Taki Zarczyk!
Polish Americans Outraged By Joke on Fox TV Show

By SARAH GARLAND
Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 20, 2007

A joke that aired on the new Fox television show "Back to You" suggesting that Poles are Nazi collaborators has enraged some Polish Americans. They are calling for the owner of Fox, Rupert Murdoch, to apologize.

The chairman of the Polish American Congress's anti-bigotry committee, Frank Milewski, said he wrote a letter in response to the episode calling on Mr. Murdoch to meet with Polish Christians who survived Nazi concentration camps and Poles who have been honored by Israel for rescuing Jews during the Holocaust.

"We can't figure out why someone would make such a statement," Mr. Milewski said, calling the remarks a "fraud of history." "People are very upset," he said. In the episode, which aired Wednesday, a character played by Fred Willard heckles a Polish character on the show to convince him to join a bowling team, saying, "It's in your blood, like eating kielbasa and collaborating with the Nazis." In a statement, the Fox Broadcasting Network apologized to "any viewers who may have been offended."

"While the comments in question were outlandish, they were entirely in keeping with this character's ignorance and cluelessness. He's an 'equal opportunity offender' who speaks before he thinks," the statement said.

Angry viewers responded to the episode with posts on the show's Web site under titles such as "cruel irresponsible joke" and "Polish jokes hit a new low." One commenter, who identified herself as Danusha V. Goska, wrote: "It is a truly evil fabrication with a disgusting intellectual history and a morally corrupt agenda."

X-posted to polska

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Unloading the Invisible SUV
Racism is an interesting thing. Growing up as I did, I had no concept of it. People of other races were just slightly little more than an exotic novelty in my childhood. Growing up in Poland in the mid-70's, I learned to hate... Well, hate is too strong a word. Resent? Resent the Germans for what they had done to my country during the Second World War. I also learned to resent the Russians for what they were then, presently doing. I was sometimes told that if I didn't behave, gypsies would take me away to live as a migrant where I would have to cheat and steal to get by. I was told by Mother Culture that I should distrust and despise Jews, but other than their inherent cleverness and tendency to stick together, I never really got a reason. Ignorance, all of it, though not without that tiny, coarse grain of truth that always seems to give rise to such "pearls of wisdom".

I've let it go. In present-day America, if I squint just right, I can see how malignant fascism can come to be without all the people of the nation where it rises being to blame. Looking back over my shoulder into the 80's, I know that the Russian people were as oppressed by the plague of Soviet Communism as Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Chechens and all the other satellites that the West let Stalin create after WWII. I still like taunting the occasional Russian troll, but that's just because I have a love-hate relationship with on-line trolls as a species. The Roma are an amazing aspect of human culture and they, much like Jews, are a cultural treasure to humanity. They're in no consequential way different from Gentiles or people born with some sort of ties to geography - or however you'd term non-gypsies. We're people, each and every one, different enough to make our differences something to appreciate, but too much alike for those differences to separate us in tangible ways.

Other than my next-door neighbor and friend, Tomoho, who was Japanese - his father was some sort of a diplomat and I grew up in a "good neighborhood" - I had never seen a person of a different "race" than I as a child. When I came to the US I got to see a whole different world. I saw black people whose skin made them more prone to be violent criminals, lazy Puerto Ricans, Hispanic people who made it their mission to exhaust the social welfare system, and, imagine my surprise, dumb Polacks who apparently were always drunk, listened to nothing but polka music and wore dirty bowling shirts. Ignorance, all of it.

As I grew up and learned to think for myself, I tried to let go of these inherent cultural prejudices, but it was a challenge. Even though I had no reason to be prejudiced, my "station in life" almost imposed prejudice upon me. It was only recently, in a relative sense, that I became aware of the concept of "white privilege" and all that goes along with being White, and male, in American society.

One of the best, most lucid and enlightening resources I've had pointed out to me on the subject of White Privilege is an essay entitled White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. I encourage all of you reading, who have not read it before, to take a bit of time, read it, consider it, sleep on it, and get back to me.

This essay has weighed on my mind since I first read it. It demands to be kept in mind, by every White person in America. But there's even more to it than that. It's a "pattern".

In software design, there is a movement centered on the idea of "Patterns" - essential solutions to recurring problems, abstractions of things that exist in all sorts of problem domains. The idea of "Patterns" is itself something that is applicable to more than just the field of software engineering. It started in Architecture, and it applies to Sociology just as well. The "Invisible Container" is a pattern of privilege, and I want to see how it applies to being an American (USian, really) in today's world. There is an even larger container in which the Invisible SUV is held, something all Westerners enjoy, but for the purpose of this community, I'd like to try to focus in on the SUV.

Please give some thought to the Invisible Knapsack and share with me in comments to this entry the items in the Invisible SUV all Americans are privileged to drive across the face of the Earth.

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First post
A Polish man, immigrating to Canada, was detained for 10 hours, then tasered to death by the police.

I have some very strong feelings about this. As an immigrant, and a Polish one no less, I am saddened by this article. When I came to the US I was 10 and didn't speak the language. I was air-sick getting off the plane and ran to find a bathroom as soon as I could. Were I to immigrate these days in those same conditions, that dead man could have easily been me, and that is terrifying and a very sad statement on how bad things have gotten "in the wake of 9/11".

This man was from a small town. He had probably never spent much time in a major city, never mind an airport in a foreign country.

I grew up in the suburbs of Connecticut and only recently moved close to Boston. I have a Master's degree in Computer Science and work for a computer security startup. I'm far from slow, very tech-savvy and used to high-pressure situations.

The first few times I made use of the Boston T I was confused as to the social protocols of public transit - do I take the Red line or the Green line? Is it free, do I pay when I get on the train, or do I need a token and if so where do I get one?

After 20 years in the US, I visited Poland for the first time as an adult. This was in the Spring after 9/11. The public transit options in Warsaw confused me too. Which bus? Which stop? What time? And how do I pay for it? Thankfully I know the language. Oh! And just about every other person you meet in Warsaw knows enough English to be able to help an English-speaker.

This man from a podunk town was a 40 year old construction worker. This means he was not superbly educated, he had probably only finished his local small-town high school. He was your typical small town blue-collared knuckle-dragger -- and there's nothing wrong with that.

Having traveled to foreign countries on business a good number of times, I can say with certainty that the process and protocol is different in every country and in every airport. After a while, you get used to it, especially if you go through the same airports several times. And all of them have signage in English as well as the local language.

I feel for this man. I can relate to the anxiety of immigration, the frustration of being detained at the immigration office (this happened to me upon my return to the US from my first trip back to Poland despite having a valid passport and a valid green-card), the confusion of a new place that's vastly different from everything you've ever known.

It could have been me. It could have been anyone lacking the language. This is tragic not only for this poor man and his utterly shattered mother but for everyone. It says so much about what our society has become.

There's certainly white privilege, the inherent advantage that white people, especially in the US, have over those who are not white. There is also American privilege, and this tragic event, though surely not fueled by hate or prejudice against foreigners, is a case study in what it entails.

I've created this community, debunk_american, for the discussion of this "American privilege". I welcome all those interested in talking about this to join my new community.

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