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

[fionn-a-bhair.livejournal.com]

It can be very hard to explain these problems to outsiders I think. I'm Irish, and it's literally true that I had not seen a black person in the flesh until I was eight or nine years old - which makes a lot of the commentary on race in fandom kind of baffling to me, as I just don't have that in my cultural background. We didn't have black people - we didn't get immigrants, of any variety. We didn't have Jews (well, we did for a few years in the forties and fifties, but the population was really too small to sustain itself, and I think most of them emigrated to the States eventually), or Muslims, or even Orthodox Christians until very, very recently. I mean, when I was a child, it was assumed that my brothers and I would have to emigrate ourselves, probably to America. It really isn't all that long ago.

All that's changed now, of course. We had the Celtic Tiger and all that, and somehow we finally became, you know, economically developed and all that jazz. The speed of the change is astonishing. Dublin has a Chinatown now - or at least the beginnings of one - and streets full of Polish bars, and substantial African and Muslim minorities, and all of this within the space of ten years. Now admittedly, the cheek of any Irish person complaining about immigration is pretty astonishing, given our history, but it did happen. There've been some very nasty outbreaks of racism (mainly in the most economically deprived areas - I've always wondered how racism and classism feed off each other) in the last few years. It seems to have calmed down quite considerably.

Plus, there's been all the fun in Northern, which even I don't fully understand. Certainly that's a primarily religious division, but from what I've seen and heard, I don't really see any qualitative difference between that sectarianism and true racism.

(As for the leprauchauns? I have no idea what that's about - they don't even play that big a role in Irish mythology to be honest - but they don't bother me especially. We've had much, much worse stereotypes thrown at us back in the day, and those stupid leprauchauns things don't hurt anyone (well, they're pretty ugly to look at). Besides, without leprauchauns I wouldn't have had the experience of being asked for directions to find leprauchauns by an American tourist.)

[winter]

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.)