I'm Polish, and I would say, the only way right now racism is less bad than e.g. US is that Poland is pretty much racially homogeneous. Mostly all white Polish people, huge proportion is single religious denomination, at least notionally (Catholic Christian). The 'discriminatable' minorities are very small and not very visible, but when they are discernible, boy do they get abused.

Where non-white non-christian non-straight people appear, they seem to be at way too high a risk of verbal or physical violence. Hard to know about discrimination at jobs etc., but wouldn't surprise me. Poland refused to accept Syrian war refugees, but reluctantly agreed to accept some Syrian Christians (so it's none of those "terrible Muslims"). No help - so many still got beaten up and chased away.

That said, I agree with the original comment. Racism in Poland is _completely_ different in Poland, and mimicking US projections of it is counterproductive, and frankly, offensively patronising.

> [...] but reluctantly agreed to accept some Syrian Christians (so it's none of those "terrible Muslims"). No help - so many still got beaten up and chased away.

Could you link an article about that? I wasn't aware.

> systemic racism absolutely is a problem there

But it's not the same thing and it happens on a completely different scale.

Systemic racism in US means that

"the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 31 fatal shootings per million of the population as of August 2020."

Which is completely out of scale for European standards (at least 3 orders of magnitude worse), including the somewhat more problematic countries in East Europe.

EDIT: for comparison in Italy in 2019 3 people were shot dead by police, without any ethnic implication, it means 1 fatal shooting every 20 millions of the population, or 0.05 every million, VS 31 every million.

To look at it in another way: you need to gather 20 million people in Italy so that one of them risk of being shot by the police, it only takes 33 thousands black men in US. It's 620 times more dangerous for a black man in US to encounter a policeman than it is in Italy.

EDIT 2: -1 after only 6 minutes.

It explains a lot about what's wrong in American culture...

Oversimplification, but Western Europe basically doesn't have a problem with police violence. That (very important) aspect of what's going on in the US just doesn't translate to a police force with very different culture and much better accountability.

It's great that we don't have that problem (people not being shot is a good thing), but that doesn't mean we don't have racism.

If you're talking about scale, then yes police violence in Western Europe isn't comparable to the US. Saying there's no problem seems like almost wilful ignorance though.

Well, the "problem" is that there are not many different races in Poland, so it is hard to judge how racist we are.

The most racist thing you can see here is people staring at blacks or Asians. Because it is quite unique thing to see.

Just like when I was in South Korea and my wife was asked to pose in a picture of young Korean girl.

Similar thing happened 50 years ago, when my mother-in-law asked a black fellow to pose in a picture with her.

But that is expected when someone is unique, intriguing.

When I was young I lived in the south of Poland where we had a Roma minority. And I as a kid was afraid of them, because they were different from me and most of the time I saw them begging on streets. But same thing happened when I saw non-Romas begging on streets, just because they were dressed in old, torn and smelly cloths.

I have personally not met any Jews that I know of, because here you don't have any visual clues, it just like meeting an Orthodox Catholic, one would need to introduce him/herself like one to be recognized. And that maybe would result in interesting conversation, but thats it.

There is another negative issue here with large south city in Poland and Jews - Cracow. There is a district there that was mostly Jewish before the WW II, and now there are a lot of visitors from Israel schools that come there to look at the old buildings and synagogues. And because those are children in a difficult age and look quite unsupervised (besides the bodyguards that act very aggressively towards Poles) and leave quite a mess in hotels where they stay.

And there are also Brits :), you can recognize them because most of them walk in T-shirts during winter and are quite loud and like to have stag parties in Cracow, and also leave quite a mess in pubs/restaurants/hotels.

>Well, the "problem" is that there are not many different races in Poland, so it is hard to judge how racist we are.

Well, the Poles didn't bring in slaves from Africa and had them working at their planations and so on for centuries though, so there's also that...

You don't need slaves from Africa if you can enslave your own people through serfdom.

If you enslave your own people it's not racism them, so that's a different problem...

I’m not saying it’s racism.

In Poland pretty much all land owners, anyone of any wealth and intelligentsia were killed either by the Nazis or the Soviets. It's as if the US had a purge 70 years ago and anyone of any means was killed or sent to a labour camp. US still reaps the benefits of both slavery and the past and ongoing discrimination of its minorities - Poland on the other hand does not. First the Partitions of Poland have erased the country from existence for nearly 100 years, then Nazis killed over 2 million people starting with anyone who had anything valuable first, then 50 years of communism made sure than any kind of systematic exploitation based on serfdom was eradicated and burnt to the ground. While it is taught in history books, the entire class of people who might have been perpetuating the practice have simply been killed off or exiled.

I'm not blaming Poles for it (being a Pole myself), just making an observation.

Again, the key word here is " it's not a systematic racism like in the US" - I'm not(obviously) trying to say that racism doesn't exist in Poland - it does and it's a problem. Just that the entire country isn't built on racist behaviour like US is/was, it's not systematic as in the country as it exists now(and largely how it existed in the post WW1 shape too) wasn't built with racist institutions and principles. Again, and I cannot stress this enough - that doesn't mean that racism doesn't exist there.

There seems to be confusion about “systemic” vs “systematic” here. Systematic racism would imply a system that is designed to achieve racism. The more common term is systemic racism, which implies racism more or less as a “side effect” of a structure or system that arguably has a different, benign purpose.

I'd argue that the American system was systematically build to be systemic :)

There are laws in the US that, on the surface, seem to be benign, but upon closer inspection are specifically and systematically created to target a certain racial group disproportionately.

FYI, "systemic racism" is usually understood to be roughly "discriminatory treatment is embedded in the institutions". For example, if Roma get stopped by police more often, that's systemic racism.

I think you use it to mean "it played a major role in the founding of our country". Saying "there is no systemic racism in Poland" makes sense in that context, but probably not in the other, and that's why people are doubting you.

Does that not also prove the point? The US view of racism being white against black eclipses all other forms of racism, including white A against white B, or even black against white.

That's not to say white against black is only a US problem, because it isn't, but it helpfully masks all other local problems and pretends they don't exist because "America said so".

Yes, it does. I wasn't arguing against the original point, on the contrary, I agree with it. I was arguing against the claim that Poland is free of institutional racism.

Yeah, I don't know about Poland specifically, but the black players in the England football (soccer) team quite often get racially abused in Eastern Europe/Balkans.

> In a way, it's even worse: because America sets the tone of discourse and frames racism as white vs black,

This. In Denmark the biggest minority is the Muslim minority, but we have still had big Black Lives Matter demonstrations with only a slight Middle Eastern twist.