of Sight - Refugees and Migrants at the Belarus-Poland Border'. 1 June [Online]. Available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/belarus/out-sight-refugees-and-migrants-belarus-poland-border (Accessed: 14 June 2022).

Romea (2022). ‚Roma and other people of color fleeing war in Ukraine face discrimination and racism'. 3 March [Online]. Available at: http://www.romea.cz/en/news/world/roma-and-other-people-of-color-fleeing-war-in-ukraine-face-discrimination-and-racism-jaroslav-miko-tells-romea-tv-that (Accessed: 20 April 2022).

The Guardian (2022). ‚'I will not be held prisoner': the trans women turned back at Ukraine's borders'. 22 March [Online]. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/mar/22/i-will-not-be-held-prisoner-the-trans-women-turned-back-at-ukraines-borders (Accessed: 20 April 2022).

The New York Times (2022). ‚Africans Say Ukrainian Authorities Hindered Them From Fleeing'. 1 March [Online]. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/world/europe/ukraine-refugee-discrimination.html (Accessed: 20 April 2022).

​UNHCR (2022). 'Ukraine Emergency'. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/ukraine-emergency.html (Accessed: 14 June 2022).

This project was created by Veronika Miklíková as a final assignment for the university course Media and Migration.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"I'm not X but ..." is an online collection of racist, xenophobic, sexist, misogynist, homophobic, and transphobic fragments of the internet discourse which relate to the migration wave induced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

# data[].attributes.body
This page is created to curate footages of discrimination against non-Europeans in media and adjusted to the non-discriminative standards.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are some words which indicates a certain kind of racism or discrimination against people. We supposed to not used them in public especially in the eyes of media. Today’s politically correct world is trying to educate everyone to be more concerned. But what about the words that are indicating superiority in a certain context?
In the early news of the Ukraine war, we witnessed the dissolving equality in terms of media representation. Some of the anchors were reporting the news by adding their comments on how Ukraine is different than other places in the world, that are witnessing the war on the same level, just because they are considerably European.
Terms like “civilized” or “European” are used to indicate a societal degree; however, it is possible to see how being “blonde” and having “blue eyes” differentiates people from the third world countries. Like as if they weren’t Europeans or blonde then their status would be the same as other refugees; outsider.
What if we would consider such words indicating superiority as harmful as discriminative or racist ones? It would be easier to focus on the real problems such as children and civil people are dying.

spreading democracy

Prosperous

/ˈprɒsp(ə)rəs/ adjective

successful in material terms; flourishing financially.

- Oxford Languages / Google

Al Jazeera English

Middle Class

/mɪd(ə)l ˈklɑːs/ noun

the social group between the upper and working classes, including professional and business people and their families.

- Oxford Languages / Google

Christian

/ˈkrɪstʃ(ə)n,ˈkrɪstɪən/ adjective

relating to or professing Christianity or its teachings.

- Oxford Languages / Google

White

/wʌɪt/ adjective

of the colour of milk or fresh snow, due to the reflection of all visible rays of light; the opposite of black.

- Oxford Languages / Google

NBC News

European

/jʊərəˈpiːən/ adjective

relating to or characteristic of Europe or its inhabitants.

- Oxford Languages / Google

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are some words which indicates a certain kind of racism or discrimination against people. We...

# data[].attributes.body
In my essay, I focused on Slovakia's media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and I tried to compare 10 articles from 2 Slovak daily newspapers. As an art project, I decided to make a photo collage of the most powerful pictures of the war I could find.

# data[].attributes.body
Focusing on media imagery of migrants and how it can shape our perceptions on migrants in Western media, I wanted to create uncommon newspapers covers. Indeed, I modified a cover of the Forced Migration Review magazine. Then, I asked myself:

What is new for us to see ? What are we used to see from these covers? Is it disturbing ? How is that disturbing? What messages these magazine covers convey?

References:
- FMR Online | Forced Migration Review. (n.d.). Retrieved June 4, 2022, from www.fmreview.org website: https:// www.fmreview.org/issues
- Black and White photo. Ferguson, A., & Henríquez, A. rose. (2021). Amy Rose Henríquez, 26, from El Salvador, at Hotel Omare in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Retrieved from https:// adamfergusonstudio.com/migrantes