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

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

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?

[winter]

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.)