Race and racism in Poland: Theorising and contextualising ‘Polish-centrism’

Abstract

Whilst scholarship has sought to consider migration in Poland, there has been a lack of engagement with the ways in which race and racism interact with migration. In this article, I map the figures in the Polish imaginary of European, and examine whether Poland has different, if related, histories of racial thinking. I ask how such histories have been conceived, shaped and mediated. To examine this, I focus on the lived experiences of sub-Saharan African immigrants and children of immigrants (Black/mixed-race) who are often portrayed as non-Europeans and seen by some as ‘not quite Polish’. In doing so, this article provides an insight into the racial contours of Polish self-conception. I call this logic ‘Polish-centrism’ – a focus on some aspects of Polish culture to the exclusion of a wider view of the world. It is within this logic that I examine what it means to be Black and Polish in Poland.

Keywords

Black/mixed-race Poles othering Polish-centrism race and racism

Introduction

Whilst many Polish citizens have benefited immensely from the freedom of movement, employment and retirement anywhere in other European Union (EU) countries (Coniglio & Brzozowski, 2016), in Poland, immigrants from the Middle East and Africa have very different experiences. The processes of differentiation experienced by immigrants are informed by intensive racialisation that resonates with restrictive immigration systems (Hollifield, 2000), increasing visibility of chauvinistic organisations (Klaus et al., 2018), and resistance from the public due to fears of globalisation and terrorism (Hellwig & Sinno, 2017). In certain circumstances, reactions toward immigrants are prejudiced by religious orientations (Narkowicz & Pędziwiatr, 2017) that have been extended to symbolic predisposition such as cultural preferences which drive racialisation of immigrants (Balogun, 2019a). All these essential markers of racialisation are often defined from within, from a shared sense of national-commonality, through the distinction and differentiation of a nation that excludes people that are considered not quite like ‘us’.

The mechanisms of exclusion identified above are not new, they have been described as ‘everyday racism’ (Essed, 2002) and as the ‘construction of otherness’ (Haldrup et al., 2006). They strengthen the representation of non-white immigrants as another type of identity that is assumed deeply contradictory to the national identity, tending to replace national identity, and forcing it itself to become ‘nationalized’ (Balibar, 1991, p. 95). These mechanisms have been recognised and articulated elsewhere, especially in the United States (Omi & Winant, 2014; Roediger, 1991) and in the United Kingdom (Banton, 1967; Miles, 1982). With a few exceptions (Nowicka, 2018; Zabek, 2009), much of the scholarship conducted in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is yet to sufficiently engage with these mechanisms of exclusion. Hence, there is a shortage of explanations about the racialisation of Black/mixed-race people in Poland and CEE broadly.

The aim of this article is to explore the racialisation of immigrants from sub-Saharan African descent and their children (Black/mixed-race) either born or raised in Poland. To this end, I plan to follow an exclusionist logic I call ‘Polish-centrism’ – a focus on some aspects of Polish culture to the exclusion of a wider view of the world; the process regards Polishness as the essence, embedded with several racial rudiments – biological racism, religiosity and language. Although classic exclusionist logic figures largely in the discussion that follows, my interest is not primarily to interpret the logic. I only revive it through ‘Polish-centrism’ in order to spotlight the racial structure of the Polish institutions that are often assumed raceless. Nonetheless, it needs to be said that not all Poles believe in ‘Polish-centrism’, many are genuinely open to difference and challenge the racist assertions in Polish society. This article seeks to elaborate on the global understandings of race and racism, and expand the geographical terrain of contemporary race and ethnicity studies especially in Poland (Balogun & Joseph-Salisbury, 2020).

To make this case, first I present a snapshot of the ‘real’ Polish racism that is often rearticulated through ordinary everyday life. This is mediated through European scientific racism, geopolitics and bordering. Then, the article turns to the usage of whiteness as nested identity to discuss the representation of Black/mixed-race people who are often seen as not quite Polish and European. Lastly, in trying to make sense of what it means to be Black in Poland, this article introduces the lived experiences of Black/mixed-race people, articulated through the Du Boisian dialectic of ‘double consciousness’.

Self-identification and the identification of the ‘other people’

The hierarchy of human superiority or inferiority is often constructed through various markers. Colour, ethnicity, language, culture and/or religion are part of the mechanisms of such markers (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). Colour racism has been part of processes of coloniality, conveyed through biological racism involving physiognomy, craniometry and blood classification. It was no accident that, after the Second World War, Poland, a major country in CEE, emerged as one of Europe’s most ethnically ‘white’ and homogeneous societies (Jaskulowski & Pawlak, 2019). The homogeneity, intensified by various administrative restrictions, was heightened by the Communist regime’s restrictive immigration policy. However, post-Communist transformations after 1989 re-established Poland within new borders that facilitated its accession to the EU in 2004. This move encouraged the opening of the Polish borders and the arrival of migrants, mainly migrants who, ‘having adopted the metropolitan language, accent, demeanours and manners’, are racialised and pass as ‘white’ (Grosfoguel et al., 2015, p. 642). However, it was the arrival of a particular group of migrants, the ‘coloured migrants’ perceived to be culturally and biologically different, that would raise all sorts of questions, including racial and cultural ones. The absence of regular encounters with ‘coloured migrants’, Mayblin et al. (2016, p. 963) have argued, makes the Polish public susceptible to racial stereotypes. This was evident in the right-wing and anti-immigrant activism across CEE, as demonstrated during the Polish nationalists’ march under the slogan ‘Pure Poland, white Poland’ against the arrival of ‘coloured’ refugees at the European borders in 2015. The same event quickly transformed into racial crisis in the Czech Republic (Tyler, 2018) and a ‘gigantic wave of racist state propaganda’ in Hungary (Tamás, 2016). In all this, Tyler (2018) reminds us that race and racism go beyond the management of ‘coloured’ bodies at borders, in more fundamental terms, racisms make borders. The absence of contacts with ‘coloured migrants’ and the call for ‘Pure Poland, white Poland’ cannot be reduced to their political and border forms, they have a deeper explanation in the Polish understanding of self and the Other within which old scientific racism plays a significant role.

Polish eugenics: Racial purity and the fear of mongrelisation

It is often assumed that racism is a problem of core metropoles, not peripheral regions such as Central and Eastern Europe. The argument used to legitimate this is that CEE nations are homogeneous communities, and have no links to colonial projects (Nowicka & Lodzinski, 2001, p. 153). This denial of racism has always been a myth of Communist and post-Communist CEE that takes racism in the West to be the exclusive definition of racisms. In doing so, it conceals the specificity of CEE racism; therefore, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are imagined to be untouched and not influenced by global racial ideologies (Balogun, 2018). Moreover, selective breeding was often thought to be mainly a Western eugenics programme. The West was by no means the only advocate of racial purification, as addressed by several historians (see Adams, 1990; Turda & Quine, 2018). I am suggesting, then, that as a widespread European practice, eugenics might be more revealing of the real character of contemporary Poland, its historical deficiencies and normative practices as part of global understandings of race and racism. Rather than just asserting this cardinal point, it is important to demonstrate the roles of eugenics in assertions of the historicity of Communism and Nazism, which attempted to protect desirables against people who did not possess so-called ties of blood to the nation.

Any attempt to make sense of race and racism in Poland must reckon first with their biological roots. There is a sense of ‘universalization of racism’ (Lentin, 2016) in the history of blood grouping. Since the nineteenth century, race has been associated with genealogy in order to identify and define ‘people in possession of specific physical and psychological traits . . . of a territory of their own with recognised physical borders’ (Turda & Quine, 2018, p. 71). Poland and other CEE countries have been known to be part of such enquiries through blood identification that provided means of ‘classifying human races as well as insights into the ethnic composition of various modern nations’ (Turda & Quine, 2018, p. 29). Causal explanations are not simply the aim of these scientific racial enquiries, they often carry deeper exclusive implications. For example, Lajos Méhely, the Hungarian racial scientist, alluded in 1934 that blood categorisation was compulsory for ‘the strict protection of [our] racial borders’ (Méhely, 1934). A few years later, Petre Panaitescu, a Romanian historian, who spent an extended time at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, declared Romanians as part of the Slavic group, belonging to a great race, a race which is forged through the Dacian mythology (Panaitescu, 1940).

The important point here is that racial ideologies have been sustained in CEE – largely through self-identification and the identification of the ‘Other people’. As was the case in many European countries, Polish psychiatrists were drawn and devoted to eugenics programmes believed to be a ‘common-good’. Although the Eugenics Society did not appear in Poland until 1918 when it published its own Zagadnienia Rasy (Problems of Human Race) magazine, the beginning of the twentieth century through the interwar years of the 1930s represented the peak of Polish eugenics. According to Magdalena Gawin (2007), the Polish Eugenics Society (PES) fully established in 1922, provided support for eugenicists mainly from the Polish Catholic Doctors’ Union. Genealogy as a concept of biology provided these eugenicists with the idea of a nation and the kind of blood and lineage that constituted the nation. They encouraged ‘eugenically superior families’ and appealed to the Polish authorities to introduce legislations ranging from ‘compulsory sterilization’ to ‘premarital counselling’, and access to ‘health records’, all aimed at reducing the burden of welfare (Gawin, 2007, p. 73). Here we are touching upon a pivotal issue within the Polish state configuration when eugenics became a contested legislative matter in Poland, and so did race, marriage and birth control. The question here goes beyond the issue of legislation. In practical terms, legislation was required to warn people of mongrelisation that may result in the production of inferior stocks (Gawin, 2007; Hacker, 2003, p. 35), and must be understood as the preliminary transformation of the Polish populations, that created division between ‘person’ and ‘sub-person’.

How is the above linked with ‘race’? Eric Voegelin (1933/1997) has observed that the ‘race idea’ is crucial in the definition of the uniqueness of a nation, it is a biological-cum-cultural uniqueness that is drummed into people in a variety of contexts and persuades them to identify with a particular territory. To be clear, in Poland, the concept of race is understood through blood relations and often used in different contexts. For many, ‘race’ means ‘nation’, ‘society’. The same idea is simultaneously used as ‘a human community’ (Gawin, 2003, p. 131). Also, culture is used interchangeably with race linked strongly to family ties and then national identity. This terminological shift allows culture to appear as the most essential deterministic structure that individuals are born into (Balibar, 2007). The shift has long been identified by Fanon (1969, p. 32) as ‘Cultural Racism’, and Taguieff (2001) called it ‘Differential Racism’. This was evident in a statement by Henryk Nusbaum, a close associate of Roman Dmowski of the National Democratic Party, who viewed race as:

. . . [the] collective, real body of the nation, a body that is the subsoil for all the qualities taken together, the virtues and vices of a human community that, ethnographically, and most importantly linguistically, constitutes that which we term a nation. (Wesołowski, 1918, p. 5)

Other ideas of race were employed to describe the characteristic physical and mental qualities related to heredity. For example, concern about ‘inferior’ people featured largely in the work of many Polish eugenicists, but must be understood as resonance of Nazi Gemeinschaftsfremde (aliens to the community) and Volksschädlinge (pests harmful to the nation). The allusion to Nazism was not restricted to extreme individuals in Poland, it was generally viewed as positive action aimed at increasing the overall quality of the national identity, which covertly implies a race. It was evident in the work of Kazimierz Dabrowski, a prominent Polish psychiatrist, who once considered the relationship between physical and mental constitution with outside influences (Dabrowski, 1933, p. 60). Indeed, it was not extremist minorities but rather a former member of parliament and advocate of Polish eugenics, Zofia Golińska, who noted that ‘[t]he nation is an organization based on biogenetic community and on the community of civilization’ (Daszyńska-Golińska, 1927, p. 15). This statement dubiously suggests that it is biological, not cultural, factors that determine a nation, its development and its decline. Belief in biofluids such as blood from the parents’ bodies that mixed with their children’s bodies played a certain role in the process. In the case of ‘crossbreeding’, however, inherited traits were believed to be unpredictable, therefore genetic diversity was highly discouraged. What is significant about these racist views, as Magdalena Gawin (2003, 2007) has broadly detailed, is that they formed the symptomatic notion in the Polish public that children from mixed marriages are susceptible to physical degeneration. Therefore, it was necessary to eliminate degenerate individuals in order to ensure the victory of ‘eugenistic types’ (Gawin, 2003, p. 47). Essentially, all these ideas appeared to have taken off from Artur de Gobineau’s legitimising racism and scientific race theory, as a confirmation of ‘universalization of racism’.

These particular episodes in the Polish history demonstrate how Poland, since the turn of the twentieth century, has occupied an unmarked slot in the practices of ‘heredity redux’ (Fitzgerald et al., 2020, p. 3). In the empirical section, I will reveal what these racial practices have enabled in contemporary Poland. In doing so, the myth of non-racist Communist and post-Communist Poland is dismantled.

The Black/mixed-race research project in Poland

The discussions presented in this article are drawn from interviews conducted as part of the Black/mixed-race research project in Poland undertaken between early 2018 and 2019. The larger study explores the integration of Black and mixed-race people in various cities in Poland; it is the largest qualitative and quantitative study of People of Colour yet conducted in Poland and CEE. Currently, there is no single data set that confirms the exact number of this particular group in Poland. The Polish Central Statistical Office only identifies people by their nationality and not ethnicity, therefore, Black British, Black French, Black German, Mixed-race Poles and African Americans living in Poland are not visible in the current number of people who are of sub-Saharan African descent (Pędziwiatr & Balogun, 2018). One way of determining the number of sub-Saharan African population, however, is through their residence permits. In Poland (ca. 38 million), there are currently over 2370 citizens of sub-Saharan African countries – Nigeria (28.67%), South Africa (8.55%) and Cameroon (7.17%) making up the major countries of this growing minority. The population is currently made up of adults: 21–40 years old and a smaller cohort 41–60 years old. In terms of their legal status, over 1600 sub-Saharan Africans have a temporary residence permit, and 700 currently have permanent residence in Poland. Contrary to the public opinion, very few Africans have refugee status in the country.¹

In this article, I focus on 30 semi-structured interviews with Black and mixed-race Polish residents and citizens. Participants were recruited through social media and snowballing. The main selection criterion used was that each participant identified as a person of sub-Saharan African descent, and a total of 40 participants between the ages of 21 and 58 participated. Participants came from mainly Warsaw, Krakow, Katowice and Lodz, Poland. These locations were selected due to the presence of non-white populations settling in the areas and therefore met the conditions for racial assessment. Almost all participants were in employment; many were studying toward postgraduate degrees and came from various socio-cultural backgrounds, with some participants being children of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Although participants’ social backgrounds and length of residence in Poland varied, difference in skin colour appeared to be a predisposing criterion of racialisation experienced by most participants.

In terms of positionality during the interviews, I was aware of the sensitivity of the topics that were raised during the interviews. As marginalised individuals, People of Colour are suspicious of outsiders (Dunbar et al., 2002, p. 291), and in regard of this, I used self-disclosure during some of the interviews. Openness was an important factor in the quality of the interaction (Chenail, 1995). I recognised the common ground between myself and the interviewees as People of Colour; I shared my personal experience as a Black male growing up in England and when I first visited Poland, whilst I remained conscious of issues of bias during the conversations. This allowed the participants to remain open about their daily lives and their opinions about the society they live in.

Each interview, conducted in English, lasted for 60 minutes or more, held at universities, churches and cafes and were audio-taped and later transcribed. Using NVivo 12 software, the analysis began with open coding, and involved several close readings that led to the emergence of themes. To broaden the understandings of the racialised bodies, I followed up with much more focused readings and further coding that provided the landscape which eventually shaped into more focused scenes of the participants’ racialised lives. To protect the anonymity and confidentiality of the participants, their names have been pseudonymised. During the discussions, I employed an ethnographic approach to observe the participants’ relationships with the Polish society and recorded the way they described such relationships. The discussions were structured around biographical understanding of migration, settlement in Poland and then talks about being different and what it means to be Black and Polish. These are the points I seek to unpick in the next section of this article.

Experiencing race and racism

Until now, I have considered the influences of biological and cultural racisms in the process of racialisation. In this section, I try to make sense of race and racism in contemporary Poland from the perspective of the ‘unruly’ population – mainly the populations of African descent who are sometimes identified as threats to European purity. Whilst recent migration from the Middle East and Africa added an accelerant to the conditions of exclusion and allowed racism to flourish in Poland, it did not create race and racism in Poland. The conditions were already embedded in the long-standing representation of people seen as the ‘Other’, made visible by their non-whiteness or non-Europeanness (De Genova, 2016, p. 88) through the preservation of Polish homogeneity as a way of maintaining stability in the state. This is what I call ‘Polish-centrism’. It is worthwhile pausing over ‘Polish-centrism’ as a racial logic that is factored through Whiteness, Europeanness and Polishness.

Where ‘Polish-centrism’ has most to offer is, in practice, the reproduction of race as a biological category, arguing that race and racism have not been marginal to the history of the West, but formed part of the configuration of CEE nations. ‘Polish-centrism’ is not the same as Polonisation, the forceful imposition of Polish culture on non-Polish populations. Quite the opposite: ‘Polish-centrism’ focuses strictly on the Polish worldview, civilisation and most especially identity. Whiteness and Europeanness provide the mechanism that sustains ‘Polish-centrism’. A good understanding of ‘Polish-centrism’ cannot be reduced to culture and ethnicity – they only make it harder to observe how the idea of race has penetrated the configuration of the Polish nation. A better understanding of the concept must begin with its connection with whiteness and Europeanness in which ethnicity offers a unique window into silent scientific racism. Conversely, the Polish concept of ethnicity is narrowed to those who share certain inborn phenotypes and blood, mainly the whiteness of skin colour linked to a common ancestry and the attitude of superiority toward the non-white Other. It is this conception of Otherness that puts into question the presence of non-white Polish citizens and residents because they are assumed not to be biologically integral to the Polish nation. At the same time, the nation is broadly claiming that its public is untouched by and certainly not influenced by the idea of race. In this sense, ‘Polish-centrism’ has a deeper dynamic than Catholic religiosity, but focuses much more on the national/continental identity that is intrinsic to the formation and definition of who is European and who is not (Benson & Lewis, 2019; Sayyid, 2018).

‘Being not quite Polish, not quite European’

My intention here is not to generalise the issues raised by the participants. I am interested in an aspect of Critical Race Theory as a well-established technique that offers counter-hegemonic narratives (Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015) that help to pinpoint instances of ‘Polish-centrism’. Although biological racism may have been largely discredited in the West (Gilroy, 1998), in Central and Eastern Europe people remain attached to the idea of biological differences that include colour. This is evident in the research participants’ lived experiences discussed below. Consider, for instance, Danni, a mixed-race Pole,² who grew up in Poland in an area with no Black families. During the interview, the following dialogue between Danni and his interlocutor was Danni’s first recalled racist experience as a teenager:

(Polish man): hey, hey look your nigger friend is here . . . so where are you from?

(Danni): . . . I’m. . . from Poland

PM:

where are you from in Poland?

DI:

Olsztyn

PM:

(removed his Red and White hat with Polish eagle) what colour is this?

DI:

Red

PM:

(Interjected): No, no, what colour is the eagle?

DI:

White

PM:

Exactly! We don’t want you here!

Danni is from both Polish and Kenyan backgrounds; he perceived biological differentiation as a logic used to define him as not purely Polish based on the construction of skin colour as a mixed-race Pole who is not white. What begins to develop in Danni’s account is the genetic power of whiteness to darken the non-white Other and whitening of the self. The dialogue points to the ‘core beliefs’ that are shaped by ‘very strong’ white hegemony’ (Joseph-Salisbury, 2019, p. 67) as a broader institution that renders Black bodies like Danni’s outside of the Polish imaginary as a non-white Polish citizen. Here, Danni’s interlocutor drew upon the white eagle as a national symbol of Poland, with Danni’s Black body acting as an interruption of the national purity. Such advantage gives the interlocutor a sense of self-identification that was channelled through the exhibition of whiteness. Resting on the assumption of biological differentiation, whiteness, as shown in Danni’s narrative, preys upon its racialised counterpart. Observation of whiteness in Danni’s case provokes a particular traumatic pain and ‘rituals of terror and torture’ (hooks, 1992, p. 342) that attempted to deny Danni of his Polishness. At this junction, Danni felt that he had to ‘choose’ his racialised background (Black) in terms of self-identification.

The obsession with biological differentiation is perhaps attributable to the absence of many People of Colour in Poland and CEE countries. This may explain why Sophia (mixed-race, female), is seen as ‘not quite 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 . . .Who’s a Polish person?, how would you describe a Polish person? They would say a Polish person is a white person. They just don’t see me as much Polish as they are . . .

Sophia’s experience must be understood as a deep-rooted biological racism that manifests itself in supposedly raceless Poland. Polishness is often seen through the universal religion – Catholicism – but Sophia’s account confirms that the identity is deeply demarcated by biological differentiation, as she marshalled her shared origins to question the rejection she experienced as a mixed-race Pole. This particular experience is suggestive of the fact that Polishness takes for granted the racialised imagination that assumes ‘the real Pole’ to be white. During the discussion, Sophia recalled an important point that led to the above excerpt. It was a moment of historical reflection in her account that she believed holds the Polish nation together following the struggle to re-establish itself as a nation, but drawn on patriotism and nationalism. This history is deeply personal to Sophia, as she struggled to communicate her identity as being Black and Polish because someone with ‘black physiognomies’, like Sophia, is not expected to be Polish or even speak Polish fluently. In her view, many white Poles have a feeling of biological attachment to the Polish nation, as well as a racialised imagination of the faces that reside in the nation.

The notion that some Poles have attachment to a racist biological conception of the Polish nation and a fixed imaginary of Poland led both Danni and Sophia to believe, on the one hand, that a sense of purification of Polish identity is embedded in Polishness. On the other hand, for these participants, too many white Poles give recognition to the mapping of bodies onto a specific national space through an assumption that their skin colour is a direct link to their national and racial identities (Ahmed, 2000, p. 13). This sense of Polishness leaves Danni and Sophia disconnected with their identity as Polish. Enzo, another mixed-race Pole with a Polish mother and Ivorian father, offered commentary in a similar mood. During the discussion with Enzo, he reflected on his early encounters with racism that made him feel that most white Poles do not see him the way he sees himself:

I feel like I belong to this society but never fully accepted . . . some people accept that I’m just Enzo, a Polish guy, but I also know that most people when they look at me, the first thing they think is that I’m a foreigner, that I’m not Polish. It’s like everyday struggle, when I go to the shop, when I’m in a restaurant, I talk to people and 90% of them would start talking to me in English because they never see me as a Pole.

Here we see again how biological differentiation serves to enforce the boundaries of Polishness. Enzo has lived in Poland all his life; hence his first language is Polish, but he speaks English in a typical Polish accent. However, Enzo believed that most white Poles often think of him as someone born elsewhere, brought to Poland and unable to speak Polish fluently without a foreign accent. In his view, he is often seen as an outsider, often as a way of ‘final assigning of values to real or imagined differences’ (Memmi, 1968, p. 185).

During the discussions, it was apparent that these mixed-race participants were not attempting to prove their Polishness because they knew they are Polish. Rather, their accounts appear as a reaction against an erasure by the white gaze and an unwillingness to attribute limits to their identity as they perceived predominance of biological differentiation as a manifestation of exclusion. Despite their Polish origin, their identities as both Polish and African are never free from discursive constraints of biopower that appear inseparable from racial and social contexts (Hall, 1996, p. 17). The point that needs stressing here is that these mixed-race participants born or brought up in Poland are evidently defined as Black. It is a reminder that the one-drop rule – a single drop of ‘black blood’ – is not unique to the United States, but found in the categorisation of people in Poland. Such contexts presented these mixed-race individuals as fragmented beings who are somehow less than a whole people (Mengel, 2001, p. 101; see also Balogun & Joseph-Salisbury, 2020).

‘Not being human’

Whilst the lived experiences of the above mixed-race Poles show several instances of ‘Polish-centrism’, a process that racialised them as non-white and non-Polish, it is through a similar logic that immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa are perceived through the prism of biological racism. For example, Jona (Black male) from Africa explained the uneasiness with, on the one hand, wanting to give the best impression as a Black African living in Poland to counter the common stereotypes of Black people. On the other hand, he described ‘Being black, here [Poland], seems like you’re representing all Black people . . . and stereotypes of Africa’ as complicated. Given such racial ambiguity, Jona was often forced to ‘dance’ – a performance ‘through which individual black people may be required to show that the ghetto stereotypes do not apply to them’ (Anderson, 2015, p. 13). In effect, Jona performed to be accepted. He related his lived experience to stigma influenced by immigration debates and politics that provide Polish people with an institutionalised sense of ‘white nation fantasy’ (Goldberg, 2008; Hage, 1998). The form of racism Jona referred to is drawn from the common assumption that Black people are culturally and biologically different, therefore their humanity is constantly in question. Constructions of Otherness through perceived biological differences are evident in the testimonies provided by Thelma (Black, female) who had lived in Poland for over four years studying medicine:

I think they have a preconceived notion of what [a Black] African person should be like . . . but when they see you, and have a conversation with your intelligence, they kind of take a second look.

What Thelma identified as a ‘second look’ could be read as a surprise that disrupts the preconceived notion of Africa and its people as uncivilised. This sentiment was shared by Nafissah, another Black female participant, who highlighted the intensive stares she experienced in Poland, but also believed that, in some cases, the attention was driven more by curiosity than hostility. Nafissah stressed that she experienced a lot of staring because ‘many Polish people have never seen Black people before’. Both Thelma and Nafissah, like many other sub-Saharan Africans, are seen as a rarity in Poland (Pędziwiatr & Balogun, 2018) and this could also trigger a range of responses, including historical derogatory putdowns (Pierce, 1970). For example, Cédric (Black, male) described a distressing incident where he was targeted by a Polish gang in the public:

. . . I was going to the cinema with my Polish friends and as we approached the entrance, a group of Polish boys, about five of them, started shouting ‘Ebola!, Ebola!, Ebola!’ [referring to the outbreak of Ebola, a killer virus, in West Africa] and pointing at me. I was very upset and didn’t understand why these boys singled me out.

Notice how biological differentiation emerges in the above excerpt to portray Cédric as impure. As Weindling (1989, p. 50) contends, the racial concept is an integral part of medical thinking that connects immunity of populations to diseases. Cédric’s account signifies the notion of Gemeinschaftsfremde (an alien) as well as Volksschädlinge (a harmful pest) to the Polish community. It defines the ways in which colonial/postcolonial logic is deployed in terms of territory, biology and history. This particular case suggests that the question of race and racism in Poland is not only a question of skin colour, ‘[It] is a historical category, a political category, a cultural category’ (Hall, 2000, p. 149) that is already fixed in the global purity/impurity of ‘race’, premised on the ideology that highlights ‘sanity’ and ‘purity’ where mixture appears ‘impure’ (Gordon, 2018, p. 35). Joshua (Black, male) described the traumatic impact of being perceived as impure:

I remember older ladies coming up to me in the street with a handkerchief trying to wipe-off my skin colour. I looked in the mirror several times and wondered why this had happened to me. I regretted that I was born with such skin colour. Twice, at ten and thirteen, I tried to commit suicide . . .

Indeed, physiognomic features play an essential role in racialised difference. Whatever the specificities and peculiarities of Joshua’s remarks, his experience comes from being part of a broader discourse on whiteness as a mechanism that sustains ‘Polish-centrism’ from which Joshua’s Black body is marked as an unnatural entity, and therefore, needs to be confiscated or erased (Balogun, 2019b; Yancy, 2017).

Collectively, the above lived experiences are not devoid of historical contexts of racial domination as ‘universalization of racism’. They reflected a broader backdrop of Africa’s historic marginalisation and its continued representation as a subordinate continent. What seems apparent in the aforementioned excerpts is European interpretation of Africa, ‘Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of “human nature.” Or, when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality’ (Mbembe, 2001, p. 1). This is the point where scientific racism interferes with the public because many of the contents described by this study’s participants strongly appeal biologically to human phenotypes, the identification of specific human features purposely for racial connotation as a social, political and historical process (Mills, 1997). Therefore, the questions of race and racism in Poland are connected to and evident in the histories of migration, foreignness, and being of a particular immigrant background.

Blackness and Polishness

To uncover the broader implications of the discussed lived experiences, I want to bring the concept of ‘Polish-centrism’ into a conversation with blackness. Indeed, I can suggest that some of the contradictions identified in the empirical data are evident of biological racism reinforced by earlier Polish literary sources such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s W pustyni I w Puszczy (In Desert and Wilderness), Alfred Szklarski’s Tomek na Czarnym Ladzie (Tomek on the Dark Continent), Julian Tuwim’s popular poem ‘Murzynek Bambo’, and the popular Polish Communist TV cartoon Lolek i Bolek – Na stokach Kilimandzaro (Lolek and Bolek – On the Slopes of Kilimanjaro). Many of the research participants believed that these are the first major literary sources where Polish kids would learn about Black people, as Danni, the mixed-race participant introduced previously, confirmed – ‘When I see kids, on the bus . . . they tend to say to their mums “oh, oh, oh, look, look, look Murzynek Bambo [Negro bamboo]”’. As Chinua Achebe (1978, p. 9) argues, Black people are often viewed as ‘props for the breakup of one petty European mind’. It is through these and many other sources that some Poles see Black people via the distorting veil of race and racism, full of stereotypes, pseudo-science and various wild constructions:

Most popular stereotypes of a traditional kind are: 1. Happy-go-lucky Negro, lazy, dirty and cheerful, naively satisfied with his backwardness, ignorance and subordinated social position; 2. Uncle Tom type: honest and pious Negro, full of moral candour, but ‘knowing his place’ and loyal to his master even if ill-treated by him; 3. A savage, cruel and aggressive Negro, a cannibal of the African jungle and an individual with criminal instincts, a potential sexual offender in a modern city. (Kloskowska, 1962, p. 193)

Conversely, all this presents the Polish population with images of ‘a Negro’ as a completely different ‘race’, if not species; an unaccustomed social phenomenon that informed the attitude of rejection, dislike, curiosity, sympathy or even ‘primitive egocentrism’ toward blackness. In order to understand this construction, we need to link ‘Polish-centrism’ to the Du Boisian dialectic ‘double consciousness’ – a sociological concept that has a normative quality that captures the dual character of unrecognised minority (Meer, 2019, p. 51). In this dialectic, Du Bois (1903/1994) discusses the strange meaning of being Black in a white society as two separate but entwined forms of consciousness. Du Bois frames issues of race and racism as hostile and at the same time inter-reliant, linked to micro and macro dimensions of life. Du Bois refers to, among other contradictions, the somatic, phenotypic and physical relationship with body as key factors that drive racialisation. Du Bois’s dialectic is partly premised on self-recognition as a form of cultural recognition which sees one’s cultural identity in connection with the cultural identities of the dominant group. It is the lack of acknowledgement of such recognition that implies the invisibility of a minority group. This is an aspect of racialisation that Du Bois describes as the veil – or ‘a one-way mirror, with the minority seeing the majority through the glass, whilst the latter sees only their own reflection (of mastery or dominance) as the former remain behind the mirror’ (Meer, 2019, p. 53). In the Du Boisian dialectic:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, 1903/w1994, p. 2)

In keeping with Du Bois’s ‘Doubleness’ as a hyphenated identity, narratives such as Danni, Sophia and Enzo’s seek to affirm both their Polish and African identities as situations that are ‘rooted in and routed through the special stress that grows with the effort involved in trying to face (at least) two ways at once’ (Gilroy, 1993, p. 3). On the one hand, they are not looking to Africanise Poland because they know that Poland has a lot to offer, perhaps because part of their identity is also Polish. On the other hand, they are not prepared to change for the sake of ‘Polish-centrism’ because they are acutely aware of the essence of blackness to their humanity. They simply wish it were possible for them to be both Black and Polish, without being spat upon by the Polish society.

Conclusion

I have spent time unpicking the historical records that underpinned the notion of race in Poland. I have suggested that by looking at the actual historically dominant scientific racism in Europe, we are better able to understand Poland’s past and the ways in which biological realities are made visible and acceptable in contemporary Poland. They are underpinned by the determination of the common identity and the notion of ‘who we are’ as a preconception of people that do not look like us. This article has highlighted that, in Poland, the construction of this preconception is closely knitted to the prominence of biological differentiation. It is part of the conceptualisation I call ‘Polish-centrism’ – the everyday biological practices that constantly reproduce the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Such differences are made possible by the processes of normalisation and naturalisation of hierarchies that allow racist views to flourish.

Expanding scholarship on global racism, this article has aimed to highlight that the question of race and racism in Poland is easily accessible from the vantage point of problems of national identity. They are articulated in relation to migration and ethnic minorities’ issues and seem to be against immigrants and citizens of ‘coloured’ or mixed heritage. The national question thus endorses itself as a variety of profoundly racialised projects of anti-immigrant nativism, from which there is no exception for the native-born Polish children of immigrants who are labelled indefinitely as foreigners.

Taking into account the racialisation of Black/mixed-race people in Poland, this article has raised the issue of international comparison by putting into context Poland’s past and present, in order to think about the ways in which racist ideologies developed in Europe. Concurrently, there were racist ideologies developed in Poland and in Western Europe. This article has looked at differences and similarities. It has highlighted that whilst there has been disproportionately large focus on the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, there is a need to understand racism as a European-wide phenomenon in which different European nations share the same kinds of racist ambitions in their local terms. In Poland, these terms are mediated through the racial logic I call ‘Polish-centrism’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Remi Joseph-Salisbury, Paul Bagguley, Lisa Long, Konrad Pedziwiatr, Dobroslawa Wiktor, Jan Brzozowski, and Jan Banasinski & Julianna Banasinska. I am grateful to the Editor-in-Chief of The Sociological Review and the three anonymous reviewers for their support and constructive comments.

Funding

This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (SAS-2017-046) and supported by the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Leeds.

Notes

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