In recent years, a march has been held in Poland to mark the country’s independence. While the event is viewed as an opportunity to remember those who died in the process of establishing the Polish state, it has also faced allegations of racism and xenophobia. Bolaji Balogun argues that in light of these debates, it is worth examining how ethnic minorities in modern Poland frequently find themselves at odds with traditional conceptions of Polish identity.
On 27 January, world leaders, including the President of Poland, who is backed by the current ruling party (Law and Justice – PiS), gathered at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp for the commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day. During the event, they all called for the defeat of anti-Semitism, racism and discrimination. While this stance is a welcome one, the occasion nevertheless offers an opportunity to shine a light on how ethnic minorities living in modern Poland feel at odds with traditional conceptions of Polish identity.
This is evident in recent celebrations of Polish independence. Poland started celebrating its independence with an annual march in 2008. The main focus of the march has been the historical re-establishment of the Polish state after 123 years. The half a million Poles who died in the processes of state creation have been at the centre of the celebration. However, in 2017, Poland’s march of independence was marred by allegations of racism, with messages such as “pure blood, clear mind” and “Europe will be white or uninhabited” present. This fuelled concerns about the rise of xenophobia in Poland at a time when other European countries are coming to terms with ideologies of white supremacy.
In 2018, the leaders of Law and Justice, the current ruling party, celebrated the country’s independence with about 200,000 people, in the process marching alongside far-right groups. Again, this raised concerns about Law and Justice implicitly encouraging neo-fascist groups, particularly given the open invitation to neo-fascist activists from Italy to participate in what was supposed to be a celebration of the glorious dead. In the end, the celebration ultimately appeared as a protest against the European Union for its role in the migrant crisis.
The 2019 march of independence was described as a ‘hub for far-right groups’, with messages about the protection of Catholic nationalism, the isolation of LGBT communities, and a strong stance against mass migration on display. Given all these controversies, many have discussed whether it is time for Poland’s march of independence to move away from the kind of anti-immigrant and ‘anti-Other’ rhetoric that seems to have been revived under the current Polish government.
The 2017 independence march in Warsaw, Credit: TG Sokół Lublin (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
This rhetoric may appear to be expressed via one-off slogans during Poland’s celebration of independence, but it has much deeper racial and discriminatory implications. It has been reported to be an endemic everyday struggle for many non-white people living in Poland. Whilst Poland’s celebration of independence is exhilarating for many white Poles, the same cannot be said for foreigners, LGBT groups and ethnic minorities – the black and brown people – who are assumed by some citizens not to belong in Poland, and are therefore seen as unable to fit into Poland’s celebration of independence. In all this, nationalism may appear to be a problem of the minority in Poland, but there are indications that the current Polish government’s actions have provided a vehicle for these sentiments to re-enter the mainstream.
Since PiS came to power in 2015, Poland has been isolated in Europe for what its critics view as authoritarian tendencies, its purging of the judiciary and its anti-immigration stance. The rhetoric has been claimed to be a way for the Polish state to protect its citizens and culture, but for the most part, such rhetoric forms part of the subtle reminder to citizens of their national identity – one that is assumed to be based on Catholic nationalism and racialised primordial ties.
To be a national is to be situated physically, legally, and socially. Such emotional attachment seems to unleash the boundaries between the nationals and the racialised ‘Other’. This has led some Polish nationalists to argue for purification of Polish culture and society. The process of purification entails purging Poland of all kinds of foreign influences and would be founded on racial differentiation. To be clear, there is a limited understanding of race and racism in Poland. Comments that are perceived as racist by black and brown people in Poland are often not seen as racist in the popular imagination. It is commonly assumed that someone could only be a racist when directly involved in a ‘violent encounter’ with a person of another ‘race’. Therefore, racism in Poland is often reduced to the behaviour of hooliganism or pathologised individuals.
However, my research in the country found that racism is not only an individual phenomenon, but a structural ideology that is sustained largely through discrimination; self-identification; and the identification of the ‘other’ people. This was evident in the stories shared by many non-white Poles living in Poland. For example, Sophia, a mixed-race Pole with a white Polish mother and black Cameroonian father, told me how she often felt about not being seen as Polish:
“…they don’t think that a Polish person can be black. If you ask anybody on the street — who’s a Polish person to you… they would say a Polish person is a white person. They just don’t see me as much Polish as they are…this is the crazy part of everything for me…”
The idea of purification has a layer of complexity that cannot be reduced simply to politics. The complexity of purification is deep-seated within the notion that difference threatens, contaminates and dilutes purities that Poland is assumed to stand for. Protesting against the influence of ‘non-Latin civilisations’, which have been viewed as threats to Polish culture, some among the Polish extreme groups believe it is necessary “to cooperate with Catholics and Latinists from all western regions in a sort of ‘white international’”. This sense of exclusion has served as a driver for contemporary discrimination and the events witnessed in the celebration of Poland’s independence since 2017. Yet, there is no evidence that the collective glorious dead that gave up their lives in 1918 and 1945 did so against black and brown people. They died because of the same racism and xenophobia that have been revived today.
What history tells us
The significance of the above experiences lies in the histories that produced them. Such histories must begin with a recent comment by the Polish President Andrzej Duda, where he cited a distasteful, racist joke about Equatorial African cannibals. Yet, Africa was a continent that provided refuge for thousands of Poles during the Second World War. The migration to Africa was in addition to the colossal Polish emigration to the Americas, after the Franco-Prussian War, with about 300,000 Polish colonists’ settlement in Brazil, as part of the peripheral European populations. These populations were by no means seen as migrants, they were understood as colonial settlers and benefited from white/European privilege.
Poland’s migration continues with the recent migration of Poles to the United Kingdom and elsewhere in Europe. This particular migration has transformed many Polish lives from restricted people to “free movers” with opportunities to travel, live and work in all other European Union states. This may offer an indication of why over three-quarters of CBOS Polish respondents (78%) agreed that Poland’s membership of the EU brings the country more benefits than costs.
Indeed, there is a sense of amnesia here – one that is not the unconscious loss of memory, but consciously dotted by a state’s system of inclusion and exclusion. This was evident in PiS accounts of foreigners threatening and attempting to breach the borders and unsettling what is assumed to be authentic Polish culture and society. These accounts not only reinforce a feeling of their specific otherness, but also reinforce the otherness of black and brown identities. Consequently, black and brown people remain viewed as threats to Polish homogeneity.
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Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics.
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Bolaji Balogun – University of Leeds
Bolaji Balogun is a Doctoral Researcher in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Leeds. He was previously an Associate Lecturer and Leverhulme Trust Visiting Scholar at the Department of European Studies, University of Economics Krakow, Poland. He tweets @BobBalogun
I am disgusted to read about the treatment of Africans and Indians at the Ukraine/ Polish border. How can they get away with it if they’re in the EU?
Just as they have been getting on
with Boris Johnson’s racist antics in the UK for years. It’s all the same.
so different to what i experienced as a polish person.
firstly, we have a large diversity of people, from light pale skin to tan/dark hair. never growing up, for once have i been taught “im white” or about race. people are people.
in fact is pretty offensive of you to even call slavic people “white” as many of us do not identify with that. as a slavic polish woman living in a nordic country, i have darker skin, i have dark hair and eyes, curly hair and i have experienced racism from natives/whites who do not see me as one of them. truth to be told, i am not. it’s quite offensive to constantly be shoved down our throats how we’re white when it suits the world but then they treat us like we’re beneath them. not quite white. but not different for some enough.
if you ask me who is polish and isnt, if you live in poland and/or have polish ancestry you’re polish. it’s utter BS that you’re polish based on skin color. my grandmother called me mulatka (mulatto) as a little girl, because i was so dark i looked mixed. she absolutely loved me for how i was and proudly showed me off to all of her neighbors! never have i heard more white-black-race-issues brought up than when i moved to a nordic country and received a cultural shock from a skinhead who verbally attacked me for being different. in poland, while i knew i was darker, it wasnt a huge deal, because we have all kinds of people. gypsy, tan, brown hair, pale skin, redheads… its all the same.
“The rhetoric has been claimed to be a way for the Polish state to protect its citizens and culture,” let me stop you right there. You really either are completely ignorant of polish history and the suffering of our people throughout history or else you would be able to understand why Poland so strongly wants to defend itself against anything that could potentially go wrong once more. i am the FIRST generation to live freely how i want to, where i want to, without war and blodshed. i could easily stop being the first generation to live without oppression. if you think that’s something not to protect… that’s your opinion, but your opinion does not make it true.
what all of you call slaves, came from our people. from slavic people, who were the original slaves. we are sick of war, the fear of war is in our blood. we are sick of constantly being harassed and terrorized. the term slave has its origins in the word slav. the slavs, who inhabited a large part of eastern europe, were taken as slaves by the muslims of dpain during the ninth century AD. we’ve had war after war. fight for our freedom after fight for our freedom.
i completely understand why poland does not want refugees who hate them because they are catholics. of the things i experienced first hand as an attempt to integrate very different groups of people. as a young polish woman, i have been repeatedly physically and sexually assaulted by my muslim boyfriend in a nordic country. it ended badly for me. this does not mean i now hate every muslim, but i understand the concerns when i see the same crimes daily in the newspaper. it’s hard to deny when it happened to you. he (my ex partner) did not view me as a worthy partner, as an equal nor as a human being that needs to be respected. integration of people is extremely important, but if you cannot view a woman as an equal, it is doomed to fail. you all fail to mention this when you cry about immigration.
poland took all of the refugees during current war in ukraine. they are our neighbors. should neighbors not be the ones to help each other? should refugees have to flee across the globe to get to “safety”? is that really the best solution?
ukrainians were aligned with the nazi in ww2 and commited horrific massacres in poland, yet here we are forgiving them for the past because their people need help, in the same way poland needed help. don’t say we don’t pay it forward. we dont want ww3. after all we are taught that jesus said turn the other cheek and help thy neighbor.
i’m sorry but no country is free from racism and discrimination. believing that any country IS, is naive. it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or alien. there are bad people in every corner of the world, and said bad people do bad things. you call poland nationalist, i dont agree. political agenda, is where the issue lies. i am sure there are some far rights groups that are racists, but don’t mistake us for “white”. we are our own ethnic group. but what you and much of the west misunderstands or refuses to face is the issues that come with mass-refuggees from a completely different culture and background. this is not about skintone, its actually laughable to me.
can you explain to me, why these refugees are mostly men and boys? why cant we have the women come too? why does majority of them get left behind? does their life not matter? no i guess not, they are “just” women. they don’t matter to you or you would be fighting for them too, like i am.
dont get me started on what belarus did, by beating up syrian refugees and sending them off injured, robbed into the polish border where they spent their time alone in the forest. if that is not a threat to national security, i don’t know what is. set up the agenda that poland is racist and to create border crisis. i mean russia would love to invade poland all over again. just like in ww2 with nazis calling us poles sub human and subject to extermination along with our jews, why don’t you continue the propaganda that just like ukrainians, we too are racists.
lastly “Consequently, black and brown people remain viewed as threats to Polish homogeneity.” with all due respect, what a load of horsesh*t. never heard that in my entire life, as a person who could easily pass as mixed yet has pale blondes in the family, i do not recognize this kind of view, this is something you are projecting onto polish people yourself.
as a polish woman, i love people of all color. i was brought up to embrace other peoples differences, i was slapped with a harsh dose of reality when i moved, however it doesn’t change the fact i want peace for all.
i do not consider myself white, i certainly do not get treated like “caucasian” by other “whites”. i am simply slavic. we are our own people. we are ethnic minorities in many western countries, away from our homelands and cultures as much as any other far away group. we face many similar issues and challenges (& yes, they dont understand our food or how to pronounce our names). personally, I don’t see us as “white”, and some of us may see us as part of a larger umbrella of “white.” Its really up to the individual,[you should probably ask the individual how they feel about themselves], but in the end it really doesn’t matter what “race” anyone purports us to be. we are slavs, and we are human too, no more, no less.
it is absolutely awful that racial division is still steering this world. however i chose not to be a part of the problem. i am what i am, you are what you are. i am not better and neither is anyone else.
we are slavs. we are the slavic “race”. whether we are “white” or not, there is no concrete answer but please do not misrepresent us. we are not taught whiteness nor carry white guilt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Polish_sentiment
these ramblings have been brought to you by polish woman, who understands our peoples history and the very misunderstood motives behind things. while poland is far, FAR from perfect and i do enjoy the freedom to live how i want, that could change, i understand that it can all be taken away in a blink of an eye, and my people go back to being nothing more than “subhuman” all over again due to propaganda.
at the end of day, all countries face issues of division, fights between tribes, fights between people due to their skin color.
i can only assume this is continuation of russian propaganda.
poland has given resources to african and indian students, numbers to call etc.
if you are referring to the fact that students could not leave/were shoved off to the end of lines, its because CHILDREN and women were first in line to be evacuated! students had much warning prior to leave, some waited too long.
and men are not allowed to leave period, i am sure their identity had to be confirmed prior, to ensure they were not ukrainian men who must stay and fight.
lets not pretend that masses of people of all color were being pushed at the border as everyone is trying to desperately to flee. it was chaos. please stop making everything about racism.
poland has taken in 4.3 million refugees. please don’t get this twisted with russian bots tweeting propaganda.