Bosomtwe: I wrote a book about Poland and Poles, not about blackness [interview].

Segregation in the United States in the 1940s had a 100-percent translation into race relations in the American military in Europe, so the army that liberated our continent from Nazism was filled with discrimination. I was led to look at those relations by the story of Janusz Majewski, the child of an American soldier stationed in Europe and a Polish forced laborer.

You write that maintaining segregation in the U.S. Army during World War II and within the Third Reich was not easy, because "German streets, buses, cafes, bars, clubs and restaurants did not have Whites-only signs; all Allied soldiers were forbidden to fraternize with the enemy, yet black soldiers were free to go where they wanted. With this they drove the white military into a frenzy; white marines boycotted German stores, bars and restaurants, whose owners had no problem pouring black soldiers a pint of beer." But the latter were always accused of sexual violence - even when black babies were not always born as a result of rape. Why .

In the liberation atmosphere, it was not always clear under what circumstances sexual contact occurred. Researcher Miriam Gebhardt, who describes the phenomenon of rape of German women, says that German clerics qualified black children of white women as coming from rape, assuming that they would not of their own free will want sex with a black man. By the time the Allies reached Germany, they had liberated France, which American military propaganda portrayed as a country of "liberated and willing women." When accusations of rape arose, the military publicized them in the case of black soldiers and even punished them with death, while cases against white soldiers were swept under the rug.

This approach to sexual violence had a long tradition in the US. Emphasizing sexual violence by black men against white women was meant to divert attention from that perpetrated by whites against black women - much more common, because it resulted from power relations. It was against this background that the figure of the hypersexual black male was created. With that said, I would be very cautious about extrapolating research conclusions from one country to another.

Why .

Because it is not quite universal. That is - one can talk about the universality of certain images and parts of the "imaginarium" that I talk about in the book and which I call the socio-cultural image of the black. But it is impossible to translate the system of race relations in the United States or post-colonial Britain into the Polish context.

What, then, is the uniqueness of the Polish context in the history of black people? Can we speak of a collective experience, resulting, for example, from some historical moment that contributed to the migration? Or is it necessary to treat the story through the prism of individual biographies?.

Both perspectives are important. If I were to point to a specific context, building a community of experience, it would be the communist period and the policy of seeking cooperation with new African countries after 1960, then called "Polish-African friendship." This translated into scholarships for foreign students, international exchanges of specialists (architects, engineers, doctors) and diplomatic visits. In the case of students, we can speak of a certain shared experience, although probably not an obvious one.

What does that mean?

Black students came to Poland from various countries that were created in the process of decolonization. They were well acquainted with the capitalism inherited from colonial empires, along with the rather homogeneous image of white Europe as a place overflowing with prosperity. In Poland, they collided with a socialist economy in which the food and everyday products they had known before had the status of the Holy Grail, a hard-to-get rarity from Pewex, for which they had to pay in foreign currency. Mamadou Diouf told me about this encounter with Poland of the second half of the 1980s, whose reality did not resemble that of the West. He recalled a colleague of his from Burkina Faso, who shortly after arriving could not be surprised to meet a white man begging on the street.

Thus, one can speak of a certain commonality of experience among black students in Poland, who came here from the 1960s to the 1990s. However, it should be remembered that they came from different countries and after a year of studying Polish in Lodz, they dispersed to different universities, so they did not form a unified diaspora. One should not be fooled by the popular and legacy of colonialism into thinking of Africa as a unified continent. What is important are the individual stories of people who may have been united by the color of their skin and their moment of entry into the Polish context, but whose origins were different. In fact, these were not numerous groups. Historian Przemyslaw Gasztold counted that from 1956 to 2002, Lodz's Polish Language College educated 3,791 students from Africa.

Copying what Western cripples one should still be wary of when describing the experience of the black community....

Here I'll interrupt you for a moment, because I find it very interesting that, paradoxically, the People's Republic of Poland was the one period that - at least propagandistically - proved to be the most distanced from the colonial attitude to race relations. As part of the Cold War dynamic, everything imperial, especially segregation and inequality in the United States and Western European countries, was criticized on principle: "you have this capitalism of yours, but you treat people terribly, and you have no real freedom, even though you talk so much about it."

The PRL system was intended to be anti-racist, with some degree of interest in cooperation with the continent, which has never been repeated on this scale before or since. Of course, this process was not without flaws, but it was opening up to the global South, then called the "Third World" because the decolonized countries were trying to look for a third way, an alternative to the Cold War East-West dynamic. This complicates our judgment of the era, which of course also includes a tendency to orientalize and fixate on otherness. When we look at the mass culture of the 1970s, we find that imagined "exoticism" - such a superficially understood aesthetic of some imagined Africanness - is eagerly exploited in television entertainment, popular in the Eastern Bloc.

It is artificial in a similar way to the Mazowsze band far removed from folk culture, because created with the eyes of the elite and to the taste of a metropolitan audience?.

Yes, I think this is a good comparison. Invented and kitschy "exoticism" seen from a European perspective was a West German export. Just think of bands like Boney M or Goombay Dance Band. Their popularity shows quite well, this attitude to blackness, which was formed in the communist era, was quite non-obvious. It is certainly not unequivocally positive or negative, which is why I am reserved about finding racism everywhere.

And yet it is the racists who abuse this argument.

My point is that while overt discrimination and violence are obvious and unarguable to me, such soft situations related to different ways of experiencing culture are sometimes not obvious. We can pick on a lot of aesthetic clichés and consider them racist, such as Boney M's performance at the Sopot festival in 1979, but on the other hand, it was something that attracted people, that seemed to be a colorful glimmer of the West that was longed for.

So we slept through the revolution, rejecting everything that the communist regime proposed, including opening up to otherness?.

This is a fairly obvious result of putting a thick line, broadly understood, because it applies to many areas of life - including symbolic ones. If we approach the not-so-distant past without resentment, we may be able to capture and retain ideas that can still be useful.

In the 1990s, we turned away from the People's Republic of Poland and began to look at Western countries, at what they had to offer, not only in the economic sphere. We wanted Poland to be like the West, and it was not, by the way, a time conducive to maintaining those old alliances. Africa was seen at the time as a "lost continent" plagued by wars and famines.

It is very interesting to observe this period, because, after all, every breakthrough affects people who previously lived by different rules, but who are now influenced by the new era. As a result, a variety of mixed orders are created, which layer overlap and intermingle. This image of blackness after the transition period seems to me to be some such mixture of that communist fascination with distant otherness, which was fueled by the closure, the adoption of Anglo-Saxon images of blackness, and the new experience of the emergence of migrants of African descent. It's also a time when censorship is no longer in place, and the regained freedom of speech means that voices, not necessarily progressive ones, that were previously suppressed, are emerging in the public space.

So it is impossible to divide cultural and social reality into hard blocks and easily arrange them into a chronological story. I find this in the Polish context fascinating and also unique, because it is atypical of Western trajectories, and at the same time makes it difficult for us to rework our relationship with the Other.

The years are passing, the borders are opening. Why are we still not succeeding? What, besides historical conditions, is an obstacle?".

We still have few opportunities to do so. It is not necessarily the case that "others" everywhere enter into direct relations with Poles. Of course, this is a completely anecdotal observation, but it seems to me that in Warsaw you can meet mainly two groups. The first is expats in large, global corporations, where there is probably indeed some exchange and cooperation, but mainly on a professional, business level; the second is people working in services, such as couriers, cooks or drivers, with whom interactions are very fleeting. As long as more permanent neighborhood relationships, school relationships and so on are not established, changing various stereotypes and perceptions is difficult. At the same time, this process will probably accelerate, I recently pointed out in Lublin.

Why exactly there .

I have never met so many black people in a Polish city before. It seems to me that this is a result of the popularity of Lublin universities among students from various African countries. I think that such daily contacts will make us talk less about some kind of symbolic imagery and more about real contact with another human being, which does not boil down to a discussion of the "m" word and In the Wilderness and the Desert by Sienkiewicz. And this is what we most often debate in the context of blacks in Poland.

Maybe this way we avoid discussing the undercurrent of more veiled or systemic discrimination? Or, on the contrary, the very obvious and tangible one? Are there any forms of it that you would like to draw our female readers' attention to more broadly? For in the book you avoid the word racism. .

Racism, like many other key words on social issues, has become a buzzword that everyone understands in their own way. It is then difficult to hear each other.

It seems to me that no one doubts the need to condemn overt violence, beatings or verbal aggression. The stairs begin when we touch things on a micro scale, such as language and its accompanying intentions, the modes of representation and cultural codes we operate with, or the ability to critically understand the past. This is very complicated when we enter the field of culture, which can't be glued to a rigid framework or a single perspective. It seems to me that the most effective and thought-provoking way of dealing with stereotypes is to view them from different angles and describe them in such a way as to understand where they come from, to whom and what they serve.

I admit that I am uncertain about the universality of condemnation of racial violence, but I readily find evidence that symbolic acts of racism at the micro level reflect systemic oppression or tend to escalate..

It seems to me, perhaps naively, that in the process of understanding tensions, cause and effect are important. This allows people to see that certain things are no longer necessary for them, and various images are simply anachronistic. I mean the way we often still perceive the African continent, the countries, the people, their cultural and economic capital.

We like to think that nothing is changing in Africa, meanwhile it is rather our perception of the continent that is evolving very slowly. Perhaps the work to be done should not only be to track down stereotypes, but also to show the truth about the reality of African countries and migrants coming from there, about their daily life, work, economy, tourism or culture. This will make certain associations go away on their own. That is, there will be less argument about whether Sienkiewicz was a racist, and more understanding that, to quote Dipo Faloyin, "Africa is not a country." In a book so titled, the Nigerian writer points out that what unites people on the continent is an irritation with what image of Africa and Africans is reproduced by Western culture.

However, don't you find it risky to state: "let's not track racism everywhere, let's try to get to know the other" at a time when xenophobic attitudes in society are radicalizing in the face of events on the Polish-Belarusian border and the war in Ukraine?.

It seems to me that this is a pragmatic statement. I'm not downplaying the important problems you're talking about, but I wonder to what extent, in the current political reality, top-down (though there's no chance of that, since we don't live in a regime) control of the discourse could have useful effects. People always know their own anyway. One can and should, of course, effectively and to the benefit of minority groups, regulate all sorts of issues in workplaces, in offices, implementing inclusive policies or conducting anti-discrimination training. This is very important work. But without real contact with the Other, while being exposed to a media narrative that on the one hand singles out Poles for racism and on the other reports on African countries only in the context of wars, famine and humanitarian aid, this may not be enough.

The perception and portrayal of black people as a homogeneous group of "refugees" who allegedly pose some kind of unspecified threat, is a stereotype that hits both people of similar skin color who were born in Poland or ended up there in a perfectly ordinary way, and those who, fleeing war or difficult living conditions, crossed the border in an unauthorized place.

Are you missing positive stories? .

With this, for example, the discourse about Africans differs from the perception of Asians, whose image is not reduced to the Khmer Rouge regime or the Vietcong guerrillas. We also see them as successful people, creators of great companies and innovative technologies, talking from phones manufactured in Asian countries. This counterpoint is missing in the case of Africa, which displays in our minds images of slavery, poverty, war.

What I mean to say is that after centuries of deprecation of black cultures and communities, skin color often brings to mind the aforementioned associations, and we won't change that just in the course of correcting the language. We won't win against stereotypes in a closed discussion about racism if we don't open ourselves up to examples, events, accounts and situations that break down these prejudices.

You write that you find the community of color repellent. However, in the face of people who are in any minority and have the privilege of having a platform of expression, the expectation arises that they will be spokespeople for these groups. On the one hand, this seems obvious, because we need voices to be heard, on the other hand, it is then easy to tokenism, i.e., creating a false impression of diversity, and still on the third hand, if someone gives it up or does it in isolation from the community, it is probably because they want to please or not expose the majority as part of internalized racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. Are you in any way familiar with these dilemmas? .

I leave them to the people who discuss my book. Instead, I believe that communities in general need to be approached with caution; I don't feel myself to be anyone's spokesperson or activist for any cause. This is also not the emotional starting point of the book. I appear in it as a writer who shares her reflections, presenting facts that correspond with my thinking and sensibilities. At the same time, I give voice to my characters, whose experiences are part of common identity dilemmas and attempts to solve them. They can be interpreted in a thousand ways. I think I wrote a book more about Poland and Poles than about blackness and its history. If anything, it's a story about white history, which breaks out of the narrative known from textbooks when it turns out to be co-created by black people. I think a good example of this is the story of the black insurgent.

This is about August Agbola O'Browne. The veracity of this story is not confirmed. What does the fact that we wanted it so badly prove? Maybe about how tokenism works - that this one black in the ranks of the Warsaw insurgents universalizes our struggle for independence and at the same time absolves us of racism?.

Well, but what is the result of saying that about ourselves? In my opinion, this story is simply interesting if you go into it and not pigeonhole it. Because if we pigeonhole it, we close the topic and put it on the shelf with the words "oh, token, not good, delete". And using such strong labels leads to invalidation.

Tokenization doesn't delete the subject person, it just shows how their identity can be used by the majority, who make good PR for themselves this way. This is also what critical race theory is all about, which, yes, applies to American realities, but reveals the universal mechanisms of anti-discrimination posturing.

One can look at it from different angles, or rather deconstruct the available stories. Besides, whatever we do, someone will always come along with yet another approach and accuse us of not taking something into account. Telling true stories, when we write a biography, film a biography or even paint someone's portrait, always really consists of residual knowledge. The way it is done at any given time usually tells a lot about what is needed in the era, what is being paid attention to, captures some zeitgeist.

Storytelling is always some form of negotiation. The ways in which Browne's fate is described show how much discourse changes - a given story, and it can be valuable to one person and downright offensive to another. What intrigues me is that everyone involved in recreating his fate had the conviction that they were doing something important to break the then-dominant narrative about the Warsaw Uprising, usually portrayed as a military uprising by young white heterosexual men. Now the story is much more nuanced than it was a dozen years ago, precisely because of the publicity given to these other life stories.

I don't know if this was a conscious tokenism, since we were dealing not so much with a cold calculation and superficial ticking off of a cause, but simply an excitement about the story?

What's wrong with the term "person of African descent".

Nothing, it's just very unspecific. I don't know if we need such a generalizing term for people of African descent if we want to move away from thinking of Africa and black people as a monolith. I myself rarely refer to myself as a Polish woman of Ghanaian descent, because this duality is artificial for me - I was born and raised in Poland, and it is my father who is Ghanaian. Maybe such terms are needed when we really want to emphasize where the parents come from. But I don't know if it's that important.

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Oliwia Bosomtwe - was born in Krakow, grew up in Nowy Sacz, chose Warsaw. She was editor-in-chief of Noizz.pl for three years. She has published in "Znak", "Vogue" and "Res Publica Nowa", among others. She is the author of the book Alike a White Man. A Tale of Poles and Others (W.A.B. Publishers, 2024)

Translated by

Co-funded by the European Union