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

[mirabilelectu.livejournal.com]

This is a very good post, particularly because it offers little Western-European me and actual (however small) insight to Poland. I see other people illustrating the situation in their countries, and I'll make use of the occasion to say a bit about the Netherlands [not Holland; that's the regionalism again!].

We have several major groups of immigrants, apart from our native minority of Frisians, and I'd argue they fall into two groups: former colonials/Antilleans and genuine immigrants (I say this because most of those who came here upon the indepence of Surinam chose to remain Dutch citizens, and the Dutch and mixed Dutch/Indonesians ("Indo's") and Moluccans were kicked out of the Republic of Indonesia). (And once upon a time about 120,000 Jews lived here; then World War II happened and over a hundred thousand never returned from the camps. Our helpful population register told the Nazis exactly who was Jewish and the other Pillars of our pretty self-segregated society [Jews, Socialists, Liberals, Catholics and Protestants all had their own Pillar, meaning shops, papers, radio stations, schools, etc.*] mostly didn't do a thing because, well Not Our People.)

Our current tensions are about Islamic immigrants (mostly originally Turkish and Moroccan) and poor young people who've come here from the Antilles. In fact, a former minister proposed a law to send criminal Antilleans (they are proportionally the most imprisoned in the Netherlands) back to the Antilles, even though the islands are part of the kingdom!

*As an aside, I believe this phenomenon is at least in part responsible for the initial failed integration of Islamic immigrants: initially it was thought better not to give them too much connection to Dutch society, because they'd be going again, and when it became clear they wouldn't be here temporarily but forever, and with their families, still no effort was made by the government to teach the our language so they could make an effort to become connected to Dutch society. I think the idea then was that there would be an Islamic Pillar along side all the others.

And as an aside to the aside, the exact same reasoning is being used to justify keeping the newest wave of immigrant workers -- Poles! -- out of mainstream society, because it's obviously worked so well in the past.

[winter]

Thing is, I dunno if anyone ever hit on the right model for a multi-ethnic society, one that won't have anyone feeling left out and resentful. This semi-isolationism doesn't work, melting pot doesn't work, nothing else really does work. Not unless you change the underlying paradigm of "we can only get along and cooperate if we are the same" and get everyone to agree on it.

[mirabilelectu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I completely agree with that. (There's a few people here you think you can't be functional in this society you've assimilated so completely you've become a stereotype!)

But I think we in particular, because of the Pillarisation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation), have that sense even stronger. And that was in a fairly mono-ethnical society, but there was still the serious need to conform to your Pillar. And, well, it's been less than half a century since the Pillars broke down.

Dear god I hate that term. (And huh, it was in Belgium as well; I never knew that.)