Black Russian : Moscow Reporter Discovers That U.S. Race Relations Aren’t Just Black and White

“So,” asks the visiting black Soviet journalist, “what is all this about football, football and the first black headquarters. Headquarters, yes?”

Headquarters, no. Quarterback. The first black quarterback to play in the Super Bowl, Doug Williams.

“Yes, yes, what is this?” she asks incredulously. “What is all this discussion about? Don’t they know, that, ah, that ah. . . .” Yelena Khanga’s hands flutter and her melodious voice stops.

That race has nothing to do with ability?

“Yes,” nods the 25-year-old reporter for the Moscow News, a million-circulation weekly read in Britain, Germany, France and Spain, as well as in the Soviet Union. “Of course,” she states firmly and lifts a forkful of pork chops to her lips.

She samples the stewed tomatoes and okra. She’s encouraged to throw a dash of hot sauce on it. “Oh, yes,” she says, eager to try. It’s her first encounter with soul food. And Khanga, a second-generation Russian whose roots go back to the American South, likes it.

“Very tasty, very tasty,” she says.

Khanga is in the United States as part of a three-month exchange program between her newspaper and the Christian Science Monitor. Based in Boston, she has come to Los Angeles at the invitation of black businessman Lee Young, who was fascinated by a Jet magazine article identifying her as the only black reporter in the Soviet press corps during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in January.

“I didn’t know there were any blacks in Russia,” said Young, owner of LDY Inc., a San Pedro engineering firm. Once he found out and learned that some, like Khanga, had American roots, he wanted to know how they got there from here. He knew other blacks would be interested too and wanted them to meet her.

Khanga had never been outside the Soviet Union until she covered the summit as part of the two-paper exchange.

As her eyes scan the interior of Cyril’s--a popular, black-owned establishment featuring haute African-American cuisine and an elegant art deco-cum-Southern mansion decor--her usually animated face is in repose. It has a chiseled-out-of-stone strength that makes her look more mature than her years. And her nearly perfect English is spoken in a voice that is cultivated and confident, one that conveys a certitude and experience belying her youth.

Suddenly, she is excited by the music coming through a loudspeaker. All afternoon it’s been a mix of classic doo-wop, jazz, salsa and the blues.

“Who is singing?”

“I think that’s the Channels,” calls out Cyril Good, the lean, attractive co-owner of the restaurant.

Khanga eyes him as he stands behind the bar.

“That’s the owner?” she asks sotto voce.

She savors the sight of him and licks a bit of sweet potato juice from her lips.

“Ah, but he’s so young,” she says admiringly. “And who says all black Americans are poor?”

Coming to America has been an education, the journalist says.

“I used to think of (the U.S.) as black and white. But it is full of shadows, thousands of shadows.”

She was told by Soviet friends that Boston, where the Christian Science Monitor is based, is the most racist city in America. “But I didn’t feel it at all,” she says.

“Of course, I was staying with a middle-class family from the Monitor, very nice, very warm people.”

However, certain negative “bells rang” that made her suspect racial discrimination, she says.

They first went off during the summit.

“I was one of the few blacks,” at the historic meeting. The ones who were there, “we can count them on fingers,” she says. “And there were so many reporters.”

She wondered: “Where are black American reporters? Aren’t they interested in what happens between our two countries?”

She still doesn’t understand their absence, and asks if it is because they are not given the opportunity to cover such events.

Then she spent the weekend with friends in Plymouth, Mass. “A wonderful, marvelous place,” she half sings. “We were traveling everywhere and all of sudden I felt something was wrong. I didn’t see any blacks there at all. And I said, ‘What’s wrong with this place? Is it bad? Why don’t blacks live there?’ And there was a very polite answer. ‘No. It’s a very good place.’ ”

So, she says, “I understood that it was so good that blacks couldn’t live there.”

During her stay, as reporters have dogged her, she has been a guest in many homes.

“When I came to white families, everybody was very good. But I never saw black families.

“When I was with black families, they were very warm, but there were no white families.”

None of these people were racist, she says. “And if you asked if they were prejudiced, they would say ‘No. We work together, we have good friends on both sides.’ ”

Still, “I understood that in their minds remained (attitudes from the past) that kept the races separate.”

Amazed at Jimmy the Greek

But what “shocked” her most were the comments of Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder alleging that racial differences accounted for black superiority in sports.

It wasn’t just that he said it, it was that “he said it on television,” the amazed Moscovite recalls.

She knows such things might be said in private. Her Soviet colleagues in America had told her she would see blacks and whites on television and in the movies--”an official balance. Officially, there is no racism. So to hear it on TV was quite a shock.”

Despite her animated, open manner, there is something guarded about Khanga. She tells a revealing anecdote: “I was surprised by the friendliness of people, black and white,” on the streets in America. “In Moscow, people usually say hello only to people they know. If somebody said ‘Hello, how are you doing?’ the answer would probably be, ‘What’s your business?’ Really,” she laughs.

Her First Visit

Though she has not been out of the Soviet Union before, she did tour her vast country as a champion tennis player while in her teens. As an amateur tennis champ--”ranked second among Soviet youth”--she repeated the youthful experience of her mother, Lily Golden. Now 52, Golden is a Soviet expert on African history and culture, a translator of several books by black radical Angela Davis, and a former tennis champion in her native Uzbekistan.

It is in Uzbekistan, near the Afghan border, that the history of Khanga’s family in the Soviet Union begins.

Her grandfather, Oliver Golden, was an adventurous African-American who left Mississippi around 1930 (Khanga is not sure of the exact year) with a group of 16 blacks and his white American wife. He was answering the call of Lenin, whose open letter to the workers of America asked that they come to Russia to help build a socialist society, she says.

Grandparents Stayed Behind

Oliver Golden, a graduate of Tuskeegee Institute, and the other blacks who formed the first colony of African-American emigres after the Russian Revolution were all experts in agriculture, she says.

Recalling this unique chapter in black international history, Khanga says some of the group left after their contracts expired. But her grandparents, and a handful of blacks, stayed.

Her grandparents had “suffered great racism” at home because of their mixed marriage, she says, explaining a major reason for their decision. (The U.S. Supreme Court did not strike down anti-miscegenation laws until 1967.)

“There was no racism in the Soviet Union,” she says. “They fell in love with their new home,” choosing to stay in the Asian Republic of Uzbekistan because the people were darker-skinned “and reminded them of people at home.”

Father Was From Africa

Her father was a black African from Tanzania whom her mother divorced, Khanga says. “She didn’t want to live in Africa.” He went to school in the Soviet Union, but never became a citizen. “I know, really, nothing about him,” she says. “He was minister of something or another, and died during a coup” when she was about 4.

In the Soviet Union, where she specializes in interviews and profiles of foreign celebrities--jazz musician Dave Brubeck, first son Ron Reagan, Sen. Edward Kennedy and former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein have been a few of her subjects--no one makes an issue of her race, she says.

“I speak with a perfect Russian accent,” which she asserts a foreigner “can’t really learn. So, over the phone, people assume I’m Russian.”

When they see her in person, they are “a little surprised.” But they make the common-sense deduction that “somebody in the family came from someplace else, maybe Africa.” And because she speaks perfect Russian, “she must be Russian,” they conclude.

Only in the United States did her race bestow a dubious form of “celebrity,” she says with dismay.

Attended Reagan Summit

She was relentlessly pursued by the media during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit when her nationality was discovered.

Of course, she points out, there are not many identifiable blacks in the Soviet Union--so many have intermarried and their black ancestry in unknown, she says. Her best guess is that there are “perhaps hundreds of blacks, not enough to even call us a minority.”

Even so, the black presence there goes back centuries. The father of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin, was of African descent, and his great-grandfather, Hannibal, was an Ethiopian prince who served Peter the Great as a general.

The American interpretation of that historical fact--misinterpretation, from her point of view--threw into sharp relief for Khanga the perception of racial identity in the United States.

Interview on TV

During a television interview in Boston, “I said Pushkin has a black background.” When she saw the edited version on TV, “they said that I said Pushkin was black,” she fumes.

When Khanga complained to the station, they told her, “In the United States, if you have one-thousandths black blood, that means you are black.”

She shakes her head dramatically. “In our country, he is Russian.”

Asked if her government, now in the era of glasnost --openness--permits her to talk about any subject while in the United States, she says: “Yes, except for politics.”

Pressed to explain why that subject is forbidden, she disingenuously replies: “Well, I am not a political reporter.”

Anything about blacks, however, anything purely social or cultural, is all right, she says.

Mum on Personal Life

About things personal, though, she’s reticent. Her boyfriend wouldn’t like it.

“He’s a typical Russian boy, with very Russian roots,” she says. His parents had never seen a black until they met her.

It wasn’t a problem, she says. “He introduced me, of course, and they accepted me because they love him. Why shouldn’t they? They were very warm.”

When she returns, she’ll share the black American slang she’s picked up. “I’m trying to make a dictionary of it,” she says.

Already, she’s mastered, “Hey homeboy, how you doing?” with all the appropriate posturing--head bobbing slightly, neck pulled back like an Egyptian. She knows what it means to “chill out.” And when somebody tries to explain slang she’s already discovered, her swaggering retort is: “Hey, I know what time it is.”

Frankie Lyman is wailing, “ Why do they fall in lo-ove . . .”

Loves American Music

“I love rock ‘n’ roll,” Khanga says. “I love to dance to it.” Her mother, who has a vast collection of American music, taught her how to dance. “She’s a wonderful dancer and sometimes I wonder who is 25, her or me?”

And then she says the thing that fixes her image in the mind, pieces together the dramatic movements, the velvet voice: “I love opera singing.” She loved it so much, she decided to drop out of the journalism program at Moscow State University with just a year to finish. She wanted to be: A diva.

“I loved ‘La Traviata,’ Verdi. I dreamed it. I know it by heart. I hear it in my ears. One day I awoke and said, ‘If I won’t become an opera singer, I’ll die.”

It was winter, she ran to the dean of the Moscow conservatory and said, “ ‘Either you take me, or I’ll kill myself.’ ”

He didn’t want to see her die, but could she sing?

“Ah yes, that was the question,” she recalls.

“No,” she told him.

“So what do you want me to do?” came his reply.

He said she needed to go to school.

Wanted to Sing Opera

“I don’t have enough time,” she told him. “If you tell me I’m not worth it, I will go away and forget it. But I don’t want to have the feeling that I didn’t try something in my life.”

So she auditioned. And she did have a voice.

“They took me into the conservatory, but not as a full-time student--courses for people who would like to begin,” she says.

The role of Violetta was in her grasp. Her soaring soprano would embellish “ Sempre Libera “ beyond Verdi’s wildest dreams. She would die like no other soprano singing “ Addio del Passato .”

And then they discovered it: she was really a mezzo, a voice too deep for Violetta.

So sing “Carmen.”

“That’s what they told me,” she says, still disgusted at the thought. “But I was dreaming of ‘Traviata.’

“It was such a tragedy.” But, “I said it’s Violetta,” she throws up her hands “or journalism.”

It is Saturday evening. An elegantly turned-out Yelena Khanga appears at a reception in her honor at the Sheraton Plaza La Reina near the airport.

Earlier, at lunch, she complained about her hair. Beauticians in the Soviet Union don’t know how to take care of black hair no matter how many pictures from Essence magazine she shows them. And the hairdo she got when she first came to America, “Well, I’m not pleased with this, either.”

But tonight, her coiffure is smooth, her handsome face is carefully polished and her black fitted suit shows to good advantage a lean, powerful body. She’s been in the hands of L.A. experts.

Her hosts, San Pedro businessman Young and his wife Maureen, have invited about 100 guests to the reception. Later, in a forum organized with the help of the Black Journalists Assn. of Southern California, Khanga talks about blacks in her country and answers questions.

No Racism in U.S.S.R.

She maintains, before the predominantly black crowd, that there is no racism in the Soviet Union.

Someone wants to know how many poor blacks there are in her country.

“Since we don’t have unemployment, we don’t have poor blacks,” Khanga answers.

If there’s no racism, another person asks, “Why are there no blacks from the Soviet Union represented in the Olympics?”

She thinks for a moment, then says that she doesn’t know any black athletes in Russia. Most of the blacks she knows are in “the conservatories,” studying music and in schools studying “the sciences.”

There is a momentary hush.

In America, Khanga can’t seem to avoid the notion of a congenital linkage between blacks and sports.

And in the quiet that descended after her answer, neither could the puzzled few.