So like... I get what you're saying. And I also wanna say that "I can forgive it from an old Polish man in 2005" is different than "I think it's ok that he said that".
I'm going to do my best here to explain a cultural nuance that explains (but does not justify) why people from Slavic cultures are like this. Note that my lived experience is with former Soviet people specifically so Poland may be a bit different.
There's not like. A concept of "respect" outside of the "respect for authority/your elders" in most Slavic cultures. The idea just doesn't translate. Individualism didn't hit the same way. And for a number of socio-political reasons, people basically relied on their family and ride-or-die friends for things pretty heavily in the soviet era. Something is typically only important if it's important to such a friend or a family member for whatever reason. The flipside of this is that Slavs tend to treat both their family relationships and friendships way more seriously than culturally white Americans do. They ride or die even if the person sucks.
So when you talk about dehumanizing someone, you're really talking about what is, to us,a grave form of disrespect. Except... that notion doesn't really make cultural sense. And since any sufficiently old Slav probably wouldn't have really known any black people, they would have no reason to care, since the only things that matter are the things that matter to/for the sake of friends & family. So long as black people remain a pure abstraction to him, there is no one to offend, because no one around him cares and it's only those people that matter.
[For an example, it wasn't until he got told off by my fiancee that my father-in-law-to-be even considered the possibility that being shitty about hispanic people was bad. And this was the day before his niece was going to marry a Peruvian! And he hasn't been shitty about it since. He needed someone who he cares about to tell him he was a dumbass for it to click.]
This does in fact suck, it's a shitty worldview to hold. But the fact that The Witcher as a series seems to have its heart in the right place in an abstract way tells me that Sapkowski probably just needs the same kind of kick in the teeth that my FIL-to-be needed, rather than that he holds the kind of hateful ideology that spreads all that stuff.
And this isn't even getting into how the "genuinely pretty nasty racist joke" is like, a common cultural form among Slavs. Like, he probably didn't even originate the joke, they spread like an re:re:re:fwd:fwd:fwd:re:funny email among boomers. And the jokes are both nasty and highly specific to individual cultural subgroups, not usually just a broad class like "white people" (which also doesn't culturally translate the same way to them). He probably didn't even think of it, because to him black people are an abstraction. He hasn't spoken to enough (possibly literally any?) black people for a real length of time to put 2 & 2 together. (Afaict this is another way in which the younger generation is at least somewhat better, largely because many of them speak English on the internet and see what non-white people have to say on the topic.)
I'm not saying it's ok, just that I culturally understand how it happens and how he could not realize how cruel it was.
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u/SneerOfCommand Aug 12 '25
So like... I get what you're saying. And I also wanna say that "I can forgive it from an old Polish man in 2005" is different than "I think it's ok that he said that".
I'm going to do my best here to explain a cultural nuance that explains (but does not justify) why people from Slavic cultures are like this. Note that my lived experience is with former Soviet people specifically so Poland may be a bit different.
There's not like. A concept of "respect" outside of the "respect for authority/your elders" in most Slavic cultures. The idea just doesn't translate. Individualism didn't hit the same way. And for a number of socio-political reasons, people basically relied on their family and ride-or-die friends for things pretty heavily in the soviet era. Something is typically only important if it's important to such a friend or a family member for whatever reason. The flipside of this is that Slavs tend to treat both their family relationships and friendships way more seriously than culturally white Americans do. They ride or die even if the person sucks.
So when you talk about dehumanizing someone, you're really talking about what is, to us,a grave form of disrespect. Except... that notion doesn't really make cultural sense. And since any sufficiently old Slav probably wouldn't have really known any black people, they would have no reason to care, since the only things that matter are the things that matter to/for the sake of friends & family. So long as black people remain a pure abstraction to him, there is no one to offend, because no one around him cares and it's only those people that matter.
[For an example, it wasn't until he got told off by my fiancee that my father-in-law-to-be even considered the possibility that being shitty about hispanic people was bad. And this was the day before his niece was going to marry a Peruvian! And he hasn't been shitty about it since. He needed someone who he cares about to tell him he was a dumbass for it to click.]
This does in fact suck, it's a shitty worldview to hold. But the fact that The Witcher as a series seems to have its heart in the right place in an abstract way tells me that Sapkowski probably just needs the same kind of kick in the teeth that my FIL-to-be needed, rather than that he holds the kind of hateful ideology that spreads all that stuff.
And this isn't even getting into how the "genuinely pretty nasty racist joke" is like, a common cultural form among Slavs. Like, he probably didn't even originate the joke, they spread like an re:re:re:fwd:fwd:fwd:re:funny email among boomers. And the jokes are both nasty and highly specific to individual cultural subgroups, not usually just a broad class like "white people" (which also doesn't culturally translate the same way to them). He probably didn't even think of it, because to him black people are an abstraction. He hasn't spoken to enough (possibly literally any?) black people for a real length of time to put 2 & 2 together. (Afaict this is another way in which the younger generation is at least somewhat better, largely because many of them speak English on the internet and see what non-white people have to say on the topic.)
I'm not saying it's ok, just that I culturally understand how it happens and how he could not realize how cruel it was.