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

[moonysshadow.livejournal.com]

I often think that there is relatively little antisemitic action at the moment is only because there are next on Jews and especially few visible ones. I often wonder if Austria and Germany are lucky that they can pass themselves off as civilized is because most of the Jews who were connected to the holocaust (the few that survived) preferred going to Israel or America.

Really? I'm from Germany myself, and I think anti-semitism, at least in the social groups I frequent, is more or less gone. Especially in the younger generations (mine and that of my parent), even though we very seldomly get confronted with Jewish people, it just isn't an issue any longer; the kind of racism that gets inbred (and let's be honest, all of our families are racist to some degree, including us) is usually against immigrants or east european countries. Especially the German-Polish relations, as someone already mentioned, are still a problem for many of the people living in former East Germany.
But even the NPD and other right-wing nationalists and neo-nazis, are focusing on immigrant and not Jews.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I still think that the reason we can feel relatively free of antisemitism (well aside from the occasional defacing of Jewish cementary) simply because the Jews were (and are) so invisible aside from the occasional Mahnmal.

It's just something that comes up when people are discussing black/white racism in the US. Where people are still talking whether black people or the descendants from slave are owed by the establishment. If there is a duty to be particularly sensitive.

We are taught that we have to be particularly sensitive to Jews and we are for the most part okay with it. But really being nice to Jews really is an abstract concept to us because there are barely any Jews around. We don't dislike jews because we don't know any.

And when people do get called on it, like some additional reparations that have been paid or because they have to give back some piece of art that was appropriated during WW2 there is bitching and there is grumbling and there is "Well, how much longer do we have to do this/how much longer do we have to pay/isn't it enough"?

After WW2 the Jews that survived had a place to go to, America and Israel to build a new identity. After slavery was abolished the slaves still had fewer rights for a long time and they stayed less educated and less rich than the average. And so issues of identity are still discussed and are still an issue.

That is not to say that the Jews were somewhat better off than the slaves. It means that we were better off because the people we treated badly mostly disappeared from our direct line of sight, found their own identity without our help and their new enemies are now other people so we don't have to feel guilty anymore. We had the liberty of recovering without having our mistakes stare in our faces in the shape of real living people, we recovered quietly and when we were ready we had our nice sanitized far removed Aufarbeitung that was more about us perpetrators wanking each other than about direct confrontation with real life jews. To me that seems much different than dealing with a minority right in out midst.

Just like it is easy not to hate Roma if there are so few of them that barely ever has met one or your country is so rich that they can ensure that even Roma live relatively well. (ever tried to say Roma in the presence of somebody from Eastern Europe? Usually instant guarantee for a long and detailed tirade about what low lives they are)

I'd like to think that we are different because of OUR unique history (scared straight so to speak) but honestly? I'm not convinced. It's easy for us because we could live in denial over the mess we made (because the world was busy with the Cold War) till we were ready for it. And if we ever do get into really dire immigration problems again, I'm not convinced that we wouldn't be at least as assholish as everybody around us. And if the immigration or culture inside culture was with Jews, I'm not convinced that we would be more sensitive (probably actually less) than we are with others. The reasons we can be easy going about it is because there just aren't enough Jews for us to really feel like there could even be a problem.