Racism in Poland

In Poland again, sadly.

My hosts’ friend says she will never again go to France because there are so many blacks there. This, she pronounces, is the end of a civilization. Though she be a solidly middle class entrepreneur, her views regarding race are not any better than those of the Polish construction worker in Rome whom I saw cursing a Gypsy woman. That event had given me a lot to think: she was in Rome legally (begging is not illegal) while he was almost certainly there illegally (working without permit is); and she was sober while he was drunk: two-to-one for her, so far. More fundamentally, I wondered: why was he opposed to Gypsies coming to Rome? Why did he propose to have an opinion about it? What business was it of him? Who was interested in his opinion and why did he proposing to give it?

Likewise, what business is it of her -- my hosts' friend -- that there are blacks in Paris?

More interestingly, what civilization does she propose is ending as a result? The lady isn’t a consumer of the opera and gave only the usual cursory look to the Louvre, thus her concern doesn’t seem to be really for anything that could be called culture. Pressed, she says that to her mind a culture is, for example, the way children related to parents and vice versa; yet, I will bet rubies against hazel-nuts that my attitude to my parents isn’t like the lady’s: so much for the presumed common European culture; and I’ll bet diamonds against raisins that neither she nor I know how Africans relate to their parents: so much for their proposed difference from us: we simply do not know it.

I suppose that what really disappointed the lady about France is the absence of mustachioed fellows in berets playing accordions and smoking pipes; a sad thing, I must agree, as sad as the absence in Sweden of fellows in leather armor and bucket helmets with horns. The world is going to the dogs. But maybe not in the sense she thinks: there was a large population of blacks in Paris in 1780’s. Black members sat in the Assemblee Nationale at the time of the French Revolution.

But the main point is this. Fear of strangers is perhaps an unavoidable and natural reaction: I recall well the sense of anxiety I felt when I found myself the only European – straight out of bone-China-white Eastern Europe, in a room full of Chinese men. The difference between me and the lady is, I suppose, that I did not leave the room and let the initial feeling of strangeness pass, while she let it dictate to her.

Perhaps neither the feeling of anxiety at strangeness, nor the reaction of flight from it are in themselves racism per se, anymore than envy is theft. It seems to me that racism begins only when we propose a flimsy ideological program with which to justify our feelings. In the past the program was anatomical – blacks had smaller brains; Chinese brains were incapable of invention, etc. Today that those views have been discredited, the ideological justification for our anxiety is “culture”. The modern racist is perfectly prepared to say that all cultures are equal but insists that they represent something valuable and should not be mixed – “adulterated”. The problems of this view are enormous – whatever culture is (and there does not seem to exist any definition we can hang a hat on) it is always changing; cultures are constantly mixing and polluting each other; so the view in fact makes no sense at all; but like all ideologies which appear to justify our emotions, it has a great appeal, even to professors’ minds. So why not an intelligent but not otherwise particularly philosophically inclined merchant in chemical reagents?

Not a particularly hopeful reflection, I must say.