"At first, they abused us verbally, then physically…..” Nobody helped them!

by Surya Karki, Nora Lassahn, Vu Thuy Ahn Phan

From 2010 to 2014, Poland saw a 472% rise in reported racist and xenophobic crime. We – three 2015 Humanity in Action Fellows – embarked on a journey to try and understand the situation of people of color in Poland.

“At first, they abused us verbally, then physically. They beat us and kicked us, breaking my brother’s arm,” said one of the two black Dutch brothers that were abused in Wrocław, Poland in January of 2010. The incident was one of 182 racist and xenophobic crimes reported in 2010. It is astonishing to see its exponential rise to 1042 cases in 2014. Will the hatred against the 1.23% of the Polish population continue to rise? Or will the civil society stand up to the injustice?

After conducting the research online and meeting people, subjected to discrimination and racism, out team came to a deeper understanding of the symptoms of the problem – being treated as an object, stereotypical staring, and physical violence. We also came to learn an astonishing fact that 70 percent of Polish youth encounter hate speech on the Internet and most of the hate speech is directed against black people. The problem is on the rise, and, for our team, turning one’s back on the issue was the problem we wanted to tackle head on! We decided to launch social media campaign “Don’t Turn Your Back!” to call for civic courage and action for in our understanding, indifference and neglect could be equally contributing to the unjust situation as the direct action.

Don’t Turn Your Back! became a social campaign, aiming  raise awareness about discrimination and racism directed against people of colour in Poland. We had a specific focus on people of Black African background, identifying them as the ones being subjected to racism the most. In the beginning, our team faced several challenges. The most apparent one was that none of us were from Poland/Polish speakers. Coming from Germany, Nepal, and Vietnam-Ukraine, we were new to the Polish context. Another challenge was the sensitivity of the subject – talking about historically charged ideas of “race”, “colour”, “blackness” vs. “whiteness” was never easy. While brainstorming the ideas for our campaign, we asked each other: “What kind of story would be the most compelling one to convey in our campaign? How can we portray the situation without replicating the same stereotypes or even aggravating the situation? What if the problem is so small that by presenting it in our campaign, we would create a backlash?”

We decided to go out there “in the field” and find out the situation by talking to people, who have actually lived in that environment and experienced unjust situations themselves. We visited La Mama Restaurant, which was run by people from Nigeria, and started conversations with them. Several people agreed to be interviewed. In the end of our research phase, we decided that our campaign should certainly talk about uneasy and even negative things, but in the end of it all, we would call people to react and take actions, so those uneasy and negative things would not repeat themselves.

“Don’t Turn Your Back” came into being. Our team decided to use social media platform Facebook to target as many Polish citizens as possible in the campaign that combined series of videos, interview-stories and visual graphics with a principle “first - show the situation, second – call for action”. In our video series, we chose to depict day-to-day situations of discrimination and racism shot from the first person perspective. The audience cannot see who the subject experiencing the discrimination is, but they can see that people don’t treat that person well. In the final video episode, the audience gets to know that all the mistreatment was done because of the subject’s skin colour.

Black people live at the core of discrimination. They don’t choose to be in either position but are forced into it. One of our interviewees put it wonderfully: “We get marginalized, stared, tokenized, and objectified so much that we have got used to it. Being stared at on a bus/street, and being called names is now a normal thing for us because every person on the street thinks it is ok”.

In our page, “Don’t Turn Your Back” call for us meant not to ignore incidents of discrimination, whether it means to “step” in or report it, and not to be a perpetuator in these incidents. While injustice and discrimination is accepted by majority of Poles, there are few effective and efficient organizations and campaigns (Never Again, HejtSTop, HIA Polska, and Afryka.org) mainstreaming the issue of racism and xenophobia that 1 in every 4 Black Africans living in Poland are currently subjects of.

We provided the links to those sources on our Facebook page. Our team also hoped that with the absence of effective official channels to tackle the situation, citizens can take an active part in creating new channels for actions and dialogue themselves and that our social media campaign has contributed to that. After our first week of campaigning online, where we were actively contacting other NGOs in Poland, we have received more than 200 likes, including from the organizations that work for African communities in Poland and followers who oppose discrimination and racism.

So what was the main take away from our one week campaign then? Well, working as a team we came to understand that the issues of discrimination of colored people in Poland has been ignored by the majority and will continue to be ignored from political as well as civil discourses if everybody continues to turn their backs. In the end, the relevance of our campaign might be obscure for those, who have not been so familiar with the situation. But trust us, the 40,200 national or ethnic minorities living in Poland need you to understand that the feeling of being mistreated, marginalized and discriminated isn’t warm and fuzzy. Therefore, the change should start with us not turning our backs and taking action!