winter | 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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I often wonder if one problem with the race debate is that on some level Europeans just don't get Americans. They don't get black Americans and they don't get white Americans either, because European ways of dealing with things just run on very different lines.

And to us flat out hate for certain groups of societies just work differently and they might differ strongly from country to country. We often barely know how to deal with our own problems and the problems of our direct neighbouring countries and so maybe it feels weird to us to be asked to be dealing with the problems of other countries as well. We barely understand our own history and the history or our next door neighbors and current immigrants and so taking a stand on American history is just weird. We know some American history (probably more than the other way around). But we usually get the Uncle Tom's Hut, Martin Luther King cliffnotes version. (and that aside from the fact that the average European seems to be much more creeped out by the killing of American natives than I have ever seen any US American being) But that doesn't mean that we have a clear understanding of how the day to day dealings work. Especially since the closest we have at the moment is dealings with regular immigration of people of a different skin color and there are some rather core differences between the problems that arise from that than there are from the typical American black/white divide. We don't have the same problems of people of a different skin color still being discriminated against after 200 years not because we are better but because the black people we do have are so recent that they still fall under the dealing with immigrants problematic.

I don't think it's only recent immigrant problematic, because it directly ties to the colonization issue. At least it does for every European country which had a significant colonial presence. And that can in some cases date as far as 200 years ago.
And about slavery, Europe takes very little responsability for it despite the fact that they were also responsible, before even the US existed. We never did study Haiti's revolt in my French History classes, despite that being France most of my History teachers were marxist.
I think for all European countries that did have colonies (that does include Germany, right? They had colonies in the Africa eastern coast for a while IIRC, and the ties with Turkey were different but still related to Imperialism, weren't they?) you can't separate the issue with immigrants to the colonial issue. Because the "they're savages needing to be civilized" is very much still part of the discourse of racism against immigrants, as it were to justify colonization.

International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

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