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

[kaethe.livejournal.com]

Of course, the gov just can't abandon these people, that would be morally wrong. But I am reminded of a saying of Bede's "give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach him to fish, and he can feed himself for the rest of his life". However, what does one do, when those that could be taught refuse to learn? I have many friends who are public school teachers, and they say over and over again that many poor children, esp. blacks, often don't want to learn. Interesting enough, though, poor children of other races often do want to learn.

I would be interested in knowing how well these public school teachers have been educated in the needs of economically disadvantaged children of *any* race. As a public school teacher myself, I'm aware that there are individual students out there who don't value education--the old, "How am I going to use this in real life?" argument that assumes they aren't. At the same time, I'm also aware that kids literally come out of the womb geared to learn. You almost never find a child in pre-K/Kindergarten/first grade who doesn't love to learn, although sometimes they don't love the way the school makes them learn. That is true regardless of race. Resistance doesn't start until they're much older, and it's not a function of race so much as a mixture of how the school works and the home/community support that a child gets. If the home environment doesn't value education, if the community the child is growing up in doesn't value education, then the child is going to have an uphill row to hoe. However, the school *can* make up that difference if the people at the school are willing. They can provide the encouragement, the stimulation, and the support structure (such as help with homework, healthy meals, etc.) that a child needs. Some schools don't step up to the plate. Worse, there are historical problems with race in education: studies show that minorities (and females) are often called on less than whites (particularly males), meaning they have less opportunities to vocalize what they're (hopefully) learning. There is a disproportionate number of minorities, mainly black students, in special education, and it's not necessarily because they have a true learning disability. Unfortunately, special ed. works as a form of "tracking" where s.e. kids are nearly always learning at a lower grade level than they're enrolled in. (This is totally appropriate for those kids with learning disabilities; not so much for kids who simply need extra help to catch up, but have the intelligence to do the catching up if given a chance.)

Ruby Payne is a controversial "authority" in education; many people feel that her work on how to work with children in poverty is racist and not even totally accurate in its portrayal of what the "culture of poverty" looks like. However, she does say something that is true, regardless of its source: all children, and especially children in poverty, *must* have a rewarding relationship with someone in the school in order to be invested in learning. They have to believe that at least one person believes in them. With older kids, that can mean (for the teacher) working against years of ingrained apathy in the student. It can mean taking the time to figure out where the kid is, even if it's not grade level, and teaching them there. It can mean convincing them that they're not as dumb as they've been shown they are all these years, that they're not going to fail again. It can mean showing them that even though the teacher is melanin-challenged and they're not, they're still just as important as everyone else in the room, because one of the insidious messages of racism is that the darker your skin, the less you're worth to the people in authority. It can mean disciplining and then giving a hug/pat on the back/whatever rather than being strict and stern, because they don't really believe you like them. It can mean going an extra five miles, not just one.

To be honest, if I had teachers that looked at people like me and assumed we didn't want to learn, I wouldn't want to learn from them.

Re: International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Here in the UK they've just released the last set of figures on educational attainment by gender, class and ethnic origin, and do you know who came bottom. White, working class boys, below black, working class boys, and well below working class girls of either colour. I believe they said Chinese children came top.

Re: International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

[kaethe.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. Did they have any theories as to why?

Re: International Blog Against Racism Week: Central European perspective

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Nothing beyond the same excuses they've been trotting out for years about black boys.

The biggest cause that gets the blame is the "feminising" of the education system.