‘Stop calling me Murzyn’ – how Black Lives Matter in Poland

Geographies of imagination: why decolonizing Polish children’s classics matters

“…His hand rests upon the shoulder of a monkey, which is depicted offering a banana, evoking an imagery that reinforces prevailing stereotypes of Africanness. Such representations easily permeate other depictions of blackness in contemporary Poland, 11 as illustrated in Figure 5.…”

Oppressive Even As It Inspires

“…Beginning in 2013 and culminating in the 2020 George Floyd sympathy protests across the continent, the U.S.originated movement challenges Europeans to grapple with structural racism in their own societies. Its global resonance draws unprecedented numbers of primarily young Europeans into a renewed, dynamic grassroots movement for racial equality; allows them to express their solidarity for the plight of Black Americans; and, most fundamentally, provides an auxiliary framework to call attention to homegrown anti-Black racism (Balogun and Pedziwiatr, 2023;Kelly and Vassell, 2023a;King 2020;Younge 2020). As the latest major example of Black transnational anti-racism activism-part of a long history that goes back to slavery and abolitionism and climaxed during the 1960s-the worldwide scope of 'Black Lives Matter' (BLM) is a testament to the international impact of the Black freedom struggle and the effectiveness of diasporic politics.…”

Is it Antislavic racism, or how to speak about liminality, stigma, and racism in Europe

“…In original "my jesteśmy białymi Murzynami", but here translated as Black. However, seeBalogun and Pędziwiatr (2023) for discussion of the meaning of the word Murzyn in Poland,Gawlewicz (2016) for a discussion on the problematic Polish-English translation, and Nowicka (2018a) for a discussion on the changing usage of the words Murzyn and Czarny (Black) among Polish immigrants in England.2 Similar narrations were documented by various scholars in the British context, seeFox et al (2012),Narkowicz (2023), andRzepnikowska (2019).3 Violence can be physical (bodily harm), symbolic (othering), structural (patriarchy, economic inequality) or psychological (emotional, trauma)(Omeni, 2020).4 It is impossible to speak of Polish immigrants in Germany without speaking about Poland. My approach is thus transnational, and it questions the imaginary that 'Eastern Europe' starts at the German-Polish border.5 Each of them having distinct, profound and persistent impacts on the lives of Jews and Blacks, both historically and today(Hannah-Jones et al, 2021; Small, 2013;White, 2020).6 It needs to be acknowledged that German imaginary of the East of Europe has never been monolithic(Liulevicius, 2009;Stevens, Jr, 2016).7 Although imaginaries legitimise action, create power and provide rationale(Bürkner, 2015), they often do not match the…”

“…1 1 In original “my jesteśmy białymi Murzynami”, but here translated as Black. However, see Balogun and Pędziwiatr (2023) for discussion of the meaning of the word Murzyn in Poland, Gawlewicz (2016) for a discussion on the problematic Polish‐English translation, and Nowicka (2018a) for a discussion on the changing usage of the words Murzyn and Czarny (Black) among Polish immigrants in England. …”