Last night, my other neighbor, the son of the person who owns these flats, said “She’s been arrested by the immigration detention people, I have to take her documents to the police.” Curious, I asked did an incident prompt this arrest? “No, she was randomly picked up in Łódź.” Now, I thought this extremely odd, as Łódź is literally in the center of Poland. Why would border control be screening people there? He responded, “Poland is not the same anymore, Tony.” And he left for the police station with her documents. I still haven’t seen her. Of course she was racially profiled and picked out for inspection and detention. I have seen it before in the US, while traveling from San Diego to Portland on a Greyhound bus. Border agents asked everyone, well almost everyone, for their documents. I went to hand them my drivers’ license, and the agent said “No, no need.” He moved on to an MA student from India; the student had his student ID, but not his specific residency visa. The agent chastised him, “You need to keep your documents with you at all times!” Fortunately, he was not detained. I recall this vividly. [...]
Emerging from prison, I wrote, arriving in Warsaw April 2017, that I felt like Christopher Isherwood in early 1930s Berlin. I included this in a rather cheerful piece about the local LGBTQ scene, which was then translated and published in Vice Poland. Polish readers, in particular the Polish LGBTQ communities, seemed to like the piece. Replika, the only LGBTQ magazine in Poland, shared it, among many others, including Polish drag celebrities included in the article, from Aldona Relax to Charlotte Drag Queer. I later went to Vice Poland, this time under a new editor, and asked to do a piece on transgender people living outside of Warsaw, in small towns, to document their struggle. Finding this too prosaic, or “not really what our readers want,” the editor asked me to do an interview with a far-right gay person. I found someone, and did the interview with a translator. Spewing vile garbage about immigrants, the need for a wall between Poland and Germany, near admiration for Hitler (“Merkel would make Hitler cry!”), and condemning the LGBTQ Pride March in Warsaw for “showcasing all these deviants;” I found what the editor wanted. Or so I thought. The individual didn’t “fit” the profile. He was slightly effeminate, he went to all the gay clubs, he was wealthy — not the football-hooligan type with homosexual desires. I dubbed the article “Clubbing with Eichmann” and submitted it. The editor sent back an email full of passive-aggressive abuse, saying that I allowed this person to voice his opinions! I should have found someone who fit the bill; the editor wanted a football-hooligan, not someone who blended in with the fashionable gay scene in Warsaw whilst holding the views of a neo-Nazi.
I self-published the article in both English and Polish. The backlash against this individual became so intense that he threatened to sue me, and to have me deported. I asked him what was materially incorrect about the article, and he said “nothing, it’s just hurting my music career, people are talking about it.” He sought an injunction along with a 130,000 zloty fine for “defamation” — for in Poland, even if what you write is true, if it harms the “dignity” of the person, they can sue. I took the article down. Discussing this mess with my translator, I asked her, what is the problem with these people? She said “the whole thing made me ill, and you wrote exactly what he said, I translated it (in person and on Facebook group chat).” Interestingly, the gay male backlash against this person didn’t include any critiques of his racist views. They were all appalled that he’d call the Warsaw Pride March a disgrace, but nary a word was mentioned about his comments regarding the “filthy Africans and Arabs” coming to Europe. Racism permeates the core of Polish society, in particular a fear of the imaginary, non-existent “Islamic caliphate” in Europe, and the equally imaginary “hordes of dirty Africans” supposedly “invading” Europe, and by extension “threatening” Poland. Poland has taken virtually no refugees from the Middle East and Africa, and Poland remains one of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in Europe. Roughly 97% of the population is ethnically Polish. Not just white, but ethnically Polish. Other Europeans make up the majority of the minorities (Among minority groups, the largest numbers of respondents claimed Silesian nationality (847,000), followed by Kashubian (233,000), German (148,000), and Ukrainian (51,000). *Note: The statistics on Ukrainians do not include recently arrived migrant workers, which a report by the National Bank of Poland estimated at around 1 million in 2015.) All of these predominant minorities, making up a grand total of around 4-5% of the population (factoring in the newly arrived Ukrainian migrants), are white.
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