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

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

That's because the Roma that have emigrated from Romania are usually up to no good wherever they go. It's not that there aren't respectable Roma... it's because they don't want to change and adapt to society. Right now in Romania, I think 60% of the Roma population is employed; but their numbers are rapidly growing (and gods, do they have us Romanian nationals beat at natality rates ^^;;;) and about half of the criminal elements in our society happen to be of Roma nationality. Don't ask em why that is - maybe it's in their genes, or maybe they've gotten away with it so many times in the past that they will not change.

It sounds like you are rehearsing anti-Roma stereotypes, with a healthy dollop of racism, in the comments to a blog post for International Blog Against Racism Week. You are asserting negative things about a group of people without any proof and then suggesting that it's possibly genetic. I am frankly pretty horrified that you don't even hear this as racist.

[alice_montrose]

I am not rehearsing anything. I am merely stating how Roma are seen in Romania by the majority of the population. I have nothing against them, as individuals or a nation. But when you see them being offered so many opportunities for integration by the government (free superior education, well-paid job offers, etc.), and having most of them turn them down because hey, they are already work seasonal jobs - and even those without working permits - and they cannot possibly spend time studying for 3 or 4 years without having to pay... wouldn't you be annoyed?

Yes, I can see why you would accuse me of being a racist. Perhaps in a way, we all are - only toward a different set of people (like U.S. citizens against Latin American immigrants). You were not born and raised here, and therefore you probably have a different set of values. And I'm okay with that. Be as horrified as you like.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Maybe that's because it can be quite patronizing to tell a people how to live when they don't want to live this way?

[alice_montrose]

Possibly. But wouldn't they prefer living in a nice apartment and have baths as often as they like to living in dumps, with no food for their herd of children (because they seem not to have heard of contraceptives)? I have nothing against them, really... but if they won't change for themselves, at least for those children.

And I shall not get into that ridiculous tradition of them marrying off said offspring at ages starting from 10. Because I know that news went across the world a few years ago.

[etrangere.livejournal.com]

Still patronizing.

I have indeed heard about the age problem, I think that should be treated as a separate issue.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course we have similar stereotypes about racial minority groups in the United States. That's the point of International Blog Against Racism Week--to resist racist stereotyping. I am not accusing you of being a racist, because that implies that you are taking on these attitudes to persecute a racial minority. But you are taking on the attitudes, and they are racist attitudes, similar to the ones that people here in the United States have toward other groups.

You read an entire essay by someone you like that asserts that racist attitudes are common and deplorable only to say "well, of course we discriminate against this racial minority, would you like to hear my stereotypes about them?" Twice?

Roma and Sinti are not major minority groups in the United States. From an outsider's perspective, it looks like you have a racial minority who are 2.5% of the population whom you have accused of half of the criminal activity. Yes, that sounds familiar to me as someone from the United States! Though, as you say, our racial bias is against different groups. You blame the Roma for not succeeding in schools where, Roma representatives claim, their children face discrimination. Hey, it only takes a little Googling to find out that 50% of ethnic Romanians surveyed in 2004 thought Roma should be forcibly sterilized. (See here (https://www.irr.org.uk/cgi-bin/news/open.pl?id=7315)--I wanted something more detailed and recent, but this was what came up.) That's a pretty frightening statistic if you're a Romanian Gypsy. Especially knowing that in neighboring Slovakia Roma have been forcibly sterilized.

It never makes sense to compare discrimination, in the sense of deciding who has had it worst. But it does make sense to compare the biases of another society against the biases in your own society. It can make you see them.