International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

[winter]

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?)

Comments

[valancystar.livejournal.com]

Yes, racism definitely is well and alive in Europe. And like others have pointed out, it takes different forms in different countries. In Finland, people tend to be very prejudiced against Russians - many basically seem to consider that all Russian men are criminals and all women are whores, or alternatively they'll rage at them for stealing our land back in the 40's. We seemingly have less of a racism problem with immigrants etc. but that's only because we don't have nearly as many immigrants as most other European countries. Most people who haven't been born Finnish don't seem to care to move here, and perhaps it's not a wonder. ;) But when we do get immigrants, people can be quite racist - and since we haven't had much diversity for a long time, people aren't at all used to dealing with it.

Fear and dislike of what is different seems to be a deeply ingrained instinct in people, so it's quite difficult to overcome. But denying the problem certainly doesn't help.

It was an interesting experience, though, when I lived in France for nine months, and there were lots of North African immigrants there... Despite very much wanting not to be racist, after a few months I was treating with suspicion any young man who looked North African, avoiding looking at them and preferring to stay away from them. Because every single time some man made a pass at me about two seconds after seeing me, in none too dignified and pleasant manner, it was someone who looked North African. I absolutely hate when men do that, and find it threatening, so after a while it was impossible not to note that it was always the people belonging to a certain group who did that. And though I knew that there might be such men who are actually perfectly well-behaved and respect women, it seemed safer to assume the worst. It does get problematic when people feel they have a good reason to consider many of a particular group to be somehow threatening or disrespectful of their core values.

[winter]

*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 ;)