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

[alias_sqbr]

Here from metafandom, and really glad you write this post. Your own experiences were really interesting, and it's inspired so much other interesting discussion!

I am personally quite interested in Poland since my maternal grandmothers family left Poland at the turn of the last century due to the pogroms, and my maternal grandfathers family are ukranian and irish Catholics who entirely disowned him for marrying a jew, so I was always brought up to despise racism and intolerance ..except maybe against those horrible antimsemetic poles and catholics *rolls eyes*

As an australian I think our attitudes to race are different again to europe and america: unlike europe the white majority is pretty racially and culturally homogenous(*), and unlike America we don't have this large oppressed somewhat racially segregated segment of the population always agitating to make sure noone forgets about racism(**). As with pretty much all first world countries (and presumably a lot of poorer countries, you just don't encounter so many people from them online) we have the ever present resentment towards immigrants and their descendents despite the fact that pretty much everyone is either an aborigine or has only been here a few generations.

(*)Though there has been a process of integration as Mediterranean immigrants have gone from "untrustworthy brown people" to "nice white people". This may have something to do with the end of the white australia policy, so that they are no longer the "least white" group coming in.
(**)Since the aboriginals are too successfully downtrodden to make their voices heard, and none of the other racial groups seem to organise politically (not counting religious groups) Huh. You know that never struck me before.

[winter]

*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.

[alias_sqbr]

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