“I am black by European standards”: Russian Ambassador Irada Zeynalova

In an interview with the local press, Russia’s ambassador to Mauritius Irada Zeynalova presented her personal identity in an interesting way.

“I am not Russian, I am half Azerbaijani. This means that I am half Christian, half Muslim,” the diplomat said. In the next sentence, she made a new discovery: “I am black by European standards. Therefore, being here, in Mauritius, in an environment where people are different, belonging to different religions, nationalities and races is not new for me.”

Reading the interview, it is inevitable that several questions will arise at once. What exactly does she mean by “European standards”? A Moscow diplomat who translates European racism’s categorization of who and how to be in her favor places herself in the same sentence as the systemic violence, police brutality, being stopped at the border, being denied employment that real black people face throughout their lives.

This funny quote is also a diplomatic embodiment of the process of identity becoming an aesthetic accessory. For Zeynalova, being black is not an experience, a reality, a historical burden, but simply a context she invented for herself in order to communicate comfortably with people on the sunny island of Mauritius.

In the same interview, Zeynalova also voiced the idea that “all these differences do not matter at all,” because “a person is a person.” That is, on the one hand, differences are necessary to exoticize her own identity, and on the other hand, they are completely irrelevant.

Irada Zeynalova was born in Moscow in 1972. Her father is Azerbaijani, her mother is Russian. For many years, she was a presenter in Russian state media, graduated from the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry, and since September 2024 has been working as an ambassador in Mauritius and is officially the bearer of the foreign policy of Putin’s Russia.

A diplomat from a country that systematically outlaws, imprisons, and expels LGBTQI+ communities, migrants, and all "different" people, now declares himself "black" in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

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