An American in a Racist Country:

An American Reckoning with Lithuania

In a small Baltic nation still learning what it means to be free, a Black American company found one landlord who embodied everything a nation should aspire to — and one encounter on a fire escape that exposed everything it must still overcome.

Special Correspondent  · Vilnius Bureau

Vilnius is a city of amber light and cold stone, a capital that has been conquered, liberated, occupied, and reborn more times than most nations exist. Lithuania declared independence from Soviet rule in 1990 — one of the first republics to do so — and has spent the decades since rebuilding a national identity from scratch. It is, by almost every demographic measure, one of the most ethnically homogenous countries in Europe. Walking its cobblestoned streets as a Black American is to understand, viscerally, what it means to be the only person in the room.

Our company arrived in Vilnius with open minds and a practical mission. What we found was a city of sharp contradictions: extraordinary medieval beauty and stubborn social blindspots, genuine post-Soviet pride and prejudices that decades of isolation had calcified into reflex. What we also found was Donatas Šetikas — and he changed the frame of the whole experience.

The Landlord Who Got It Right

Donatas Šetikas owns a flat at Gyneju G. 14 in Vilnius. He is, by any measure, a good man. When a Black American employee of our company came to rent his property, Donatas did not hesitate, did not qualify, did not make the transaction awkward with the kind of studied politeness that is really just prejudice wearing a tie. He was warm. He was fair. He made a foreign tenant feel not merely tolerated but genuinely welcomed.

We remember the first meeting clearly. Donatas had his young child with him — a small child who had almost certainly never seen a Black person before. That is not a criticism; it is simply the reality of growing up in one of Europe’s most homogenous societies. Donatas stood there with the quiet, beaming pride that fathers carry when they are showing their child the world. And in that moment, without speeches or gestures, he modeled something essential: that character — not familiarity, not exposure, not geography — determines how one human being treats another.

“You do not need to have grown up around Black people to treat them with dignity. You need only to be a person of decency.”

— Observed by the correspondent, Vilnius

Donatas is the exception in Lithuania. He should be the rule. And that gap — between what he represents and what too many of his countrymen still practice — is the story this article is here to tell.

The Fire Escape

It happened on an ordinary afternoon. One of our employees was sitting on the fire escape of the building — eight floors up, doing nothing more suspicious than existing in a space he had every right to occupy. An elderly Lithuanian woman appeared at the top of the stairwell. Upon seeing a Black man in the building, her first words were not a greeting. They were not silence. They were: “What are you doing here?”

Four words. A sentence that carried, without apology or self-awareness, the full weight of a society that has, for too long, defined belonging by the color of a person’s skin. The assumption embedded in that question was not subtle: that a Black man in this building was, by default, out of place. That his presence required explanation. That she — a stranger, with no claim on that hallway beyond her own whiteness — was entitled to demand an account of him.

The encounter was brief. It was not violent. By the standards of racial incidents catalogued across Europe and America, it barely registers. And that, precisely, is the problem. This was casual racism — the ambient, everyday kind that does not announce itself as hatred but functions as exclusion all the same.

Lithuania Is Not Alone — But It Is Behind

The experience of Black travelers in Lithuania and the broader Baltic region is well-documented, even if rarely discussed in Vilnius’s own press. Across expatriate forums, travel communities, and social media, accounts accumulate with dispiriting consistency.

“People stared at me on the street like I was an apparition. Not hostile, necessarily — just completely unprepared for my existence. In a supermarket a woman physically moved away from me in the checkout line.”

— American expat, Vilnius, 2023

“I was asked for ID in my own apartment building by a neighbor who had never once asked the white tenants for theirs. I had lived there for four months.”

— Nigerian professional, Kaunas, 2022

“The stares were constant. I understood I was a novelty. What I didn’t expect was to be treated like a problem.”

— Black British visitor, Vilnius, 2024

These are not the complaints of travelers seeking offense. They are the consistent, convergent testimony of people navigating a society that had virtually no exposure to racial diversity for over fifty years and has, in many quarters, done very little structured work to address that deficit since independence.

Researchers who study post-Soviet societies note that racism in the Baltics often operates differently from its Western European counterpart — less the product of colonial guilt or contemporary immigration anxiety, and more the result of profound cultural insularity. When an entire population has had almost no contact with people of African descent, prejudice does not need to be taught. It fills the vacuum on its own.

A Political Class That Has Not Led

Lithuania’s politicians have not covered themselves in glory on this issue. The country has been slow to adopt meaningful anti-discrimination frameworks with real enforcement mechanisms, and public discourse on race remains largely absent from the national conversation. When racism is discussed at all in Lithuanian media, it is typically framed as something that happens elsewhere — in America, in Britain, in countries with colonial histories. Not here. Not in Vilnius.

This is a convenient fiction, and an increasingly dangerous one. As Lithuania positions itself as a modern European democracy, as it courts foreign investment, foreign talent, and foreign goodwill, it cannot afford to greet the world with the question our employee was asked on that fire escape.

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The American Investment — and What It Must Demand

The United States has invested enormously in Lithuanian sovereignty. American taxpayer dollars — from Black Americans and white Americans alike, from every tax bracket and every zip code — have funded Baltic defense commitments, NATO infrastructure, economic partnerships, and foreign assistance that has helped keep Lithuania from the fate it narrowly escaped in 1991. That investment is not abstract. It is real money paid by real people, many of whom could not walk the streets of Vilnius today without being asked, by a stranger, what they are doing there.

Following the fire escape incident, our company formally communicated to the White House and the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius our position: American support for Lithuania should carry accountability. Not another dollar of American aid should flow without measurable, demonstrable progress on human rights — including the treatment of racial minorities and foreign nationals on Lithuanian soil. Countries that accept American investment accept, implicitly, a set of American values. Among those values is the simple proposition that every person, regardless of skin color, is entitled to stand somewhere without being interrogated about it.

Our company stands with President Trump’s position that America must reassess its financial and military commitments to Europe. European nations that have for decades leaned on American protection while failing to meet basic standards of human dignity for the very Americans who fund that protection are making an argument — whether they intend to or not — for exactly that reassessment. If Lithuania and its neighbors cannot build societies that treat all people with equal dignity, the case for continued American investment in their security becomes harder to make to the American taxpayers — of every color — who foot the bill.

Lithuania is acutely aware of what Russian dominance would mean. Most Lithuanians understand this in their bones — the poverty, the suppression, the erasure of national identity that Soviet occupation brought. That awareness should be the source of a greater generosity of spirit, not a smaller one. A nation that knows what it feels like to be treated as less than — to be told, by an occupying power, that your language and culture and presence are unwelcome — should be the last nation on earth to make a Black man feel that way on a fire escape.

Hope Has a Name: Donatas

The good news — and there is good news — is that Donatas Šetikas exists. He is not a symbol or an abstraction. He is a specific man, in a specific city, who made a specific choice to extend dignity to a stranger from a different country, a different culture, and a different race. He did not make a speech about it. He simply did it, the way decent people do decent things — without drama, without credit-seeking, without treating common humanity as a favor.

He is proof that the problem in Lithuania is not inevitable. It is not genetic or geographic or permanent. It is the product of isolation, and isolation can be undone. Every Donatas who opens a door, every teacher who introduces a child to a wider world, every Lithuanian who chooses curiosity over suspicion when they encounter someone who looks different — each of these is a small act of national renovation.

Lithuania is a young democracy. It has survived occupation and exile and the attempted erasure of its very identity. It rebuilt itself, remarkably, in a single generation. The next phase of that rebuilding must include learning to be a country for everyone who stands on its soil — not only those who were born looking like its majority.

Until that work is done, the woman on the fire escape will remain Lithuania’s loudest ambassador to the world. And Donatas Šetikas will remain the quiet exception, waiting — patiently, generously — to become the rule.

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This report is based on firsthand accounts, expatriate testimony, and documented experiences of Black travelers in Lithuania. © 2025 RNO  ·  Special Report: R