From Russia With Blackness: Terrell J. Starr, An expert on Russian and Eastern European politics, and he has a few warnings for us
Terrell J. Starr MSNBC
Terrell J. Starr has been Columbused by many in the mainstream media in the last several weeks. As the Russian hack on the 2016 election and President-elect Donald Trump’s relationship with Russian leader Vladimir Putin dominate the headlines, outlets are looking for a fresh take on Russian politics and American vulnerabilities.
Terrell J. Starr—tall, black, lanky, with a Detroit accent and who is just as likely to lay out facts in Russian as he is to compare Putin to Marlo Stansfield from The Wire—has stepped into the gap.
He may not “look” like your typical Russian/Eastern European political expert, but with a Fulbright scholarship and degrees in journalism and ethnic conflict, Terrell J. Starr just might be black Generation X’s best chance to understand what is happening in this post-election Trump/Putin world.
Starr spoke with The Root about his experiences in Russia, what really happened with the hack and the racial dangers associated with Trump’s cozy relationship with Putin.
“I grew up in inner-city Detroit; both my uncles sold drugs,” Starr says.
Not exactly the background many people think would lead to becoming one of the media’s newest experts on Russia. With help from family and some teachers, Starr went to Philander Smith College, a small, private, historically black college in Little Rock, Ark.
“Around my freshman year in 2001, there was an international volunteer program that I signed up for,” says Starr.
He hoped to work in Africa, any country in Africa. Instead, he was assigned to Russia: “I was like … Russia? Who wants to go there?”
But that trip changed his life and set him up for the career he has today.
“One of the first things I noticed when I was in Moscow was like, ‘How did all of these Africans get here?’ I thought I was going to be the only one,” he says.
After a few months on his first trip, Starr was intellectually sold on Russia.
“I fell in love with the language. I didn’t understand a word of it, but I loved how it sounds,” he says.
He traveled through Estonia and Georgia, and was in Ukraine for the Orange Revolution in 2005. The more he traveled and learned, the more enamored he became with the politics of the region, and how the racial dynamics of America fit so well into the politics on the ground in the former Soviet republics.
“Georgians considered themselves black.
Poles are like the white trash of Europe.
I had no idea I would learn so much about race. Especially from people who, by American standards, would be considered white,” he says.
Putin's Cyberattacks Through his travels and research Starr has seen how Vladimir Putin’s Russia initiates cyberattacks and foments dissent. While various former republics attempt to break the political and economic chains that Russia has on them, Putin usually starts with a disinformation campaign to discredit political leaders that would stand against him.
“Putin did this in Adjara, the Ukraine and South Ossetia,” relates Starr as he runs down a list of nations Russia has attempted to disrupt politically through cyberwarfare in recent years.
On Election Day, minutes before the polls closed, CyberBerkut hacked into the election commission website and posted false election results that were mysteriously reported by Russian television almost immediately. Given that history, it’s not hard to understand what Russia was capable of—with Donald Trump’s help—in America.
Crowdstrike, the private security firm famous for uncovering and tracking down those responsible for the Sony email hack, has been onto the Russians for months and shared information with the CIA. As early as June, it filed reports that the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee and were sharing emails with Wikileaks and the Trump campaign.
Starr notes that a likely Russian paid hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, along with others, are contacted through the dark web to do the dirty work Russia doesn’t want to get directly implicated in.
“All of these attacks have been targeted at some form of racial strife,” he says.
When the Ukraine elected a pro-Western leader, Russia spread disinformation aimed at stoking pride among ethnic Russians in the nation. Russians were encouraged to “take their country back” and take up arms against other ethnic groups and leaders they didn’t respect. Not a far cry from a President-elect Trump, who on more than one occasion alluded to shooting Hillary Clinton.
So what does this mean for America, and African Americans in particular, heading into a Trump presidency?
According to Starr,
“Russia is one of the most anti-Semitic and anti-black countries in the world.
There was a point in the early 2000s when dozens of African students were murdered. The government does nothing about it. Putin used the same “crackdown on crime” language as Trump.”
The potential parallels of the rise of Putin and the commensurate racial violence on people of color and the rise of hate crimes with the election of Donald Trump are eerily similar.
In an attempt to distract from a sagging economy and his own corruption, Putin has tacitly endorsed white nationalism/Russian pride and turned a blind eye to violence against African immigrants in particular. African students and businesspeople are regularly assaulted, murdered and attacked on subways and in public spaces in Moscow.
Putin and state-controlled media focus almost exclusively on mythical “black drug dealers” to justify this fear and violence. Even more concerning is the boost that the Trump presidency gives to growing ties between Russian and American white nationalist and Nazi groups.
“[Former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard] David Duke has been going to Russia and Ukraine for the last 10 years. During the Soviet period, [white nationalist groups] were illegal,” Starr points out.
It’s no coincidence that there was a huge white nationalist convention in Washington, D.C., just a few weeks after Trump got elected. The kind of day-to-day violence experienced by Africans in Russia coming to America seems less like a worst-case scenario and more like a sincere possibility.
So how does Starr suggest that African Americans view the Russian hacks and the future of a Trump presidency? “The hack happened,” he says. “I know that we have history, with COINTELPRO and that the CIA operates under white supremacy. But they are serious about national security. If we start to doubt them [CIA] when it comes to something like the Russians infiltrating, that really makes us no better than Donald Trump.”
Russia-linked actors created accounts with names like Blacktivists and Back the Badge aimed at voters concerned about police relations with their communities, and other accounts that called for secure borders that were aimed at immigration hard-liners. One account, Army of Jesus, published an illustration of an arm-wrestling match between Christ and the devil. “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins!” the headline read.
The sampling of ads, some of which had been made public earlier, came during a second day of hearings with the top lawyers for Facebook, Twitter and Google and were intended to show the executives how pervasively Russia used their platforms to further its campaign of misinformation. Lawmakers of both parties expressed frustration with answers that fell short of what they had hoped and insisted that the companies, long the darlings of American technology, do better.
“I must say, I don’t think you get it,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who was also at the first hearing a day earlier. “I went home last night with profound disappointment. I asked specific questions, I got vague answers.”
Facebook, Google and Twitter said their general counsels were best equipped to dive into policy and legal questions. But counsels’ appearances on Capitol Hill also allowed the companies’ chief executives to escape high profile scrutiny.
I’m disappointed that you’re here, and not your C.E.O.s,” said Senator Angus King, independent of Maine.
Lawmakers also complained that the companies had taken months to acknowledge Russia’s interference on their sites.
“I have more than a little bit of frustration that many of us on this committee have been raising this issue since the beginning of this year, and our claims were, frankly, blown off by the leadership of your companies,” said Senator Mark Warnerof Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, spent Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., talking to investors and analysts as they reported blockbuster quarterly earnings. The stocks of both Google and Facebook, which faced the most criticism in the hearings, are at record highs.
During the earnings call, Mr. Zuckerberg was unequivocal in his stance on the issue of Russian meddling in the election.
“I’ve expressed how upset I am that the Russians used our tools to sow mistrust,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, noting that Facebook’s profits will probably be affected by the amount of money the company will spend fighting abuse of its platform. Facebook said it plans to double the number of content reviewers it employs, to 20,000, and will try to add a greater degree of transparency into its advertising system.
“What they did is wrong, and we’re not going to stand for it,” Mr. Zuckerberg said.
The tech companies also provided new numbers on the reach of Russia’s influence campaign. Facebook said an estimated 150 million users of its main site and its subsidiary, Instagram, were exposed to the posts, a larger figure than it provided even as recently as Monday.
During the last of the three hearings, members of the House Intelligence Committee spoke in front of posters displaying the content, complaining that it was divisive.
Representative André Carson, Democrat of Indiana, said an account called Being Patriotic, which amassed 200,000 followers, pushed out content that “cynically exploits grieving officers and their loved ones in order to pit Americans concerned about our law enforcement personnel against Americans concerned about African-American lives lost during police encounters.”
A collection of ads that were created by Russia-linked social media firms tasked with creating influential content.
The account was created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency.
“My concern is that a dictator like Vladimir Putin abused flaws in our social media platforms to inject the worst kind of identity politics into the voting decisions of at least 100 million Americans,” Mr. Carson said, referring to the Russian president.
Facebook has found a particularly vocal set of critics on the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Mr. Carson is a member along with Representative Terri A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama. Together, they pressed Facebook to grapple with its role in promoting racial animus.
Ms. Sewell cited figures showing few blacks in Facebook’s work force and its leadership — a lack of diversity that she said made it hard to believe that those reviewing socially divisive ads could spot problematic posts.
These operations — while we’re talking about the 2016 presidential race — they’re not lt limited to 2016, and they were not limited to the presidential race, and they continue to this day,” he said. “They are much more widespread than one election.”
Such comments offered a rare view into the Senate committee’s investigation, which has largely played out over the past nine months in secured briefing rooms. Publicly and in private, Mr. Burr and Mr. Warner have taken pains to preserve bipartisan comity, and their success has set the committee apart from the other panels investigating Russia’s efforts.
But the difference in their emphasis on Wednesday also underscored the political realities buffeting their work. In advancing an investigation tied to Mr. Trump, Mr. Burr has been careful to make clear that the committee’s work is larger than an individual candidate, and he has repeatedly tried to tamp down expectations about what it might find.
Democrats did not have such reticence.
“Whether the Russians and the campaign coordinated these efforts, we do not yet know, but it is true that the Russians mounted what could be described as an independent expenditure campaign on Mr. Trump’s behalf,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, also took aim at Mr. Trump’s dismissal of the role of Russia-linked social media in his win. Mr. Heinrich challenged Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, to acknowledge such content and the role that fake accounts linked to Russia and other misinformation had in the election.
“Last month, President Trump called Russian-purchased Facebook ads a ‘hoax,’”Mr. Heinrich said. “I’ve looked at those Russian-sponsored Facebook ads. I certainly hope you’ve had a chance to review them. Are they, in fact, a hoax?”
Mr. Stretch said no. “The existence of those ads were on Facebook,” he said, “and it was not a hoax.”
Daisuke Wakabayashi contributed reporting from San Francisco.
