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

Re: International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

[a-blue-moon-cat.livejournal.com]

being interested in the almighty dollar was *the* essential American ideal. At least, that's how it's been presented to the rest of the world. This is sad. "Greed is good" started in the 80s here and has never gone away. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle-class is being taxed to death. What's happening to the middle class is also a direct result of the conservative politicians in this country not wanting a thinking and acting middle-class, a middle-class that would rise up against them once they realize that their rights are being taken away. Without an educated middle-class, a country is left with rich people lording it over poor people who are too busy trying to stay alive to worry about any thing like loss of their rights. (Many of the Latin American countries are in this fix. And many other third-world countries as well.) The Federal administration in the US has been trying to do just this since the 2000 Presidential election.

It's not that most people here think greed is good, we are just trying to stay alive under the crushing burden of taxes, we of the middle-class. Poor people don't pay much, if any, in taxes, and the rich wiggle through loopholes in the tax laws. And here's the really sad thing: most corporations do not pay taxes any more, due to conservative politicians passing laws to protect those big businesses. After Hurricane Katrina two years ago, gas prices doubled, even tripled, and have stayed that way. Exxon-Mobile had windfall profits after the hurricanes, and yet the Feds refused to tax them. And many people displaced by those hurricanes still don't have a decent place to live or a decent job! Don't think that the middle-class in this country is that supportive of the current Republican administration. Some of this is why our Congress is now controlled by the more liberal Democratic party, and why probably a Democrat will be elected to the Presidency in 2008.