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International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

ibarw is on again, and after the recent kerfuffle (or does anyone remember it in the wake of the Boldthrough?), I've been thinking along the same lines.

One issue I often see in racism discussions is the Europe/America divide. Racism in America is something special, yes, but I think it's mostly because of how much it's been fought against and for, there. I wonder if it wasn't for the better: if Americans aren't perfect, at least they have the instinct to respond to an accusation of racism with "No, I'm not." Too often in Poland, the response is "So what?"

And I'm not talking about the usual angle, the black/white divide, though that one makes the news on the football field. Not even about Asians, though there was a recent stellar example of a big bazaar being shut down, then given an extension - "But only for the white merchants, because the Asians are all illegal immigrants". And no, the guy didn't lose his - ministerial - post over it.

The thing is, in Europe it's hard to say "white", and our racism problems aren't the ones that make big fandom debates. When did you last read a post railing against discimination of the Roma? Or Romanians even - in Poland, those two are often lumped together and passed off as thieves and beggars. Or the Ukrainian affair, which goes back centuries before there were either blacks or whites in what is now the US of A. And that's not even touching on the big bogeyman.

To apply standard American measures of political correctness to Poland would be to have a heart attack over every fridge magnet of a Jew counting money. It's a financial good-luck thing, on the lines of the Irish leprechauns with their beer and pots of gold (and somehow, the Irish sell them themselves), but put it next to the tele-evangelist who promises not sulphur, but the Jews coming to take everything away if people don't pray hard and give him money, and it starts being frightening. This is the country where accusations of Jewish blood are thrown in political debate as the highest insult.

This is the country that used to have three million Jewish citizens, once. Once.

So forgive me if I don't overlook these issues, if I don't close off my creativity in a garden where I pretend race doesn't matter at all, just because "it's an American issue". I'm too hot-blooded for that, too prone to overthinking to ignore the fact that if something conforms to the usual tropes because it's easier, it reinforces them in the reader, the watcher.

Mixing Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish blood probably wasn't one of my ancestors' brightest ideas.

(As an aside, I've also been thinking about the issue of writing about race or other discrimination from the point of view of a character with a cultural background and ideas different from my own. Would anybody be interested in reading something like that?)

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In Poland, it's a see-saw - before World War Two, we had only about two-thirds ethnic Poles according to various statistics. Between border movements and resettlement, we ended up with 98% ethnic Poles until 1989, and now IIRC we have one of the largest Vietnamese populations outside Vietnam. It's telling how different various immigrants are treated - Arabs and Asians generally get treated well, blacks tend to get stares and sometimes knee-jerk racist reactions from the football crowd just because they're uncommon, while Romanians, Russians, Belariussians and Ukrainians etc trigger old familiar prejudices at times.

I think the one difference in the Northern Ireland situation is that at sight (and partly even with accent) there's no way to tell if someone's Protestant or Catholic unless they declare their allegiance by words, actions or dress, so it's a bit harder to discriminate against either party. And hey, at least with Poles around you can finally buy decent bread ;)

(Sorry. Was stuck in Ireland for three months on an exchange program in 2004 and got sick and tired of not being able to buy any bread that didn't have the consistency of cotton wool.)

Gotcha and gotcha.

One whole side of my family is Polish, and my husband's entire family is. So the history is more familiar to me than probably most Americans. There are Jews who do harbor resentment, but, it's like you say: a knee-jerk kind of thing. The facts speak for themselves.

I can understand (emotionally) the Israelis' fear of being unsafe. It's good to know it's not fact based. I hope that over time their perceptions will change too.

My sister said the worst place for her was actually Germany- she got spit on at a train station. I found that shocking, but I don't know if I'm just naive.

*nods* I think the reminders like Jews in Europe and the black movement in the US are good for general societal attitudes and awareness. Awareness being key - it does no-one any good to pretend that it's all fine and everyone's getting along.

I just got ticked off when reading both people from Europe dismissing it as a "strange American thing" and Americans saying "but we can pretend there's no racism, just like in Europe". Only place prejudice doesn't exist is Utopia.

I'm told that in Germany, it depends on the region - the Ossis didn't quite get the guilt and memory as beat into their heads as their western counterparts did. Certainly when I was in Köln, those who did mention that, said that it's a knee-jerk reaction to check for antisemitism and make sure none of your actions or opinions are such. But the fact is, primitive idiots happen everywhere, and like I said before, any excuse is valid if an idiot is looking for a fight :(

I really do think that awareness of the problem is the first step to fixing it. If you know that what you're doing is wrong, you're that little bit less likely to act on it and pass on those attitudes.

And cultural loss is a painful thing. I keep meaning to learn Russian, still :(

*nods* We lived in France for six months when I was 9, and while I came out of it with the firm conviction that people can be angels or bastards no matter what the skin colour (and being a racial minority in school was an eye-opener), Mother still treats North African-looking people with suspicion. Maybe the reason I don't is because I'm generally not scared of much, physically - being my height and fitness does tend to come in handy ;)

Still, at the same time or just a bit later, there was the big influx into Poland. IIRC a large bit of it was Dutch and German Jews looking for a place that, at the time, was amazingly free of persecution and had substantial incentives for settlers.

Thing is, I dunno if anyone ever hit on the right model for a multi-ethnic society, one that won't have anyone feeling left out and resentful. This semi-isolationism doesn't work, melting pot doesn't work, nothing else really does work. Not unless you change the underlying paradigm of "we can only get along and cooperate if we are the same" and get everyone to agree on it.

Oh, I completely agree with that. (There's a few people here you think you can't be functional in this society you've assimilated so completely you've become a stereotype!)

But I think we in particular, because of the Pillarisation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation), have that sense even stronger. And that was in a fairly mono-ethnical society, but there was still the serious need to conform to your Pillar. And, well, it's been less than half a century since the Pillars broke down.

Dear god I hate that term. (And huh, it was in Belgium as well; I never knew that.)

That's because the Roma that have emigrated from Romania are usually up to no good wherever they go. It's not that there aren't respectable Roma... it's because they don't want to change and adapt to society. Right now in Romania, I think 60% of the Roma population is employed; but their numbers are rapidly growing (and gods, do they have us Romanian nationals beat at natality rates ^^;;;) and about half of the criminal elements in our society happen to be of Roma nationality. Don't ask em why that is - maybe it's in their genes, or maybe they've gotten away with it so many times in the past that they will not change.

It sounds like you are rehearsing anti-Roma stereotypes, with a healthy dollop of racism, in the comments to a blog post for International Blog Against Racism Week. You are asserting negative things about a group of people without any proof and then suggesting that it's possibly genetic. I am frankly pretty horrified that you don't even hear this as racist.

So forgive me if I don't overlook these issues, if I don't close off my creativity in a garden where I pretend race doesn't matter at all, just because "it's an American issue". I'm too hot-blooded for that, too prone to overthinking to ignore the fact that if something conforms to the usual tropes because it's easier, it reinforces them in the reader, the watcher.

I think Americans would like our racial problems to be unique, because in some way that means we can't help it. I have the same impression of Germans and their lionization of Daniel Goldhagen. (He was a popular historian who emphasized the unique nature of German anti-Semitism.) When societies do that, they deny the actual mechanisms of popularization of stereotypes, political use of stereotypes and systematic discrimination.

As a Jew I was brought up to believe that Polish anti-Semitism was inherent to Polish society. But this isn't true. Poland is just like any other country: anti-Jewish ideas were systematically exploited by certain right-wing political elements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as part of a certain vision of national unification. The fact that those ideas persist and have currency is a measure of the failure of liberal elements in Polish society to create a counter-vision of civic nationalism. It's not a big mystery. (My friend wrote a book on the history of Polish anti-Semitism (http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/5017.html) in which she picked apart the history of how it got this way--I liked the way she doesn't demonize Poles in the process.)

Even though expressions of overt racism have lost their respectability in US society, the discriminatory social mechanisms persist, and the less obvious ideological manifestations do, too. A key mechanism of racism is segregation. There are a lot of things that just could not go on if they were visible to the entirety of the society. On the other hand, if we make victim-blaming sufficiently subtle and omnipresent, then no one sees the racism.

I don't know, some people seem to be pretty happy in their denial :)

I am not rehearsing anything. I am merely stating how Roma are seen in Romania by the majority of the population. I have nothing against them, as individuals or a nation. But when you see them being offered so many opportunities for integration by the government (free superior education, well-paid job offers, etc.), and having most of them turn them down because hey, they are already work seasonal jobs - and even those without working permits - and they cannot possibly spend time studying for 3 or 4 years without having to pay... wouldn't you be annoyed?

Yes, I can see why you would accuse me of being a racist. Perhaps in a way, we all are - only toward a different set of people (like U.S. citizens against Latin American immigrants). You were not born and raised here, and therefore you probably have a different set of values. And I'm okay with that. Be as horrified as you like.

Maybe that's because it can be quite patronizing to tell a people how to live when they don't want to live this way?

Possibly. But wouldn't they prefer living in a nice apartment and have baths as often as they like to living in dumps, with no food for their herd of children (because they seem not to have heard of contraceptives)? I have nothing against them, really... but if they won't change for themselves, at least for those children.

And I shall not get into that ridiculous tradition of them marrying off said offspring at ages starting from 10. Because I know that news went across the world a few years ago.

Yes, of course we have similar stereotypes about racial minority groups in the United States. That's the point of International Blog Against Racism Week--to resist racist stereotyping. I am not accusing you of being a racist, because that implies that you are taking on these attitudes to persecute a racial minority. But you are taking on the attitudes, and they are racist attitudes, similar to the ones that people here in the United States have toward other groups.

You read an entire essay by someone you like that asserts that racist attitudes are common and deplorable only to say "well, of course we discriminate against this racial minority, would you like to hear my stereotypes about them?" Twice?

Roma and Sinti are not major minority groups in the United States. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like you have a racial minority who are 2.5% of the population whom you have accused of half of the criminal activity. Yes, that sounds familiar to me as someone from the United States! Though, as you say, our racial bias is against different groups. You blame the Roma for not succeeding in schools where, Roma representatives claim, their children face discrimination. Hey, it only takes a little Googling to find out that 50% of ethnic Romanians surveyed in 2004 thought Roma should be forcibly sterilized. (See here (https://www.irr.org.uk/cgi-bin/news/open.pl?id=7315)--I wanted something more detailed and recent, but this was what came up.) That's a pretty frightening statistic if you're a Romanian Gypsy. Especially knowing that in neighboring Slovakia Roma have been forcibly sterilized.

It never makes sense to compare discrimination, in the sense of deciding who has had it worst. But it does make sense to compare the biases of another society against the biases in your own society. It can make you see them.

Still patronizing.

I have indeed heard about the age problem, I think that should be treated as a separate issue.

This, in turn, causes discrimination against any Romanian person going abroad by sole virtue of a well-known and acknowledged fact: "Romanians are thieves and criminals, and we don't want them in our society".

You'd think that experiencing discrimination like that as a Romanian,and how wrong people are in how they group people like yourself, you'd think twice about the racist things you are thinking and saying about the Roma, Hungarians, and Bulgarians. Turn around what you're saying, and think how it would feel to be Roma and reading what you're saying right here--how would that feel? Do you even care?

Great post.

I think the leprauchan with pot of gold and Jew counting money icons don't really fit as analogues at all--so it took me a while to get what you were expressing here.

The leprechaun is a mythical being--a cultural artifact, not a representation of an Irish person herself. It's sort of a mascot for Irishness the Irish are promoting themselves here. However, no Jew promoted that Jew as miser magnet. It is meant to represent a Jewish person, not a fixture of self-promoted Jewish culture. That stereotype is used to promote hate of Jews--that Jews have financial powers of control to be feared--no matter how innocent a symbol of luck it seems to the Polish. It can't be severed from racist thought. So it's nothing like the leprechaun as an Irish symbol at all.

And damn, as a Jew raised in the US, I would have a heartattack over those fridge magnets--you bet! Why don't anti-racists in Poland get upset over it as well--I'm still not understanding that--could you explain?

oh, trust me, I've experienced plenty of discrimination for being a woman. And if you think my comments racist when all I did was explain the general attitude in Romania towards these people, and some of the reasons for it, then that's your problem. I happen to have gypsy friends that I get along with just fine, and there's no discrimination involved. But do expect me to hide the fact that a good part of our criminal elements are Roma, and that most of them seem resilient to change? That some still live off child support? Why should I do that? It's true that things are changing, slowly, but you're not the one living here are you now.

And you have no idea what things are about with the Hungarian extremists in Romania. I'm not talking about all Hungarians here. And I have good Hungarian friends too.

So the next time you decide to call people racist, think about your own country's attitude toward Latin American immigrants. And THEN start calling people things, alright?

I meant more the beer kind of leprechauns - gotta admit they kind of perpetuate the drunken-and-superstitious Irish stereotype. That was another case of ethnic discrimination up to at least the nineteenth century - the way the English treated the Irish and the stereotypes there.

And quite frankly, I've seen a lot of people who have those fridge magnets, including a historian I know. I guess they treat the Jewish merchant as just another figure in the theatre-of-the-past that included the naive barge kid, the crusty old knight, the German merchant, and a host of other characters long gone from the cities.

I think the saving grace might be the fact that it calls to a period that ended in the eighteenth century, while the ideological (as opposed to knee-jerk fear-the-different reactions that happened everywhere in Europe) antisemitism dates from the end of the nineteenth - before, the Jews were treated more like one of the many ethnicities that made up the country. I don't know if you're familiar with Pan Tadeusz, our Great Big Patriotic Poetic Epic published in 1834, but in the story of a patriotic revival in a borderland village, an important patriotic conspirer and later the musician who plays a medley of patriotic songs that get everyone in tears as the culmination of the whole twelve-book story is the Jewish innkeeper, natch.

(Not that I'd get a magnet like that myself, of course. But then, I can imagine the connotations it would trigger in the mind of someone like you, while most people here - see my whole post - just don't think about these things.)

And if you think my comments racist when all I did was explain the general attitude in Romania towards these people, and some of the reasons for it, then that's your problem.

No, I'm not thinking your comments are racist because you're explaining a general attitude in Romania. I'm calling your comments racist because you are perpetuating that majority racist opinion instead of resisting it and trying to change it and make things better--you have that choice.

I happen to have gypsy friends that I get along with just fine, and there's no discrimination involved.

You know, this is a trope people accused otf racism bring up all the time to try to deflect from an examination of their racist attitudes--the "some of my best friends are x, y, z," line. Have you spoken to your friends the accusations you are making here about the Roma--and how did that go over?

But do expect me to hide the fact that a good part of our criminal elements are Roma, and that most of them seem resilient to change? That some still live off child support? Why should I do that? It's true that things are changing, slowly, but you're not the one living here are you now.

It's true I'm not living there, but the rhetoric you are using against the Roma--"they are criminals and they are living off child support"--is exactly the kind of statements white racists in the US make about our racial minorities--blacks and latinos in particular. To make these statements is racist. Because, you know, other Romanians need child support as well--so why make needing child support an accusation against a minority ethnic group? Other Romanians steal--why make that an accusation against the Roma in Romania? I am not living there but I have been following reports of the discrimination the Roma face in Europe at large. There are groups on LJ even, for and by the Roma and others who wish to support, where you can learn more about their side of these issues if you wish. I doubt your Roma friends feel welcome talking to you about these things.

And you have no idea what things are about with the Hungarian extremists in Romania. I'm not talking about all Hungarians here.

Understood. No, I don't know the issue at all--is there a part of Romania that a group of Hungarians are trying to claim? It's just the context in which you stated this--combined with calling Bulgarians and Roma criminals--sounded like you were making a statement about the entire ethnicity/nationality and I only have your words here and you were using them broadly and unqualified about ethnic/national groups.

So the next time you decide to call people racist, think about your own country's attitude toward Latin American immigrants. And THEN start calling people things, alright?

Oh, absolutely--I do call out the racism against Latinos and the hypocrisy of Americans who rail against Latino immigrants--it's my duty to work against racism in my country--there's sure unending work to be done here--including the internal work I need to keep doing in myself. That doesn't change that you are expressing racist attitudes that I think you need to be fighting against as well.

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International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

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