Am I white?

I haven’t been writing for a while again for a number of reasons. Mostly to do with travel, linked to a certain mental re-location. I spent enough time in France to start linking into the language and cultural sphere. I also spent more time in Poland again, and dug more into how things are now and also into the historical roots of why things were the way I remembered them. I actually didn’t even speak a lot of English, or peruse too many texts from the anglosphere. I tried, somewhat, to re-root myself in “Europe”, the continental part, the part where I clearly feel more home.

I think this was also a hiccup after COVID, where my life moved online, and there into not just the anglosphere (just easier to find courses, meetings, classes etc. in English) but kind of under a US influence, which over time I started to dislike – a whole other topic. But while I’ve at least lived in the UK and hold some feelings for it, living in a virtual soup of US culture just at some point became neither enjoyable nor appropriate-seeming. Whole other topic. Point just being, I decided on a Continental and Eastern European backlash for balance.

It didn’t go as far as writing in any of the other languages, though (though I’ve considered switching / including other fragments, as would be context- and content-appropriate).

I have a couple of long-winded points to digest. Ever since I’ve moved out of writing strictly of my own experience, and of mental-health related matters, out to more sociological, geographical, anthropological topics, I’ve been writing a lot of nonsense (incl. information I’d have to correct now). I guess this is inevitable with new topics. This isn’t a science blog so I’ll let most of it slip, even if it’s annoying.

Maybe I’ll come back to that. For the moment, I’ve just had the impulse to continue one of the semi-personal, but not fully personal topics I’d been breaching last year, which is antiracism. I’ve been trying to comment on a few books and sources I’ve been looking at.

I’ve had a certain weirdness about it, because I initially went into the subject following the US (and UK probably) approach that racism is by definition about skin colour, so I should come at the topic from the perspective of a white person with white privilege etc. It didn’t sit or click with me though. What was therapeutic wasn’t reflecting on my presumed whiteness and seeing through its limitations – nope, mostly accounts of BIPOC immigrants were really therapeutic to read. And accounts of identity formation of young BIPOC kids in Western countries. Adolescence. Identity dilemmas. Loyalty dilemmas. Modes of code-switching, complexities of cultural belonging while neurodivergent (especially two accounts by autistic BIPOC, one … I lost, it was an autistic woman of Indian heritage, the other by Tré Ventour is here). Shame, psychological mechanics of inferiority, of not-belonging, not taking up space, feeling like a guest where you have not been one for a long time. Etc.

I didn’t actually know this, but as someone born in Poland (People’s Republic of Poland at that, a country that only existed until 1989 and was followed by the II RP that has looked completely different each decade) who grew up mostly in Germany … I was subject to racism. I’ll call it racism, now – I’m calling it that after having chewed it for half a year, or a year, or more. Cause I found sources that document it, experiential writings and also just research, anthropological and historical.

I didn’t actually grow up white – at least not that part of my childhood that was spent in Germany.

Same time, I grew up whiter than a lot of folks there, like the kids of the Turkish “Gastarbeiter” (whose parents of grandparents migrated for temporary work, but many families have stayed for generations). There were no Black persons in the town I lived, so Turkish were the most racialised, and yeah – I didn’t grow up white, but somehow I understood quite early that I’m not “supposed” to play with them; I’m to play with the East Block kids (Polish, Russians can be Ok, upclass Iranians were also somehow Ok) or the German kids. I read about this too, finally, and was shocked at how I could have overlooked this conditioning (which is common, once I looked for accounts).

Essentially, since I’m an intellectually driven autistic, to validate my own feelings / impressions, I had to look for books on race published specifically in the Central European context, not in the US, not in the UK. Poland, Norway – Germany (but in Polish translation, I still have too much PTSD to read German). These books / researchers point out the obvious – which I didn’t really get even if WW2 and the Holocaust was my “special interest” in later childhood (yes, horrid, but not that uncommon as in Poland and Germany you get exposed to that stuff constantly; in Poland more so). The obvious being, the 3rd Reich carried out the annexation of Poland and other Slavonic-populated territories, as well as of course the Holocausted, based on explicit and frontal racial and (for the former) colonial premises – the territories conquered east of Germany, meaning Poland, territories inhabited by other Slavonic peoples like Ukrainians, Belarussians, Russians, etc. (I don’t know the details for each of the territories / countries) were – in ideology, to some degree practice – to be treated like European colonies. This didn’t come out of nowhere, either – in the context of Poland, I never added up 1+1, but Prussia had occupied and tried to colonise these territories also from 1792-1918 – with the same mindset and partly methods as were applied to overseas colonies, though as far as I can tell still much less drastically. Prussia and later the Reich acted under the same racist and colonial framework as other colonial powers on other continents, seeking expansion, raw materials, cheap labor, and painting the annexed peoples as uncivilised, “dirty”, “carries of diseases” etc., racialising them basically.

I’m not here saying Poland and Ukraine were Africa or India, I think comparisons are out of place and I don’t have the historical knowledge either. Point I’m making, is that I didn’t see it – for lack of interest / knowledge in history, for lack of dealing with the topic at all – that as an immigrant to Germany from a country that Germany persistently occupied for centuries under a colonial philosophy, heck – it’s not like that all got magically purged in 1945: of course, Polish (and other Eastern Europeans) are still racialised specifically in Germany (and as far as I read, for other reasons in the Nordic countries and the UK). That’s why I grew up white-skinned but racialised.

Of course, we also racialise each other (in a continuation of European colonial thought, Polish used to racialise Ukrainians, etc. – the further east, the less civilised). Polish also carried out colonial policies in territories inhabited mostly by Ukrainians, when they had the opportunity (chiefly in the brief period of independence, 1918-1939; but also during WW2 and after 1945). Ukrainians did it when they had the upper hand, too. From what I’ve read in Polish sources o the history of the region so far, everyone occasionally copied nazi rhetoric to some degree to get on top of whoever was currently the minority, while also being a victim of it. (I won’t comment on this as it’s probably out of place, but this also reminds me of my time in Israel, and how astonished I was at certain fascist flavours found there – now I see, it’s not the exception at all. Everyone with roots in the region is infested to some degree with fascist thinking disease and using it on whichever minority currently doesn’t have the upper hand – at least my impression.)

I’m not sure how much sense this articles makes, or of how much interest it is, to anyone who isn’t somehow tied to the central European region, to the “Central European” German-Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian-Russian etc. sphere of historical mess. Plus an immigrant. If you aren’t, you probably really have a different view on all this, too.

For example, if you’re Polish in Poland, you presumably grew up white. In the US, as far as I’ve been told, too – that’s why US antiracist folks were so outraged by my doubts probably, seeing a white person who is in denial about their privilege. (I’m not, tho. And it’s obvious that there’s a hierarchy, and I’m probably the closest to white you get if you’re not fully, but still – I’m just not white the way a white Brit or German or French for that matter is, that explains my whole psychology.)

In fact, realising I didn’t grow up white in Germany – is a huge key to my messed-up biography. Huge, but also very obvious key. I didn’t find it earlier because – yeah, of course, because these topics are shut out of public discourse, not just in Germany, despite the huge numbers of migrants present in Western countries.

It explains to me why I felt like I’m getting a breath of fresh air in some ways when I go to not just Poland, but also places like Bulgaria, Romania, Palestine, but also Spain, Italy, when I interact with Latin Americans, people from the Arabic countries, Persia, etc. There are many layers to this, but – part of it is because I don’t get racialised, or – I get racialised as white (“(Northern) European” in this case) by these folks, in a kind of positive way (yupp). I mostly feel this as people asking me mostly intelligent, non-stereotyped questions about my background, my culture. This almost never happened in Western countries – I actually thing, literally never, I can’t remember a single convincing instance over 20-30 years, but maybe there were some that I forgot. The deepest comment folks from these countries usually have about the fact that I’m “from Poland” is that they travelled there and “it’s cheap”, or something comparably penetrating (I didn’t get the worst kinds of stereotypical comments, but I know them from the media, other people etc. and they’re unfortunately replaying and alive in my subconscious).

That kind of thing is of course trivial compared to anti-Black racism etc. but it’s still part of a family, in terms of a field of forces that generates shame, fear of taking up space, “double-consciousness”, and the many others phenomena I never had words for (and I won’t document here the specific racialisation Eastern Europeans experience in Germany, there are other sources for this and I can’t quote anything in English for the moment).

Specifically, a book I got on “Polish racism” from a Polish leftist publisher had an interesting cross-over chapter on W. E. B. Du Bois visiting Poland in the interwar period, and the ruins of Warsaw and the Warsaw ghetto after WW2, and how this affected his thinking about race (broadening the spectrum from skin colour to look at other heads of the hydra on the European mainland). I think he later wrote chiefly on the Holocaust, I didn’t follow up his writings on Central Europe yet. But for me, these wider cross-over writings, views are fascinating, I will probably dig into these topics.

I lost / postponed the point I was meaning to make above, regarding the explanatory force over my biography of learning that yeah, I actually grew up racialised even if white skinned. It kind of explains why I always wanted to run away to places where I’m white. Why I considered living in Spain, but couldn’t deal France, for example. It’s a matter of how I get racialised in these places – white or not. That in Poland I’m simply white – as in the rest of Eastern Europe. That’s why my confidence and the space I take up grows as soon as I cross certain borders. I’m not a guest. Or I’m a guest, but a honourable one.

It also explains the weird phenomenon regarding other migrants from Poland, from Eastern Europe. I think some managed to grow up without this kind of trauma – it might depend on many things (like the material status and mental health of your parents, and whether you’re autistic, just for two factors that concern me; as well as the age at migration). Above all though, the post 2004 (EU wave) migrants – the folks who emigrated as adults, when the country became part of the EU. They’re totally different from me, and I’d say in general from the folks who emigrated in the 1980s (Solidarność) or early 1990s. They don’t seem to hide, shy away, try to blend into the background, they don’t seem to have a particular inferiority (compensated by superiority sometimes) complex the way us earlier migrants often seem to. In my head, that’s well – for one, cause they grew up white, in Poland. The country’s status also significantly changed in 2004, its image has been changing in my opinion, it’s not a “real” European country but … it’s different than in 1989. I don’t know about the children who grow up here now (writing this article from Berlin – in Berlin, probably still a much better outlook than in the rest of the country).

My various odysseys weren’t just about belonging (that was / is of course part of it) – they were also, yeah, about just being racialised white. It’s better to be white.

And since I got light skin, I shift between categories depending on many factors (where I am, what language I speak, what I choose to reveal about myself, whether I bullshit people about my origins, as I’ve sometimes done) – but my internalised childhood conditioning isn’t that of someone who feels white. It’s based around confusion, fear and shame (incl. shame for my parents), invisibility, code-switching and double-consciousness, also rage at why I always had to hide and why I always had to be invisible – in my youth in Germany – as someone who has an additional culture, language, complex history and perspectives. Why I had to swallow all that, make it invisible, eradicate that aspect, too. “Speak their language” (metaphorically, broader than just the linguistics, I mean acting out a whole persona) or no language. The weird vacuum.

I almost emigrated to France, when I started feeling the same “energy”. I think I’d be fine with it, as an adult, but since it’s a powerful childhood trigger, I resigned for now.

…

Was this my point? This would be far more interesting with a bibliography, but for now I just have one in Polish. I’m not sure I’ll write about this in Polish – maybe at some point.

It’s also the case that in the last couple of years, since I’ve tried to live there last time, Poland has again changed so much – I feel almost like it did in the 1990s – that I feel I’m from another planet. Can’t keep up with it. Like the world in general, but some places still emanate far more stability than that part of Europe currently.

…

I have more things to say and I’m aware that I’m just making random comments and not documenting anything. Most of my comments on Blackness still refer to Guillaine Kinouani’s and e.g. Beverly D. Tatum’s work, which I blogged about previously. I’m also neither a historian nor do I have a grip on race in general, so there’s probably parts which will be wrong, inaccurate, or which will annoy various readers. I’m trying to work things out a bit for my Eastern European context.

And just to add, I’m trying to work out the not-obvious part, which is the in-between status of Eastern Europeans in certain Western European countries. I’m not trying to work out the obvious part, which is that Eastern Europeans have mostly fully swallowed the colonial ideology and are as racist against BIPOC as any white (and for the most part, less aware of it), plus have their / our own “Blacks” (Jews, “gypsies”). If I had grown up “in my own country”, I think I’d just be white and have the normal white set of unconscious reflexes and prejudices – which I do anyways; but on top of that, there is this “double”, equally or more invisible layer of having internalised that I’m not racially “neutral” (white), i.e. not just a full, normal, equal person, based on a racialised ancestry / origin.

I can go on philosophising about the collective level of this, the cultural level of this double status of being peripheral white, or “trying to be white”, in Poland (maybe after I’ve finished reading the source material I’m on currently).

For the moment, also given that this blog was initially purely self-therapeutic in nature, I let this stand as a somewhat personal essay. Noting (again) that, ever since my 20s, I had mental health issues related to all this and people tried to recommend therapy etc. I didn’t make progress for 20 years, until I started reading antiracism books, courses, and now central European history books (with focus on racialisation). Yeah, I just needed history books, understanding where I’m from, ancestors, understanding the past and the present, sociologically. These are collective issues, I’ve just been mirroring the past and the collective unconscious in very specific, personal ways. One more thing (next to stuff in the gender & neurodiverence field) in my life that was never a personal problem, but just a thread leading back to the wider tapestry of the times, places, societies I inhabit.

Post-edit: the Polish biblio for this post

Agnieszka Kościańska i Michał Petryk: Odejdź. Rzecz o polskim rasizmie

They quote a lot from

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio:

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial RealitiesRace Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

which I will probably read next.

On Norway, with comments on Germany, Denmark, the UK and US:

Ewa Sapieżyńska: Nie jestem twoim Polakiem. Reportaż z Norwegii
(original in Norwegian: Jeg er ikke polakken din)